3 Evenings: Experiments in Performance and Technology lands at Wapping Hydraulic Power Station on 16-18 October, marking ten years of Somerset House Studios with Gazelle Twin, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Team Rolfes, Holly Blakey, Lawrence Lek and more.
Ten years ago, Somerset House Studios opened inside the former Inland Revenue building on the Strand and quietly became one of the most important experimental art spaces in London. Over 200 artists have been resident since 2016, among them Gazelle Twin, Lawrence Lek, Tai Shani, Jenkin van Zyl, Keiken and Larry Achiampong.
The 10th anniversary celebration could have been a retrospective. Instead it’s a three-night performance programme in a decommissioned hydraulic power station in Wapping, broadcast simultaneously to a global audience, that reimagines a landmark 1966 event. This is Somerset House Studios doing what it does.
3 Evenings: Experiments in Performance and Technology takes over Wapping Hydraulic Power Station at 25 Wapping Wall from 16 to 18 October. The building, currently being sensitively restored by the Glass Castle Foundation, provides the kind of setting that most arts venues spend decades trying to manufacture: dramatic boiler house, heritage hydraulic machinery, raw industrial architecture that makes every performance feel genuinely site-specific rather than simply relocated.
The reference
The event takes its name from 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering, a series held in New York in 1966 that brought together artists including John Cage, Yvonne Rainer and Robert Rauschenberg with engineers from Bell Telephone Laboratories for what is widely regarded as the first large-scale collaboration between artists and technologists. Sixty years on, 3 Evenings asks the same question those nine evenings asked, but from a position of technological saturation rather than novelty: what does it mean to perform with technology now?
The programme
Friday 16 October (7pm to 11pm)
Gazelle Twin, the Ivor Novello-nominated British composer and performer Elizabeth Bernholz, opens with Ragebait, a new work in which robotics and voice rebel together. The piece asks whether our dependence on technology is approaching a point of reckoning, and whether technology is something to be resisted or recognised as a reflection of ourselves.
Also on Friday: Lawrence Lek presents a live performance of NOX, his immersive work exploring the psychological consequences of a future shaped by smart systems, centred on a fictional AI programme built to rehabilitate disobedient self-driving cars. And Jenkin van Zyl expands the world of his current Somerset House Studios commission Enclosure with Hostess, a promotional figure for a defunct franchise who continues to deliver her welcome to an audience that no longer exists.
Saturday 17 October (6.30pm to 10.30pm)
New York-based Team Rolfes, known for their collaborations with Arca and Lady Gaga, make their UK debut with The Mustang Speedrun: Pitt Call, a motion-captured cockpit performance that hands control to the audience in what the artists describe as part game show, part emergency. Holly Blakey, one of the most significant choreographers working in the UK, collaborates with Turner Prize-winning artist Tai Shani for I am a Glass Doll under the Heel of a Dirty God, a multi-camera site-specific performance drawing on erotic film and cosmology. Gary Zhexi Zhang, Klara Kofen and Cameron Graham reimagine Puss in Boots as a hybrid robotic performance in which a robot dog navigates a live 3D simulation.
Sunday 18 October
Arkansas-based experimental pianist Precious Renee Tucker, whose work has caught the attention of Solange and Kelela, presents a new commission scoring exoplanetary atmospheres in collaboration with a team of astrophysicists. Lynn Hershman Leeson, one of the most influential media artists alive, returns her long-running fictional character Roberta Breitmore to the stage in Constructing Roberta, a performance that finds the character navigating later life in a world of digital doubles and constant self-presentation. Roberta was first created in the 1970s, making her return here something of an event. Ligia Lewis closes with The Rant that Can’t, a work that responds to the resonant architecture of the power station through augmented 4D sound design.
The installations
Running across all three nights: a world premiere playable video game from Ayoung Kim, 2025 LG Guggenheim Award recipient, set within her Delivery Dancer series; Liquid Perception from Somerset House Studios residents Keiken, an embodied empathy technology that facilitates communication between audience members without words; and nom nom from engineer and artist Xin Liu, an interactive installation constructing a new world from millions of particles across a large-scale LED surface.
3ETV
Alongside the live event, Somerset House Studios is launching 3ETV, a nine-channel online TV station broadcasting from 30 September to 16 December in partnership with Pioneer Works in New York and HEK (House of Electronic Arts) in Basel. The station broadcasts performances, commissioned works, archival material and live capture of the Wapping programme, turning the whole event into a networked experience for global audiences. Available via Somerset House’s platform Channel.
The London x London Take: This is not a celebration that looks backwards. It is an arts institution at the top of its form making the most ambitious programme it has ever attempted in the most extraordinary setting it has ever used. Gazelle Twin and Lynn Hershman Leeson on the same bill, in a Wapping power station, in October. Book the three-night pass.
Need to Know
- Where: Wapping Hydraulic Power Station, 25 Wapping Wall, London E1W 3SG
- When: Friday 16 to Sunday 18 October 2026
- Friday: 7pm to 11pm; Saturday: 6.30pm to 10.30pm; Sunday: times TBC
- Price: £25 per night (£20 concessions); Three Night Pass £60 (£48 concessions)
- 3ETV: Available via somersethouse.org.uk/channel from 30 September
- Book: somersethouse.org.uk/whats-on/3-evenings-somerset-house-studios
