ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
The exhibition revolves around various possible interpretations of the act of documenting. The featured artists consider the impulse to document through capturing, recording, collecting, accumulating, narrating, archiving, witnessing, following, tracing, etc.
Through the exhibition we consider documentation as process or outcome. Propelled by varied motivations the works invite us to think of ephemerality, transience, slippages, transformations, fabulations and translations in the document as an artefact or documenting as a process. How can documentation capture feeling or moment, the complexity and partialities of histories, the entanglements within cultures, communities and families, the misalignment of mark and meaning?
As an experimental art space located in Sydney’s inner west, sydenham international operates around core concerns to generate exchange, build and support community, work intergenerationally, critically engage with what an exhibition and a public facing outcome can be, and use re-presenting as a tactic that allows conversations and ideas to be revisited and reignited by new contexts.
This exhibition grows from these principles, it brings together artists at different stages of practice, and places existing works in conversation with new commissioned work, engaging audiences through a range of outcomes - video, installation, sculpture, photography and performance - and connects across a range of communities locally, nationally and internationally.
sydenham international (Consuelo Cavaniglia and Brendan Van Hek)
Image EMMA BUSWELL
Same 2023
Hand crocheted beaded bag, statement from a resigned politician
Photograph by Brenton McGeachie
ARTIST STATEMENTS
TIYAN BAKER
nyatu’ maanǔn mungut bigabu (2021) first exhibited at Private Island, an Artist’s Run Initiative at Girls School Gallery in Boorloo (Perth), WA in October 2021. nyatu’ maanǔn mungut bigabu (2021) then won the 2022 National Photography Prize and exhibited at Murray Art Museum Albury, NSW.
These four photographic prints use images taken on Bidayǔh native lands in Sarawak, in rivers where Baker’s mother played as a child and on ancestral farm lands. These images are autostereograms, also known as Magic Eye images, a nostalgic optical illusion technology that was very popular in the 1990s during the artist’s childhood. Embedded in these images are forgotten or rarely used Bidayǔh words that are about wandering, collecting and foraging. Serian Bidayǔh language has hundreds of terms for activities that speak to a daily rhythm of moving through the jungle and working intimately with plant life. In current semi-Industrialised Bidayǔh society, these words are almost never used and have been left behind. These images are incantations to evoke the old knowledge these words hold. They suggest that if we learn to see the natural world in a slightly different way, we can access another way of knowing and moving.
nyatu’ (to collect fallen fruit), maanǔn (found all over the place in plenty), mungut (to pick only the young buds), bigabu (to walk through water)
EMMA BUSWELL
On the 29th of May 2023 controversial labour leader and Premier of Western Australia Mark McGowan resigned from his position and political life, with the words “the truth is I’m tired, extremely tired, in fact I’m exhausted”. In the months following this decision he accepted roles within the private sector including mining giant BHP and Joe Hockey’s consultancy company Bondi Partners. Same was made in the weeks after McGowan resigned during a time when I was also very tired. I’m tired of politicians making decisions for economics and not for people or country. I’m tired of the revolving door between public office and private sector fossil fuels boards. I’m tired of leaders who prioritise the market over human rights and I’m tired of decisions that place the burden of fixing systemic present and imminent dangers on the shoulders of younger generations. The work exhibited and my current work more broadly, takes its inspiration from the matrilineal hand craft and knitting techniques passed down from my grandmother and mother, as well as a contemplative investigation into the nature of kitsch, ephemera and national identities. As an artist, curator and designer, I am fascinated with systems of government, economies and culture, particularly in relation to constructs of place, identity and community.
LOUISE CURHAM WITH ERIK GRISWOLD
In my practice I explore the creative application of old media. I trained in archives, film and timebased art, and research, teach, and practice as an archivist. I develop and share much of my work in collaborations – re-enacting 1970s media art in the artist archivist collaboration Teaching and Learning Cinema and numerous collaborations in contemporary experimental music. For Yokahama Flowers, Erik Griswold has developed the music component. Erik is a composer and pianist working in contemporary classical, improvised, and experimental forms. Particular interests include prepared piano, percussion, environmental music, and music of Sichuan province. Erik currently resides in Brisbane, he composes for adventurous musicians, performs as a soloist and in Clocked Out, and collaborates with musicians, artists, dancers, and poets. We have worked together for over a decade bringing together prepared piano and analogue film projection to create intimate events. Highlights have been Otherfilm Festival at IMA in Brisbane in 2007 and the Dots and Loops Festival in Brisbane in 2019.
HANNAH DE FEYTER
at the beginning of this year i flamed out on my professional filmmaking practice (temporarily?) and began working a day job at a national collecting institution. synchronicity: Consuelo invited me to participate in a show about archives. as a beginner archivist i have spent the last six months going down conceptual rabbitholes about archival theory and literal rabbitholes about mysterious collection items. ARCHIVE ARCHIVE is about the weight of archive theory, the weight of ~history, the weight of The Institution, and, i guess, the weight of having a day job. it’s also about the pure delight of finding a collection item bearing no identifying information other than the note “1992: CAKE TIN IN WHICH THE FILM WAS FOUND.”
LEWIS DOHERTY
My manner of making seems less inclined toward the confirmation of singular or precise sculptural forms, but rather a process-based, interventionist approach wherein materials, methodologies and form operate in a state of profound reciprocity. My sculptures thus directly articulate the operational language of how they have been cast, shaped, coloured and made upright, like fraught and poetic monuments to a contingent and unstable material reality.
MP HOPKINS
Lingo is an ongoing project I began in 2018. The project revolves around an iterative text I generate using found materials that deal with speaking and listening in differing ways – poetic and literary texts, linguistic theory, instruction manuals, philosophy, and wikihow web pages. These materials are cut-up, combined, altered via online writing tools, partially redacted, and re-arranged. This process repeats – and the text grows – as new found materials are intermittently added in. For witness, collector, archivist, narrator I
worked with a single page from the Lingo text to produce photographs and a film and sound work. These works aim to convey the strange movement and shape of language I experience in generating the text –the irregular rhythm and murky contours of a narrative that is continuously folding in on itself.
MELISSSA HOWE
I’m an Australian interdisciplinary artist working on Ngunnawal, Ngunawal and Ngambri lands (Canberra, ACT). My practice is centred on using photography to create still and moving image work investigating the everyday, memory, place and time. My recent work has focused on exploring alternative forms of street photography that deviate from the tradition and use concept-driven approaches to create sequences of anonymous portraiture. Since 2008, my work has been exhibited in various galleries in Australia and has featured in local and international publications.
ALEX KERSHAW
Working in video installation, film and photography, my practice involves longterm engagements with communities whose subjectivities are constituted through their relationships with the natural world. My work integrates ethnographic method with performative and cinematic genres, where subjects are not simply observed via the camera, but cast as ‘actors’ playing versions of themselves. Rather than recording ‘reality’ or simply manufacturing fictions, my work provokes an alternative reality that is then documented. Quotidian rituals are the portal through which we witness the work’s subjects making sense of their world in order to better cope within it. Thus, while the camera is my tool, the social body is my primary medium. In studying entanglements between humans, non-human animals and their ecosystems, I render their material and somatic realities beyond ideological articulations and discursive inscriptions. In this crisscrossing between meaning and matter, subjectivities are co-produced in worlds that no longer belong only to humans.
CLARE PEAKE
I don’t really know why I do what I do. I think that this question, or perhaps it’s a feeling, is what underpins my practice. I often find this feeling of uncertainty is reflected in the geography of the landscape I am currently situated in. Long roads, open spaces, expansive horizons, big skies. I wonder too if this pondering also has something to do with growing up in a regional town and why I so often choose to engage in slow, repetitive processes within my work. I am currently residing in Broome (Western Australia) and as I continue to revisit the same works over and over within my practice, I find the circular nature of the weather cycles, and living on a peninsula with one road in and out, an apt metaphor for my practice. I forget time. I forget when things are started and they seem not to really finish either. I guess like the landscape, things do change over time but perhaps slowly, only in small amounts, just enough to record a little shift from here to there.
Image ALEX KERSHAW
Callistemon / Cook (still) 2024
6K video and sound, 8:25 (looped), Alex Dufficy (Cinematography) and Gail Priest (Sound Design)
Photograph by Brenton McGeachie
Image CLARE PEAKE
A Sorcerer’s Dress 2016 - ongoing
Studio scraps, test pieces, failures and project remnants
Photograph by Brenton McGeachie
ARCHIVE, ARCHIVE 2024
Text
Image HANNAH DE FEYTER
Photograph by Brenton McGeachie
Text
nyatu’ mungut maanǔn bigabu 2021
Digital Autostereogram prints on
Left CLARE PEAKE
A Thread of a Spider (Portal A) 2024
Muslin baby wraps, hair, gold thread, plastic eyes
Centre HANNAH DE FEYTER ARCHIVE, ARCHIVE 2024
Right TIYAN BAKER
cotton rag, coding by Xavier Burrow, graphic design assistance by Alanna Roy Bentley
Photograph by Brenton McGeachie
Left MP HOPKINS
Page 74: transcription 1 & 2 2024
Gelatin
Centre MP HOPKINS
Page 74: transcription 3 2024
silver prints mounted on aluminium
Framed gelatin silver print
Right ALEX KERSHAW
Callistemon / Cook (still) 2024
6K video and sound, 8:25 (looped), Alex Dufficy (Cinematography) and Gail Priest (Sound Design)
Photograph by Brenton McGeachie
mungut (from the series nyatu’ mungut maanǔn bigabu) 2021
Image TIYAN BAKER
Digital Autostereogram prints on cotton rag, coding by Xavier Burrow, graphic design assistance by Alanna Roy Bentley
Photograph by Brenton McGeachie
Diary film 2020
16mm film digitised, 2:27, looped
Centre MP HOPKINS
Page 74: transcription 4 2024
Handwriting on found 16mm film transferred to video, sound, viewing structure by Brendan Van Hek, 3:39, looped
Super 8mm film original transferred to digital, 2:42, looped
Left LOUISE CURHAM
Right LOUISE CURHAM with ERIK GRISWOLD
Yokohama Flowers (undated)
Photograph by Brenton McGeachie
Above LOUISE CURHAM with ERIK GRISWOLD
Yokohama Flowers (undated)
Super 8mm film original transferred to digital, 2:42, looped
Photograph by Brenton McGeachie
From the series The Crossing 2020-2024
MELISSA HOWE
Archival pigment prints mounted on 3mm aluminium composite
Above MELISSA HOWE
From the series The Crossing 2020-2024
Archival pigment prints mounted on 3mm aluminium composite
Photograph by Brenton McGeachie
Above EMMA BUSWELL After Arachne 2020 Wool, cotton and synthetic yarn
Photograph by Brenton McGeachie
Image EMMA BUSWELL
After Arachne 2020 Wool, cotton and synthetic yarn
Photograph by Brenton McGeachie
Image CLARE PEAKE
The Procession (Part 4 – Cloak) 2023 - ongoing
Studio scraps, test pieces, failures and project remnants
Photograph by Brenton McGeachie
