Live Art Ireland: Unfinished Business Review: The difference is witnessed Live!!

This paper discusses eight performances presented in Unfinished Business, curated by Deej Fabyc for Live Art Ireland, to explore how live art generates forms of knowledge that exceed the visual and unsettle dominant perceptual hierarchies. Through material, sonic, olfactory, tactile, and ritual practices, the participating artists—including Sandra Corrigan Breathnach, Mariya Hoyin, Fable Lane, Clare Carswell, Paul Regan, lwrds duniam, Jack Keeshan and Emma Starkey—foreground encounter over representation, inviting witnesses into modes of attunement that unfold relationally and over time. Drawing on Starkey’s methodology of dancing‑with, the paper argues that originality emerges not through novelty but through sustained attentiveness to resonance and embodied difference. Witnessing, particularly when discomfort arises, is positioned as a decolonial relational force capable of disrupting the institutional orientations of whiteness and the ocularcentrism that structures Western educational and aesthetic traditions. Building on Ahmed’s (2017) account of the invisible labour required to challenge institutional norms, the paper contends that live art—especially when unrehearsed—creates conditions in which these orientations can momentarily slip, exposing their operations and enabling alternative modes of perception. In doing so, the performances demonstrate how multisensory engagement deepens understanding, making subtle distinctions and relational knowledges perceptible in ways that purely visual attention cannot.