Roles are performed, performances are documented, images are proliferated and disseminated on the internet, identities are fragmented, self and culture is constructed, deconstructed, reconstructed, curated, fabricated.
our selves presents video works by 8 young Australian women exploring cultural performativity within new media technologies, investigating how we navigate our fractured identities in a time of both increased virtuality and heightened vulnerability of bodies and environments.
The artists in the exhibition engage with multiple, intersecting identities and speak from various positions such as queer or female, and non-European Australian perspectives. The works included are somehow both personal and universal, speaking to themes of dislocation, digital loneliness and homesickness, while also engaging with postcolonial narratives and gender identity from the perspective of the internet generation.
Many of the works in this exhibition highlight ways that digital technologies and social media platforms can be used to explore, establish, re-establish, contextualize, curate, empower, disempower, construct, deconstruct, and/or reconstruct each artist’s sense of identity – across cultures, generations, timezones, (facebook) timelines, borders, media platforms, and geographical locations. Where do our bodies exist within this network? How do we situate ourselves when computer generated imagery can place us anywhere in physical and digital worlds?
Featuring work by Corinna Berndt, Xanthe Dobbie, Caroline Garcia, Nikki Lam, Eugenia Lim, Zoe Scoglio, Jacqui Shelton, and Talia Smith.
Curated by Frances Fleetwood
our selves will take place at CTRL+SHFT Collective, Oakland from October 5 – November 4 2017.
our selves catalogue can be accessed here.
Featured Artists:
CORINNA BERNDT (Melbourne, VIC) is a visual artist working across multiple mediums, including sculpture, collage and video. Her practice investigates the tension between corporeal and digital experiences, often exploring interactions between objects and bodies on screen. Her current interest in digital video and editing processes originates from her background in sculpture. Corinna’s layered videos investigate multiple possibilities of manipulating the image space of the screen. An ongoing focus of her work has been the concept of the video screen as an experimental space for exploring experiences of time, space and the image in relation to the body. Corinna has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and has recently completed a Masters of Fine Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne. She has exhibited her work at Anna Papas Gallery, Hawthorn Town Hall Gallery, West Space, Seventh Gallery and C3 Contemporary Art Space. Her work was recently featured as part of MCA ARTBAR at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia in Sydney.
XANTHE DOBBIE (Melbourne, VIC) is a new media artist and curator. Her practice aims to capture the experience of post-internet contemporaneity as reflected through feminism, art history, iconography and queer culture. Combining snippets of sourced footage and found images in a multitude of carefully manipulated layers, she develops animated paintings, which merge contemporary internet and trash culture with loaded historical imagery. In 2017, Xanthe has exhibited across Australia in festivals, solo and group shows, as well as internationally in Austria, Germany, The UK and Thailand, including Femmosphere (Berlin), Ecosex, (Berlin), The Act of Showing (Melbourne), Deep Trash: Royal Trash, (London), Undergarments (Sydney). She has shown work in numerous festivals including Next Wave Festival, Channels Festival, Midsumma Festival (all Melbourne), Queeriot (Austria), Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardis Gras, and MELT Festival (Brisbane).
http://cargocollective.com/xanthedobbie
CAROLINE GARCIA (Sydney, NSW) is a culturally promiscuous, performance maker. She works across live performance and video through a hybridised aesthetic of cross-cultural dance, ritual practice, new media, and the sampling of popular culture and colonial imagery. Caroline’s practice is shaped by alterity, echoing notions of cultural ambiguity and displacement by adopting the role of shape shifter, sliding into the gaps between cultures, experiences of otherness and timeless clichés of exotic femininity. Caroline has presented at Underbelly Arts Festival, Channels: The Australian Video Art Festival (VIC), Proximity Festival (WA), Junction Arts Festival (TAS), MCA ARTBAR, Art Month Sydney, and PACT Centre for Emerging Artists, among others. She has exhibited at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, The Centre of Contemporary Photography, Firstdraft, Sydney Contemporary, The Substation, The Sydney Film Festival Hub and UTS ART. Caroline recently participated in La Pocha Nostra’s Live Art Lab in Greece, led by Guillermo Gómez-Peña and was PACT’s Artist-in-Residence for 2015, where she presented an original solo performance called Tropical Hypeisms. Caroline is currently developing a new work called Flygirl, as part of The Curtis R. Priem EMPAC Residency in New York, facilitated by Australia Council for the Arts.
carolinegarcia.com.au
NIKKI LAM (Melbourne, VIC) is a visual artist and curator whose practice engages in the complexity of belonging through the exploration of self, memory and space, using video installation, writing and performance. Born in Hong Kong (1988), she is interested in exploring the translations of post-colonial identities and narratives in the hybrid world, often through the studies of rituals, language and their visual representations. Working primarily with the moving image, she is also passionate about the cross-sections of screen cultures, media arts and representations of narratives and histories. Nikki has presented at Underbelly Arts Festival, SafARI, Firstdraft, BUS Projects, The Ferry Gallery (Bangkok, Thailand), Galleria Marcollini (Forli, Italy), and toured around the world with Over View International Festival of Video Art. Her most recent curatorial projects include Frames of Seeing (2017) at Nite Art, Screen as a Room (2016) at THE SUBSTATION and Channels Festival (2015). Nikki is the Co-Founder of Anonymous Migrant, an audio-visual collective that explores the dislocation�of sound and image in the postcolonial world. She is the former Artistic Director (2014-2016)�of Channels, The Australian Video Art Festival, a biennial showcases contemporary video practices�and continues to investigate the evolution of video culture. She is an editor-at- large at Peril Magazine, an arts and culture journal with Asian-Australian focus.
EUGENIA LIM (Melbourne, VIC) is an artist of Chinese–Singaporean descent who works across video, performance and installation. In her work, Lim transforms into invented personas to travel across time and cultures to explore how stereotypes and national identities cut, divide and bond our globalised world. Lim has exhibited, performed or screened internationally at venues, festivals and fairs that include: Tate Modern, GOMA, ACMI, Next Wave, FACT Liverpool, 24HR Art (Darwin), EXiS (Seoul) Experimenta, Sydney Contemporary, Melbourne Festival, TINA, Dark MOFO, West Space and MPavilion. Lim’s recent solo shows and performances include The People’s Currency, a 4A Centre for Contemporary Arts commission for Asia TOPA (2017), Artificial Islands: Interior Archipelago, Firstdraft, Sydney (2017), Yellow Peril, Artereal, Sydney (2016), Bus Projects, Melbourne and Metro Arts, Brisbane (2015); Shelter, Grey Gardens (2015), Stay Home Sakoku: The Hikikomori Project, West Space and stayhomesakoku.com(2012) and Narcissus (2012) at KINGS ARI. She has been awarded the Incinerator Award for Art & Social Change, People’s Choice Award (2015); City of Melbourne Arts Projects (2012), Australia Council Inter Arts Projects (2011-12), and Next Wave Kickstart (2008-10). Lim co-founded Channels Festival, art collective Tape Projects, was founding editor of Assemble Papers (where she is currently editor-at-large) and sits on the board of directors at Next Wave Festival.
ZOE SCOGLIO (Melbourne, VIC) is an artist uniting performance, video, sound and installation to create interdisciplinary, site-specific and participatory works. Zoe explores how the narratives we create about ideas of humanness impact the way we commodify, consume and value the natural world and its resources. In response to this era of the Anthropocene, Zoe creates work that focuses on the way our lives and physical form are intrinsically interconnected with the geological world. A science fiction of sorts, a speculative re-imagining of scientific understanding, juxtaposing and uniting human and geological scale, timeframes and materiality. Playing with notions of time, origin, sentience and morphology, Zoe’s work engages the varied cultural, political and personal narratives we create about this rock we call home. Recent live works and performances include The Sedimentary Collective, at Western Treatment Plant (Melbourne, 2017), Shifting Ground at Operadagen Rotterdam (Netherlands, 2016), and In the Round, Women of Fairfield at Museum of Contemporary Art C3West and PYT (Sydney, 2016). Zoe has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at Footscray Community Art Centre, BLINDSIDE, Next Wave Festival, Channels Video Art Festival and Liquid Architecture, and Gertrude Street Projection Festival (all Melbourne), as well as internationally in Iceland, the Netherlands and the UK.
http://www.zoescoglio.com/filter/video/Zoe-Scoglio
JACQUI SHELTON (Melbourne, VIC) is an artist based in Narrm, Melbourne, currently completing her PhD at MADA, Monash University. In her artistic practice she uses performance, writing, and filmmaking to explore the poetic and political potential within the spoken or written word. She is interested in the unspoken undercurrents of voicing, intimacy, and storytelling, and how this manifests physically. Jacqui has recently produced projects for Arts House, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Liquid Architecture, the Bogong Centre for Sound Culture, TCB Inc, and Westspace. She has also recently been awarded supported residencies at BCSC, Arts House and Testing Grounds, and published a book in collaboration with Therese Keogh.
TALIA SMITH (Sydney, Australia) is an artist and curator of Samoan, Cook Island and New Zealand European descent. Originally from New Zealand she is now based in Sydney, Australia. Her visual arts and curatorial practice utilises the mediums of photography and video to examine the emotional and physical traces we leave behind on the landscape, the histories we build and the ruins we leave. She has exhibited and curated shows at artist run spaces in Australia, New Zealand, Germany and New York with solo shows in both Australia and New Zealand. Smith is the founder and Co-Director of new artist run initiative Cold Cuts, is 2017’s emerging curator at Firstdraft, is the 2017 Critical Animals curator and will be completing a residency with Bundanon Trust in August, 2017. In 2018 she will undertake her MFA at UNSW.
francesfleetwood 