One of our favourite museum projects this year - we spent a day with bodybuilder and performance artist Jake Wood in the galleries of the Fitzwilliam Museum’s exhibition, Paris 1924: Sport, Art & the Body. The film was the result of a creative collaboration between Jake, the Fitzwilliam Museum and Storya.

Bringing together bodybuilding and art, Jake Wood’s work explores the intersection of sport and art, queerness and masculinity echoing many of the key themes in the show - idealised bodies, physicality, sexuality and identity.

“I like to see myself as a live performing object.” - Jake Wood

Jake’s performance plays with the homoerotic undercurrents present in Greek statuary and Olympic imagery, aiming to ‘queer’ the museum space. Collage is a central element to his artistic practice, as he feels it’s an inherently queer medium capable of constructing new worlds and identities. This approach to image-making was integral to our film.

To accompany the performance piece, we also produced a short film to provide context to the project, featuring an in conversation between Jake and Diarmuid Hester, radical cultural historian, activist, writer, and Fellow at the University of Cambridge.

The full performance film will be screened at the Museum Late on 22 October and the exhibition, Paris 1924: Sport, Art & the Body is showing until 3 November 2024.