Alison Ballard is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice investigates changing notions of presence, attention, and lived experience within a technologically mediated world. Working across moving image, installation, sound, text, and live performance, Ballard’s work asks what it means to experience something in real time in an age defined by asynchronous communication, digital mediation, and constant distraction.

Central to Ballard’s practice is an ongoing interest in how technology reshapes subjectivity, memory, and the body. While works such as Wasted Labour (winner of the Main Prize at the Nottingham Castle Open, 2016) examines systems designed to optimize productivity and physical labour of the body, Narrating the Barbican and The Narrator is Present explore visibility and surveillance in public spaces, social politics, and the ways rhetoric and storytelling can be manipulated by others.

Alongside her artistic practice, Ballard has an extensive background in education as a lecturer in Fine Art and Moving Image at institutions including Goldsmiths, Nottingham Trent University, and London Metropolitan University, as well as independent coaching. This pedagogical engagement informs her work’s ethical orientation and emphasis on dialogue, care, and shared experience. She adopts an accessible approach that values process, care, and sustained engagement with diverse audiences, positioning art not as an object to be consumed, but as a shared space for reflection, presence, and critical awareness.

Narrating the Barbican (2013)
performance, 20 mins

Narrating the Barbican explores visibility and surveillance in public spaces, bringing together audio narration, immersive theatre and relational aesthetics in a promenade performance that moves throughout the foyers and public spaces of the Barbican.

Following the movements of 'a women in a blue dress and half worn-out shoes', her engagement with the Barbican is narrated via the public address system as she walks, listens, and plays with the building. In doing so, the Barbican itself is narrated and mapped, forming an alternative documentation of an iconic space.

Audiences are able to experience the work in several ways. Firstly, as a performance, following the woman as she moves throughout the building. Secondarily, as an audio narrative, heard throughout the Barbican's foyers via the public address system. And, thirdly, in fleeting moments, listening to the narration while catching glimpses of the woman as she passes by. This approach also allows audiences to join half-way through, using the audio narrative to locate the woman within the space.

Here, in the video adaptation of the piece, the absence of environmental sounds and views of the building allows the space to remain largely imagined, creating a cerebral map of the space and its soundscape.

This work was created in residence at the Barbican throughout August 2013 as part of 'Hack the Barbican', London’s biggest ever experiment in cross-disciplinary collaboration, bringing together artists, technologists and entrepreneurs, seeking to explore new boundaries and reinterpret one of the world’s great cultural centres.

More information about Hack the Barbican can be found here: http://hackthebarbican.org/

The Narrator Is Present (2017)
performance, audio, live-stream online, duration variable

The Narrator is Present is an immersive audio work, with narrative ambiguity and a sinister underbelly. It explores visibility and surveillance in public spaces, social politics, and the ways rhetoric and storytelling can be manipulated by others. It considers the ambiguity between fiction and reality, the real and the unreal, the known and the imagined. How can we distinguish fictional narrative from truth among the multitude of disembodied voices on the Internet? Who is it that is speaking to us and what do they want?

As visitors enter the gallery, an unknown narrator describes their actions within the gallery. The narrative may be an accurate documentary of real-life events or the narrator may stray into fiction - sometimes playful, sometimes troublingly divisive in nature.

Derived from the artists interest in the dislocated relationship of image, sound, and phenomenology, Ballard seeks to question our relationships with people, places, and objects, and the shifting meanings of time, presence, and liveness in a technology mediated world.

Existing simultaneously in the gallery and online, the work explores the dualistic experiences of the virtual and the physical, and the ways in which these two spaces contribute to a single reality. Audiences are being watched, potentially around the world. Will audiences choose to protest, play along, or simply observe?

Streamed every day of the exhibition during opening hours.

Installation view: Wasted Labour at the Nottingham Castle open, 2015.