3 Evenings: Saturday
Experiments in Performance and Technology: Live performances by Holly Blakey & Tai Shani, Team Rolfes, and Gary Zhexi Zhang with Klara Kofen & Cameron Graham.
This event is happening offsite at Wapping Hydraulic Power Station, E1W 3SF
| Dates | Sat 17 Oct 2026 |
| Times | 6.30–10.30pm |
| Space | Wapping Hydraulic Power Station, E1W 3SF |
| Price | £25 (General) £20 (Concessions) |
Artists in Residence
This event is part of 3 Evenings
Framed across three different live performance experiments each night, contemporary artists explore what it means to perform with technology now.
The second night of 3 Evenings invites two brand new collaborations, between Holly Blakey and Studios artist Tai Shani, and fellow Studios artist Gary Zhexi Zhang with collaborators Klara Kofen and Cameron Graham. New York's Team Rolfes bring the evening to high energy close, with world premieres of newly commissioned interactive installations from Ayoung Kim, Keiken, Xin Liu and more, across all nights.
Holly Blakey & Tai Shani: I am a Glass Doll under the Heel of a Dirty God
Drawing on erotic filmic cosmologies, and Cinema’s grammar of close-up and cut, I am a Glass Doll under the Heel of a Dirty God is a site specific piece working with the networked system installed at Wapping Hydraulic Power Station - a multi-camera, multi-screen set-up broadcasting to and from online tv channel 3ETV - to play with ideas of perspective, voyeurism and broadcast. Shani’s work on myth, feminist counter-history and the oracular voice weaves into Blakey's choreography, in this one-off spectacular collaboration.
Team Rolfes: The Mustang Speedrun - Pit Call
Making their UK debut, New York-based Team Rolfes bring their new, chaotic, prototype club-theatre performance to 3 Evenings.
Blending live motion capture and game engine animation, avatar jockeys race to keep a failing exoskeleton running. Team Rolfes opens up their performance apparatus, a motion-captured, broadcast-rigged cockpit at the centre of their flagship project Mustang Speedrun, handing control to the audience for a one-night experiment that relies on the entire room. Part game show, part emergency, the group and their musical collaborator will need collective input to make it through in one piece.
Gary Zhexi Zhang, Klara Kofen, Cameron Graham: Puss
A reimagination of Giambattista Basile’s 17th-century story of Puss in Boots through a performance centred on a robot dog moving through a simulated 3D landscape. The work is a robotic installation, featuring a robot dog, a live game engine simulation, and a remote controlled treadmill, performed by three operator/puppeteers and a live musician.
The performance is accompanied by a generative score for baroque instruments and electronics drawing on Italian folk music. the composition unfolds as a responsive musical system, reconfiguring in real time within an immersive surround-sound environment.
3 Evenings is a playful reimagining of the 1966 event 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering, considered a pivotal moment in the history of artists working with new technologies. A three-night event and international transmission, it will bring Somerset House Studios’ distinctive approach to interdisciplinary experimentation offsite to east London’s Wapping Hydraulic Power Station.
3ETV, an interactive TV channel and evolving digital artwork broadcasting beyond the live event, will extend the project online, in partnership with Pioneer Works (NYC) and HEK (House of Electronic Arts) in Basel.
3 Evenings is supported by Glass Castle Foundation.
Puss is supported by the Creative Robotics Research Hub, UAL.
The Creative Robotics Research Hub is a platform for exploring the expanding role of robotics within creative practice, research, and cultural discourse.
Find out more about the Creative Robotics Research Hub here.
Biographies
Team Rolfes
Team Rolfes is an NYC-based virtual performance studio co-directed by brothers Sam Rolfes and Andy Rolfes, pioneering live 3D storytelling through experimental motion capture, VR puppetry, and real-time game engines.
Over the last decade, their work has manifested as contorted visual design for music, livestream improvisational comedy, televised animated shorts, and multi-media narrative theatre, with collaborators and clients including Lady Gaga, Arca, Danny Elfman, Ninajirachi, Holly Herndon, Metallica, Danny L Harle, Holly Herndon, Adult Swim, & Nike. Sam is also a Lincoln Center Collider Fellow.
Their first flagship show 321Rule, co-written with Jacob Bakkila and starring a rotating cast of musicians, toured sold-out performances at Soft Centre Sydney, CTM Festival Berlin, and Diskokina NYC/LA and beyond – to over 4,000 people. Their biggest project yet, the broadcast-spectacle world of Mustang Speedrun, is now in development for the stage and playable download.
Gary Zhexi Zhang
Gary Zhexi Zhang is a Somerset House Studios artist and writer, whose work draws connections between cosmology, technology and economy. His recent work examines how geopolitical imagination is shaped and mediated.
He recently edited a book about finance and time, Catastrophe Time! (Strange Attractor Press, 2023). In 2026, Zhang leads a programme at TBA21-Academy researching West Mediterranean climate futures. He is currently writing a book about technoculture in a multipolar world, under contract with Berggruen Press.
Klara Kofen
Klara Kofen is an artist, dramaturg and writer, whose work explores how technological interfaces shape our relation to time and affect. Recent works include ‘Fake & Extinct’ (Centrale Fies, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, 2025), ‘Admiror, or Revolutionary Sentiments’ (Guggenheim Museum, NYC, 2024) and ‘Dead Cat Bounce - an oratorio about finance and catastrophe’ (Nottingham Contemporary, Arts Catalyst, Somerset House, 2022-2024). In 2026-27, she will develop a new installation for Oceanspace in Venice through Tidal Arts. Klara is the artistic director of Waste Paper Opera.
Cameron Graham
Cameron Graham is an artist, composer and creative technologist whose work unsettles and reorients sonic experience through intermedia, parafiction and simulation. He explores cultural histories of entertainment, audiovisual technology and automation across installation, electronic music, sculpture, performance and interaction design. Recent projects include ‘Admiror, or Revolutionary Sentiments’ (Guggenheim Museum, NYC, 2024) and ‘Sweet People’ (London Symphony Orchestra, 2026). Installations have been exhibited in Paris, Nantes and Moscow, and musical works commissioned by numerous orchestras and ensembles internationally. He holds a lectureship in music and new media in London, and his electronic music is released on the Phantom Limb label.
Tai Shani
Tai Shani is a Somerset House Studios artist based in London. She is the joint 2019 Turner Prize winner with Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock and Oscar Murillo. Her work is part of institutional collections including Bristol Museum & Art Gallery, UK and Arts Council, UK, and in 2026 she will stage a solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland. In 2025, Shani’s The Sun Is a Flame That Haunts The Night was on view at the High Line, New York. She also presented The Spell or The Dream, a large-scale installation and radio work at Somerset House, London, which subsequently toured to Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh, where it is on view until 27 September 2026. In September 2025, her second solo exhibition with Gathering, Cardinal, spanned both floors with gem-like paintings and a multilayered installation exploring ritual, movement and transformation.
Holly Blakey
Holly Blakey is among the foremost choreographers of her generation and one of the few female choreographers in the UK creating large-scale work. Her practice attends to the honest entanglements of embodied vulnerability, grief, and joy, always rooted in an intersectional feminist frame. As a director and choreographer, she has collaborated with artists including Rosalía, Harry Styles, and Florence + The Machine, and with fashion houses such as Vivienne Westwood, Burberry and Dior, interweaving live and commercial contexts, much of her practice often plays on the relationship between these distinct but not wholly separable worlds.