Image Credit: Louise Orwin, photographed by Frederick Wilkinson.

Louise Orwin has never been one to play it safe. Known for work that pushes at the edges of performance, power, and audience complicity, she’s built a reputation for asking difficult questions – and then stepping fully inside them. In her latest show FAMEHUNGRY, coming to Battersea Arts Centre this May, those questions turn toward something many of us feel but rarely articulate: our uneasy, addictive relationship with social media.

Part memoir, part experiment, part cultural deep-dive, FAMEHUNGRY begins in a moment of personal and professional crisis – before spiralling into an unexpected collaboration with a teenage TikTok creator whose worldview couldn’t be more different. What unfolds is a sharp, funny, and often disarming exploration of fame, value, and what it means to “make it” in a world where attention is currency.

For those already familiar with Orwin’s work, this is a natural evolution of her fearless, self-interrogating style. For everyone else, it’s a gripping entry point – into an artist unafraid to turn the spotlight on herself, and on all of us scrolling along with her.

A few years ago I was having a terrible time. I’d just lost my sister unexpectedly, I received a hat trick of painful funding bid rejections, effectively nixing my career in that moment, and like everyone else forced into the big terrifying pandemic-shaped black hole of that time, I looked around at the detritus of my life and wondered what the hell we were all doing here.

I was in my mid thirties, and staring at the massive gamble I’d taken on a life of art making. It was meant to be fun! Glamorous! I was meant to be traveling the world and smoking cigarettes at art parties and talking about changing people’s lives with my work! But instead, here I was struggling to pay rent, doomscrolling myself to sleep every night, and wondering whether I’d been making the wrong decisions all along.

For most of my artist life up until that point I’d been very happy to live on the edge(s). To perform shows in weird underground spaces to handfuls of people, and basically not get paid for it. My whole thing was work that makes you feel ALIVE – and in pursuit of that, I’d done genuinely terrible things in the name of art. Performances where I nearly blinded myself, or got into fights with audience members, or where I asked random men to hit me. Durational works where I asked people to do things to me in basements and squat parties and 24hr performance festivals. I mean, I willingly lived online as three teenage girls for a year – come on, who would subject themselves to that? And it was all meant to be FOR something. But then it got quiet. I got older. And my friends who didn’t work in the arts suddenly started buying their second homes. What was it all for? Who was it for?

So I did what any normal person would do at that time, and I decided to make a show about TikTok.

Image Credit: Louise Orwin, photographed by Clémence Rebourg.

It was around that time I met Jax Valentine – a 15 year old TikToker performing daily to audiences bigger than I’d ever dreamed of. My existential reckoning deepened. Where I was anxiously asking what the meaning of life was, Jax was shrugging and having fun performing to their massive online following. Where I was wondering if there was any point to what I was doing as an artist, Jax was telling me they hoped TikTok would lead them to their dreams of becoming famous. Where I was worried the whole world was going to shit and I was going to die and all my friends and family were going to die and the world was going to become one big landfill site that we’re slowly burnt to a crisp on whilst doomscrolling on our phones and buying pointless shit we didn’t need to buy… Jax was cheerfully telling me data harvesting was fine, because, in fact it was quite useful to be targeted by ads for things you wanted to buy.

Image Credit: Louise Orwin, photographed by Clémence Rebourg.

So you can see – Jax and I were an odd pairing. Where I saw no hope, Jax saw plenty. Where I saw dead ends, Jax saw opportunities. When I wasn’t sure I wanted to carry on, Jax said that we should just keep going. (More on that later.) And although some of Jax’s opinions concerned me- I also found them irresistibly refreshing. I wanted a slice of that. And I also wanted a slice of their fame. At 15, they had 50,000 followers on TikTok. And so, with my dream of ever ‘making it’ slipping through my fingers, I devised an experiment. I asked them to mentor me. And that’s how the show began.

Image Credit: Film trailer for FAMEHUNGRY, created by Louise Orwin.

Over the next couple of years, Jax walked me through a brave new world that felt like the upside-down version of mine. A world where no one gave a shit about copyright (its meme culture!!), where the less polished your lip sync the better it lands (sorry actual drag artists), and where it doesn’t really matter what you’re selling, as long as you’re selling it. I hated some parts of it, and began to love others. I got obsessed with how much better my face looked with the default TikTok filter on, and accounts where people would dance durationally on never-ending streams (which looked suspiciously like some live art to me). But underneath my discomfort, something was nagging at me: maybe Jax and I weren’t so different. We both exploit our lives for content. We both want that content to be seen by as many people as possible. We both hope to make a decent living from it. Except, in the art world people generally don’t say they want to get rich or get famous- and in the creator economy, they do. As artists we’re all selling something constantly – whether that’s tickets, or ideas, or ourselves. I began to wonder if artists were just the humblebraggers of the creative world, and content creators were the freer, more honest, younger sibling who didn’t give a fuck and decided to just go for it.

Image Credit: Louise Orwin, photographed by Clémence Rebourg.

I thought the show would become a fun, interesting experiment in what happens when a performance artist tries to become a TikToker. I thought maybe this could all be a vehicle to understanding how social media was changing us and the art we make? What does Gen Z think about the world, the future? What are the consequences of living in increasingly censorious hyper-capitalist systems? So far, so worthy. And the show does some of that of course, but what I didn’t realise back then was that really at the heart of it I was asking an altogether bigger and knottier question: what makes a good life? Or even worse- what makes life worth living?

Image Credit: Louise Orwin, photographed by Aurea Del Rosario.

For a show about whether any of this was worth it, what happened next was unexpected. We’ve now been touring globally for 2 years – over 100 shows, including New York, Mexico, Malta, Denmark (plus more international dates to come). Along the way we’ve picked up awards, some mad press (hello New York Times), and even a little TikTok fan club who now come back nightly to watch some weird messy performance art unfold on the phones in the palms of their hands. And, of course, I’ve also been trolled to hell – by neonazis, Danish schoolkids, and even a right-wing Upper East Side teenager, who couldn’t bear the fact that I was suggesting TikTok might be bad, or the fact that I was putting my ‘gross, weird’ performance art on it (how Regina George of her), published by a major right wing outlet. The show itself, though, is something else- it’s chaotic and beautiful and live and strange, and if you’ve ever stood in a room full of people all looking at their phones and felt simultaneously connected and completely alone, it will feel uncomfortably familiar. And in all the darkness of it, it’s proven to me that people do still want to come back, to feel connected, and that, almost unbelievably, there still might be an audience for performance art.

Image Credit: Louise Orwin, photographed by Aurea Del Rosario.

When I met Jax they were 15. This summer they’ll be turning 23. I asked Jax what they had learnt over our time together: ‘Well I’ve basically grown up over the course of the show and I guess it’s been nice watching how things have changed. Social media is only getting worse with the introduction of AI, people are getting more braindead haha, and the world still feels like it’s ending, maybe even quicker than it did before… But I’m really excited about more tour dates! If I had it my way FAMEHUNGRY would keep going until the day I perish’.

So there you go, sometimes in the face of it all, you just gotta keep going.

And I’m still not exactly sure what makes a good life or where you find hope in the mess or where any of this is leading us. But I’ve got a show about it, if you want to come.

Find Louise at louiseorwin.com
TikTok @louiseorwin
Insta @louiseorwin

See Louise IRL on 15-16 May 2026, 8pm
FAMEHUNGRY
Battersea Arts Centre
Lavender Hill
London SW11 5TN

Tickets and info bac.org.uk

From the Run Riot archive: Louise speaks to writer Eli Goldstone about the politics and pleasures of sex (20 February 2017).