SafARI 2014 exhibition catalogue

SafARI 2014

SafARI 2014

Foreword This catalogue marks an important moment in SafARI’s development as an alternative event timed to coincide with each edition of the Biennale of Sydney.

For the first time we have the ability to reflect on SafARI post festival and contemplate its relevance today. It documents a particular moment in time and the reflections and investigations of our emerging artists.

It documents the artist run initiatives that contribute to today’s landscape and the many people who make them run despite the constant lack of resources. This catalogue also documents the groundswell of support for SafARI, its mandate and the renewed energy brought to each edition by the emerging co-curators.

SafARI 2014 would not have been the groundbreaking event it was, if it weren’t for the incredible energy, passion and enthusiasm of its co-curators, Liz Nowell and Christiane Keys-Statham, their capable team, Carrie Mulford and Alessandra Orsi and of course our much loved volunteers. Working tirelessly to fit in with the revised Biennale of Sydney schedule, they, with the help of the Board, produced a number of exhibitions and events for which 2014 will be remembered. I want to particularly congratulate Elliott Bryce Foulkes and Maria Smit for the excellent campaign design that encapsulated 2014.

These achievements are of course the result of a great deal of voluntary work done by many. The SafARI Board has and continues to play a crucial role in the development of each event and 2014 was no different. Thanks to these inspirational, experimental thinking and dedicated individuals, SafARI 2014 was able to augment the experience of SafARI without compromising the original vision that started SafARI in 2004. Working within the historical yet organic parameters proved challenging and hugely rewarding.

Year after year, various communities continue to validate SafARI’s relevance in our cultural landscape and make each edition as memorable as the last. For this reason it is particularly important to note the unprecedented support received from all three tiers of government for 2014, which, as always, has gone directly back to the communities it serves.

The support and collective efforts gives rise to an event that celebrates the grass roots, the beginning, the passion, the enthusiasm and the potential. SafARI puts often short lived artist run initiatives on the map for visitors and locals alike, it provides emerging and unrepresented artists with an opportunity to showcase their practice and current investigations, it offers emerging arts workers various professional platforms from which to launch their careers, it offers the community a chance to access this presumably hidden world and better understand its existence.

This catalogue is a summation of this energy and belief in its future.

Lisa Corsi Co-founder 4 Introduction

Foreword 5

Preface In 2014 SafARI Initiatives Inc. celebrated its tenth birthday. What started as a small seed planted by visiting Swiss artist Frederic Post, has grown into a muchloved and anticipated event on the national visual arts calendar. SafARI continues to expand with each edition, and its increasing popularity is testament to the importance placed on the next generation of artists, curators, writers, designers, art workers and audiences alike.

Established in 2004 by Lisa Corsi and Margaret Farmer, SafARI provides an opportunity for international visitors to the Biennale of Sydney to also experience some of Australia’s most exciting emerging artists and alternative venues. Stretching across six venues over inner Sydney, including artist-run initiatives, community spaces and galleries in unusual spaces, SafARI 2014 presented the work of 14 artists and collectives from around the country. Furthermore, for the first time in SafARI’s history, and in response to the strong presence of performance art in the Sydney scene, we conceived and presented SafARI LIVE, featuring the work of an additional seven Sydney-based performance artists and collectives. This additional inclusion, as well as the incredible exhibition spaces, SafORUM event and various public programs, transformed SafARI 2014 into a living, breathing festival.

Since SafARI was first established in 2004, the definition of ‘emerging artist’ has shifted dramatically. As one artist pointed out, the ‘emerging artist’ has become a brand in its own right. SafARI artists are selected through an open call-out, and the only prerequisites for inclusion are that applicants are Australian, without commercial gallery representation, and identify as emerging. Free from the constraints of a curatorial premise or any overly restrictive guidelines, in 2014 we set out to uncover artists whose work expanded and diversified the ‘emerging art’ brand. From the outset, we were determined that those selected reflected not only the visual arts sector, but also more importantly, the wider global community. The artists and collectives in SafARI 2014 are as dynamic as they are diverse. While parallels could be drawn between aspects of their practices, collectively their work revealed a much broader picture—one that marks this particular moment in our history.

It is important to remember that SafARI is as much about supporting lesser-known galleries as it is about celebrating emerging artists. For this reason, we decided to work with six smaller spaces across inner-city Sydney, ranging from artist-run initiatives, to project spaces and galleries in public places. These venues, like many others operating across Australia, are vital in shaping the creative fabric of our cities and provide an invaluable platform for experimentation, innovation and creative risk.

SafARI’s aim is to remain true to an alternative spirit and ensure that the quality of the experience and exchange is our focus. Our decision to create a post-exhibition catalogue stemmed from the desire to document the relevance of SafARI as a platform for future generations of creative workers, as well as to capture the vibrancy of the entire festival. In addition to the essays, images and documentation commissioned for this publication, we have also included a number of password-protected URLs, which link to video documentation of the LIVE performances that took place during SafARI 2014.

Reflecting on the past 18 months, we feel overwhelmed by the generosity and goodwill of all those who assisted us in realising SafARI 2014. Our sincere thanks go to the artists, core team, the Board, our venues and our amazing volunteers. Special thanks also to those who helped bring the SafORUM symposium together, and our inspiring speakers from Australia and abroad. We would also like to acknowledge the support of all our major partners and funding bodies, including the Australia Council for the Arts, Arts NSW and the City of Sydney.

Many thanks, Christiane Keys-Statham and Liz Nowell SafARI 2014 Co-curators

Hear more from the curators at: vimeo.com/99023465 Password: christianeandliz

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Preface 9

SafARI 2014 14 March – 4 April 2014 Curated by Christiane Keys-Statham & Liz Nowell © 2014 SafARI Initiatives Inc., authors and artists. Except in the context of research, study, criticism, or review, or as otherwise permitted by the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission.

Published by SafARI Initiatives Inc., Sydney PO Box A593 Sydney South NSW 1235 info@safari.org.au www.safari.org.au Published as part of the exhibition SafARI 2014, which took place at six venues across Sydney from 14 March – 4 April 2014.

Catalogue Editors and Writers: Christiane Keys-Statham & Liz Nowell Contributors: Lisa Corsi, Julian Day, Dale Harding Copy editor: Theresa Willsteed Photography: All photos by Lara Merrington, unless otherwise credited Design: Elliott Bryce Foulkes & Maria Smit Print: Special T

Artists SafARI Board Lisa Corsi, Xavier Modoux, Vi Girgis, Nicky McWilliams, Liam Benson, David Capra, Leahlani Johnson, Tom Polo, Lauren Austin, Jodie Whalen, Julian Day, Nina Stromqvist, Arnel Rodriguez, Beatrice Spence SafARI Team Co-curators: Christiane Keys-Statham & Liz Nowell Exhibition Coordinator: Carrie Mulford Marketing Manager: Alessandra Orsi Design: Elliott Bryce Foulkes & Maria Smit Photographer: Lara Merrington Videographer: Dominic Kirkwood SafORUM Crew: David Capra, Lisa Corsi, Julian Day, Dara Gill, Leahlani Johnson, Xavier Modoux and Tom Polo Web Designer: Arnel Rodriguez

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National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

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LIVE Artists

Title: SafARI 2014 Christiane Keys-Statham, Liz Nowell, Lisa Corsi, contributors; Lara Merrington, photographer.

ISBN: 978-0-646-92339-0 (paperback) Subjects: Art, Australian – 21st century – Exhibitions.

72 76 80 84 88 92 96

Other Authors/Contributors: Keys-Statham, Christiane, contributor.

Nowell, Liz, contributor.

Corsi, Lisa, contributor.

Merrington, Lara, photographer.

Dewey Number: 709.940749441

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

Artcycle

12 Acknowledgements

Frances Barrett Kate Blackmore Linda Brescia Alexandra Clapham & Penelope Benton Beth Dillon Kelly Doley OK YEAH COOL GREAT Venues

Government Sponsors

Major Partners

ACAB Collective Bisshop | Messih Madison Bycroft James Carey Benjamin Forster Patrick Francis Emma Hamilton Dale Harding Nikki Lam Liam O’Brien Laura Moore Sam Songailo Leyla Stevens Paul Williams & Christopher Dolman

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Alaska Projects Conductors Project The Corner Cooperative The Cross Art Projects DNA Projects | Contemporary Art Wellington St Projects

112 SafORUM 114 Opening Night 104 Biographies 104 Works

ACAB Collective In modern archaeology, it is widely believed that tens of thousands of years from now the existence of humans will be marked by a thick layer of plastic sediment embedded deep within the earth’s crust. This sombre forecast refers to the theory of the Anthropocene, a term that seeks to understand the wider influence of human behaviour on the planet’s ecology and atmosphere. For the Melbourne-based ACAB Collective, this interaction is one of the most significant interrelationships of our time. Inspired, or perhaps repelled, by this, ACAB strives to create a financially and environmentally sustainable practice ‘that examines ideological perspectives on ecology through the reuse of materials in unexpected ways’.1 For SafARI 2014, ACAB created site-specific installations across the Conductors Project at St James and Museum train stations. Combining e-waste, rubbish, urea crystals, UV lighting and expanding foam, things we need was a playful yet blunt critique of our consumerist society.

Children’s toys, televisions, plastic bottles and other rubbish were encased in a pile of expanding foam and urea crystals. The crystals, which grew throughout the exhibition period, transformed the work into a living coral reef glowing with an iridescent beauty. However, while mesmerising to look at, things we need was also somewhat ominous. It felt as though we are glimpsing into the future.

The parallel drawn between waste and the ocean was timely, given the Great Barrier Reef’s current precarious position. As I write, the Federal Government is undertaking the largest dredging project ever in Australia, which will eventually make way for coal-seam gas exporting facilities. These activities are happening within the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area and are unsurprisingly sparking widespread outrage amongst the wider population. ACAB Collective’s work was not only an acknowledgement of this current environmental crisis, but also a form of direct activism.

Rather than perpetuate the cyclical pattern of consume and discard, ACAB Collective rethinks and reimagines our attitude towards waste. In Western culture, garbage is considered to be of no value—consisting of obsolete relics that have since been upgraded for shinier and newer versions. In things we need, ACAB completely overturned this perception, forever memorialising everyday detritus as a work of art.

The artists attested that there is ‘no difference between the natural and the artificial, as all things permeate each other. While we perceive ourselves as alienated from nature, we are in fact nature.’ In this sense the work could be read as ambiguous, simultaneously repelling and revering rubbish and ultimately leaving it to the viewer to decide. Extending this idea even further, ACAB Collective reassembled this waste into the image of a coral formation. Through this process of meta1 L Hansom 2014, Backyard Opera SafARI 2014 artist profile: ACAB Collective, backyardopera.com

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morphosis, ACAB forced viewers to ask themselves: ‘is this how I want the future to look?’ ACAB Collective challenges our conventional ideas of beauty and inherent worth, while forcing us to consider our disconnection from the natural world.

— LN

↑ ACAB Collective things we need, 2014, mixed media, site specific installation installation view at St James Station

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ACAB Collective 19

Bisshop | Messih Some years ago, while artists Gemma Messih and Ally Bisshop were living in Berlin, they attended a talk by cultural anthropologist Michael Taussig during the dead of the European winter. The talk revolved around the sun, its influence on art, environment and culture, and what Taussig referred to as ‘the magic hour’. The magic hour, also known as the witching hour or the gloaming, is the time between sunset and dark, a threshold time when the twilight heralds the passing of day and the coming night. For Bisshop | Messih, this lecture was particularly pertinent, as they were both, like many Australians abroad, experiencing Seasonal Affective Disorder—the blues brought on by the dark and gloomy European winter.

This shared moment germinated a seed that eventually resulted in Bisshop | Messih’s proposal for SafARI 2014. Their conversations were conducted mostly via Skype, as Gemma Messih had by then returned to Sydney. They discussed ways to commemorate these magic moments at dawn and dusk. Their intention was to create a pause in the viewer’s movement: to provide a space and opportunity for them to consider the light, the changing of the day, the endings and the beginnings.

In our rushed and busy lives, surrounded by city noise and beset by competing demands on our time, we rarely have such opportunities. This may be the reason that so many holiday snaps feature sunsets: a vacation affords the time and place for letting go of the daily routine, pausing to take in the view and appreciate the beauty of one’s surrounds.

How to bring the viewer to a place of attunement to this liminal space in their everyday lives? This was a difficult proposition, as it required invoking a seemingly accidental and almost inadvertent state in the viewer, inducing a state of reflection and a conduciveness to daydream. These would be artworks that, in point of fact, deflected attention away from themselves, artworks that were only vehicles for an intangible state of mind.

Bisshop | Messih originally proposed a structure approximating a viewing platform, placed in a city street facing west. People would encounter this structure and it would disrupt their habitual routes, lifting them physically and metaphysically out of normality and into a state in which outward contemplation and sensitivity to place would be possible. Due to practical limitations on outdoor structures, however, and the lack of unobstructed views of the sunset in our city streets, this structure was never built.

Bisshop | Messih’s final work had many components: a love song performed by a choir facing towards sunset on opening night, unannounced and dispersed amongst the crowd; a publication containing essays and surveys on the sun; a set of poles covered in beeswax; and a series of sculptures installed on the roof of Kings Cross Car Park. This was one of the most interesting and subtle parts 1 The Kings Cross Car Park was also home to another SafARI 2014 venue: Alaska Projects, on Level 2.

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of the exhibition—a group of works in flux, placed in the public realm, in a state of appearance and reappearance (and indeed disappearance, in the case of the beeswax poles, which vanished within two hours of installation). These were works that grew out of research into atmospheric effects on humans, artworks that were perhaps never intended to be whole and complete, that were not easily resolved.

As such, this group of work was a success on its own terms, a delicate and mobile experiment for, in the words of the artists, ‘ritualising the passing of the day’.

— CKS

↑ Bisshop | Messih An old chaos of the sun, 2014 performance, publication and distributed structures and interventions Images courtesy of the Artists and Lara Merrington

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Bisshop | Messih 23

Madison Bycroft

e knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numH berless, and more nameless than the colours of an autumn forest ...

Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them, in all their tones and semitones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of this own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire.1

This video played alongside an installation of terracotta rabbits. Literally hung from a wooden beam suspended in the gallery space, their contorted and deformed bodies recalled the painful death of the artist’s pet bunny. Eulogy suggested that through understanding animals we may in fact be able to recover our own sense of humanity, empathy and compassion. — LN

In her recent work, Madison Bycroft explores the complex and problematic classification of animals under a dominant Western culture. Inspired by the great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, Bycroft’s work for SafARI 2014 explored limitations of language, perception and experience in a series of video performances and sculptural works.

Borges himself once said that ‘it is clear that there is no classification of the Universe not being arbitrary and full of conjectures’.2 Eager to further understand this, Bycroft began visiting the American Museum of Natural History when she moved to New York City in late 2013. Undertaking rigorous research, these visits reaffirmed what she had already thought to be true: ‘We categorise it [animals] according to our own phenomenological perspective, not theirs.’ 3 In Unfolded Beneath, a near-invisible Bycroft slithered across familiar landscapes. Leaving no trace, her invisibility suggested that the experience of being an animal is in fact inconceivable to humans. Nonetheless, she attempted, through an act of practical empathy, to understand this experience. It is implicit within the process of classification that the human is all-knowing but, as Borges states, we do not know what thing the universe is. Unfolded Beneath explores this unknown.

During her research into systems of classification, Bycroft began interrogating the need to index animals at all. She postulated that it came from an innate desire to understand our humanity by placing ourselves in opposition to the animal world. In response to this, the artist began compiling a comprehensive list of every animal that had impacted her life. From this list, Bycroft selected her childhood pet horse and rabbit.

In Eulogy, Bycroft attempted to reconcile the emotional pain associated with each of these animals. A video featured an anonymous man, wearing a large novelty horse head, strumming a guitar and singing about the death of Bycroft’s pet horse. Bycroft hired the man to write the song, after commissioning him through a website. The final work sat somewhere between absurdity, the disturbing and the redemptive.

1 G K Chesterton, G F Watts, Duckworth & Co, New York; E P Dutton & Co, London, 1906, p 88.

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2 J L Borges, Jorge Luis, ‘John Wilkins' Analytical Language’, in E Weinberger, Selected nonfictions, E Weinberger (transl), Penguin Books, 1999, p 231.

3 K Simmons, In the heart of a stone, Contemporary Art Space of South Australia, Adelaide, 2013.

↑ Madison Bycroft Eulogy, 2014 video feat. Neighkid Horse, earthenware, dimensions variable Images courtesy of Lara Merrington and the Artist

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Madison Bycroft 27

James Carey The redevelopment of industrial buildings is a common event in most large cities.

In Sydney this form of gentrification has gathered speed in the last few decades, in line with rising property prices. Summer Hill, in Sydney’s inner west, is an area that will benefit from the forthcoming Inner West Light Rail Extension, which will bring new residents to the area and positively impact on property prices. On the edge of the suburb, the Summer Hill Flour Mill, built in 1922, is to become a residential and commercial precinct, with redevelopment commencing in 2014. In light of this transformation, the opportunity to commemorate the building and its past with site-specific artistic responses presented itself to the curators of SafARI 2014.

James Carey is a Melbourne-based artist whose practice revolves around the built environment. He seeks to disrupt our familiar and habitual perceptions of architectural space, particularly spaces that are abandoned, unused or on the cusp of major structural change. Using these sites as material, Carey interacts with the buildings themselves, creating interventions, social sculptures, paintings and drawings that gather impressions and imprints of the buildings and their unspoken histories. His aim is to capture an expression of the past, an image of the space and to allow the history of these buildings to be recorded and memorialised one final time.

For SafARI 2014, James Carey undertook a two-week residency at the Summer Hill Flour Mill, where other artists had been working for some time within the Mungo Art Studios. Carey made excursions into the larger complex, responding to various spaces in a diverse variety of media. For Carey, one of the most important parts of the work was the process itself, the time spent uncovering aspects and details of the site and considering how to represent or translate them. The materials produced, shown in a gallery space, provided a glimpse of Carey’s time spent in physical homage to the building and its history, a remembrance of things past. The artist incorporated into his works the actual physical, performative processes of their making, with the number of steps he climbed daily to the top of the building resulting in an endurance drawing: 89964 seconds [paces] of drawing [walking], 2014.

Carey has spoken of his interest in the ‘archaeology of the recent past’, and his initial approach to spaces as ‘auditing’. He deeply considers his spatial subjects in the manner of Augé’s urban ethnographer, turning a critical gaze upon our immediate surroundings, the non-places that we haphazardly update and redevelop without much thought for their histories and remnant atmospheres. Although these buildings were created for industrial purposes, their internal spaces were also defined by human usage. Carey’s inherent respect for the memories contained within these spaces pointed out that such delicate, and often unrecorded, histories should not be discarded as part of a constant urge to update and improve. — CKS Watch part of this work at: https://vimeo.com/100803051 Password: summerhill

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James Carey she hastily enters on business the flower crown and exits with golden coat and yellow boots [killer bees] (detail), 2014 dead bees, dimensions variable

James Carey 29

← James Carey installation view, Wellington St Projects ↑↑ James Carey 89964 seconds [paces] of drawing [walking], 2014 pencil on canvas, 90 x 90cm

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↑ James Carey excuse me mate, I don't want to put any pressure on you, but are you leaving soon? no. sorry mate. we just ordered another beer (detail), 2014, found object and enamel paint, dimensions variable

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Benjamin Forster

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Benjamin Forster 33

↊↑ Benjamin Forster _______________ (detail), 2014 custom electronics and lcd screens, dimensions variable

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Benjamin Forster 35

Patrick Francis Patrick Francis is a prolific and successful painter, with a strong style and highly confident approach. His form of portrait painting employs methods used in times long past: a directorial approach in the studio, the deconstruction of the subject, bold and expressive use of colour, and an extreme simplification of the pictorial plane.

Francis’ use of colour recalls the intensity of modernist movements such as Fauvism and German Expressionism: stripping back an image to its main components, he directs studio assistants to select the exact colour required for each section, adding these to more detailed under-drawings. This selective process indicates that the artist places great importance on colour, its emotive value and the power it holds within the image itself. For Francis, colour is loaded with meaning: it holds the key to the characters he paints, conveying their state of mind, their roles and their situation. Form and contours are flattened, becoming bright planes of colour.

Subtleties also exist in the edges of these colour blocks—gentle gradations give way to sudden changes that catch the eye and hint at the hidden depths of perspective and detail within the layers of paint.

Patrick Francis places just as much importance on the selection of his subjects as on the selection of colour he uses to recreate them. His source material ranges from images of art history classics, pop culture and film icons, to other mass media material. Francis also draws from facets of his daily life in Melbourne, and his sporting and community interests.

For SafARI 2014, the works selected by the curators were based on art historical source material, and include portraits of Bette Davis as Queen Elizabeth, the Mona Lisa, Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and a head from a Ned Kelly painting by Sidney Nolan. The jolt of recognition experienced by the viewer when coming across one of these paintings was quickly replaced by astonishment that the artist could capture the essence of such famous images with his deceptively reductive style. Francis’s deconstruction of the portrait is a way of seeking out the emotional truth of the subject. It is a search that distils the portrait into a purer form of representation—a portrait cleansed of its social and political implications.

In Francis’s work, the individual’s essence shines through, engaging the viewer long after the initial shock of identification has passed. — CKS

→ Patrick Francis Not titled (Mona Lisa), 2011 acrylic on paper, image size 70 x 50cm Image courtesy of Arts Project Australia and the Artist

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Patrick Francis Not titled, 2011 acrylic on paper, image size 56 x 38cm Image courtesy of Arts Project Australia and the Artist

Patrick Francis 37

Patrick Francis installation view, The Corner Cooperative

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Emma Hamilton Australians have a fascinating and, at times, fraught relationship with our landscape.

For the majority of us, clustered around the coastal edges of this vast island, inland deserts and salt lakes are an alien landscape. Emma Hamilton, an artist currently based in Melbourne, seeks out these remote places and forges a new representation of landscape in contemporary Australian art. For SafARI 2014, Hamilton created work based on trips to three dry salt lakes in the Mallee region of Victoria.

A landscape that is completely and utterly flat—a landscape that, if you spin around, looks exactly the same in all directions—is one that has strange and almost mythical properties for humans. Think of an entirely flat sea or a desert, and the prevalence of these landscapes in literature and myth. The usual landmarks are absent, there are no buildings or trees to give a sense of scale. None of the signs and markers we employ in urban environments are evident here. Such landscapes embody a phenomenon called ‘enantiomorphism’. This scientific term has been defined by the Oxford Dictionary as a ‘form related to another as an object is to its image in a mirror’.1 This genre of symmetry is apparent in crystal molecules, which are an integral part of a salt lake’s elemental, yet precarious, composition. In Hamilton’s work, this form also related to the horizon, which, when mirrored by its opposing view, is almost—but not exactly—identical. In this way, an integral part of the salt itself is mirrored in the resulting landscape. This discombobulating effect was conveyed in Hamilton’s work through the use of salt, applied to create sculptures that mimicked the disorientating effects of enantiomorphism.

How we make sense of a landscape and find our place in it is an issue at the core of Hamilton’s work. The tentative and fleeting moments of contact between light and landscape, the tension between photography and sculpture, the absence and disappearance of humans within such primordial landscapes, the sensitivity of humans to their landscapes, or lack thereof: these were all questions at play in these works. The notion of Australia as a cultural desert was here disproved, as Hamilton showed us that our landscapes are full of beauty, delicacy and inspiration. — CKS

1 The Concise Oxford Dictionary, Fifth Edition, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1964, p 399.

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Emma Hamilton installation view, The Corner Cooperative

Emma Hamilton 41

↑ Emma Hamilton Horizon Level (detail), 2014 glass, salt, rubber stoppers and liquid, 152 x 2 x 2cm Image courtesy of the Artist

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→ Emma Hamilton Emma Hamilton working on a salt lake in the Mallee region, Victoria Image courtesy of the Artist

Emma Hamilton 43

Dale Harding For some time one of my Elders has been sharing with me an experience they had as a child on Woorabinda Aboriginal Mission in Central Queensland.

As a child they were witness to what is known as the punishment tree.

The punishment tree should be understood as a torture device.

The authorities at Woorabinda Aboriginal Mission, Taroom Reserve and other Aboriginal missions around Queensland employed punishment trees as a form of corporal punishment against Aboriginal inmates of the missions.

The punishment tree on Woorabinda was a large hardwood tree on the outskirts of the settlement that was solid and rigid enough to be used as an involuntary anchor.

The tree had horizontal holes bored through it at right angles so that two steel bars could be passed through the tree to form a horizontal cross approximately two and a half feet off the ground.

Forged at the four ends of the crossed bars were steel rings these steel rings completed the cross so that the bars could not be passed back through the tree.

This formed the Queensland Crucifix.

The authorities of Woorabinda Mission used this punishment tree to crucify their Aboriginal inmates.

This inhumane punishment dealt by Mission authorities saw Aboriginal people chained through the rings on the cross and left to waste away exposed to the elements.

Their torture involved being forced to relieve themselves in the only place that they could sit or sleep.

Make no mistake this inhumane punishment was crucifixion.

The word crucifix comes from the Latin crucifixus meaning fixed to a cross.

The act of crucifixion was most often used to punish political or religious agitators. slaves and those who had no civil rights.

It was performed to terrorise and dissuade its witnesses.

↑ Dale Harding notes from the artist's sketch book Courtesy of the Artist

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By definition all intents and purposes for chaining Aboriginal people to punishment trees on Woorabinda, Taroom and other Missions in Queensland amounted to the crucifixion of Aboriginal people under the Protection of Aborigines and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Acts of 1897.

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Dale Harding punishment tree: Queensland crucifix (detail), 2014 steel, wax, acrylic and online video, 70 x 160 x 160cm overall

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Nikki Lam Max Dupain’s Sunbaker has been considered one of the quintessential Australian photographs since it was first exhibited at the Australian Centre of Photography in 1975. Depicting a young, fit man relaxing, arms folded, on a sunny beach, it is perhaps the most iconic and evocative image in Australian history. As a nation desperate to define its identity at that time, ‘that bloody Sunbaker’1, as the artist himself famously referred to it, embodied the many aspirations of white Australia.

For others, particularly newly arrived immigrants and Indigenous people, Dupain’s photograph was far removed from the reality and experience of living in Australia. In a country that had only abolished the White Australia Policy two years prior to the Sunbaker first being exhibited, the photograph could be seen as a symbol of the ongoing social exclusion and racism that existed at the time. In the spirit of revisionism, many artists began to appropriate this image and, of all these, perhaps the most well known is Anne Zahalka’s The Sunbather #2, 1989.

In Falling Leaf Returns to its Roots, self-professed ‘curious other’ Nikki Lam also appropriated the Sunbaker, transforming Dupain’s still photograph into a moving image. Placing herself in the frame, the image of a white male is replaced with that of a young Asian woman. Using the medium of video as a metaphor for the fluidity of cultural identity, Lam noted that: y comparing myself to an iconic Australian image, I am claiming that b the idea of citizenship or belonging—realised through acceptance—can also take a fluid, progressive, unexpected turn and foster something completely different, something hybrid and continuous.2 Lam’s movement in this work is subtle—only momentarily does the subject become animated, moving her head side to side. Off screen the gentle sounds of waves crashing and children playing emulate the mood of Dupain’s photograph.

The overall effect is both soothing and meditative. However, by placing herself in the frame Lam disrupted this mood instantly, subverting our expectations.

Lam, who was born and raised in Hong Kong and settled in Melbourne ten years ago, is interested in understanding cultural identities through the exploration of the Other. In this sense the beach, and Sunbaker, became a site of exploration and reflection; a space where the artist could inhabit another identity while bringing with her all the cultural memory and experience she has acquired throughout life.

What was left was a kind of self-portrait that offered a revised vision of Australian cultural identity. As the artist herself probes: ‘I wonder what makes us who we are.’

— LN 1 S Crerar, 2012, 'The man who courted light and shade', The Australian, 27 July

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2 O Leong, 2013, Interview with Nikki Lam, Falling Leaf Returns to its Roots, Peril Magazine, Edition 17 - Dualities

3 ibid.

Nikki Lam Falling Leaf Returns to its Roots, 2013 high definition video, duration 4 min 39 secs installation view, DNA Projects

Nikki Lam 49

↑ Nikki Lam video still from Falling Leaf Returns to its Roof, 2013 high definition video, duration 4 min 39 secs Image courtesy of the Artist

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Laura Moore Laura Moore is an emerging artist from New South Wales. Currently studying photo media at the Sydney College of the Arts, she is also a regular exhibitor and was the winner of the 2012 Digital Portraiture Award. Her work examines the nature of photography itself, particularly in relation to identity and representation. Moore often uses herself and her family as subjects, and is consistently inspired and informed by her personal history and observations founded in her everyday experiences.

In From Plato’s Cave, her series exhibited as part of SafARI 2014, Moore addressed the notion of photographic truth. The series referred to Plato’s allegory, which describes prisoners in a cave who, unable to move or escape, knew only the shadows cast on the cave walls as reality. Finally released, these unnamed prisoners saw the real world beyond the cave, and experienced an awakening in their conception of reality. The allegory reveals the instinctive human pursuit for truth and knowledge.

Moore considered this analogy in the light of a very old-fashioned idea about photography: that it tells the truth, and cannot lie. For these photographs, she used only the available light—the sunlight and shadow that were available on the particular day. Moore turned this pure light onto the bodies of her family and loved ones, along with her own body. Her gaze is unflinching and the sunlight is merciless.

We saw the flesh, the impurities, the freckles and hairs. We saw the skin of the aged, and of the adolescent. Here was indeed a truth, of sorts: a skin-deep reality that the camera could see clearly. This was, however, a reality that was clearly incomplete, balanced by the unseen details hidden in the deep shadows.

The nature of these bodies also allowed the viewer to project our own truths onto them. We saw echoes of our own loved ones, our own family histories and recognise the gaze of the lover, the sister, the friend. Moore’s interest in the figure of the woman in the window, a recurring symbol for feminine identity throughout art history, fitted neatly with her sunlight theme. The woman in the window is a figure who is framed by a window, a domestic space, within the frame of a painting, traditionally, or in Moore’s case, the photograph. Caught between the larger world beyond the window, and the gaze of the viewer, she considers her internal world and becomes a vehicle for our own thoughts and desires.

Many artists have stated that they use their friends and relatives as models due to their availability and the fact that they are willing to pose for free.

However, in Moore’s case, the use of her own body and form in this series indicated something beyond mere availability. Here she was searching for a truth of her own making, one that is carried by, or contained within the figures of her loved ones. This series may be a way of admitting that we can never know another person wholly, that photography does indeed lie, but it simultaneously demonstrated that the quest for truth continues regardless. — CKS

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↩ Laura Moore Proof #2 (detail), 2007 – 2013 from the series ‘From Plato’s Cave’ pigment print, 80 x 120cm Image courtesy of the Artist

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↖ Laura Moore Proof #6, 2007 – 2013 from the series ‘From Plato’s Cave’ pigment print, 80 x 120cm Image courtesy of the Artist

↑ Laura Moore Proof #7, 2007 – 2013 from the series ‘From Plato’s Cave’ pigment print, 80 x 120cm Image courtesy of the Artist

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Liam O’Brien Absurdity, in one form or another, reverberates through the recent work of Queensland artist Liam O’Brien, particularly in his video installation for SafARI 2014, The Glaze, 2013. This work appeared as a lively yet disjointed celebration of the ridiculous, monotonous or pointless motions of daily life, of domestic gesture and of language’s semantic glitches. To search for meaning in this work, which seemed actively to resist and evade interpretation, was an option open to the viewer; another was choosing to evaluate this work on its simple, absurdist beauty and sense of rhythmic calm.

Albert Camus used the myth of Sisyphus in his famous 1942 essay to explore the idea of the absurd as a reaction against futility and despair. The image of a man repeatedly pushing a boulder up a mountain has often been used as a metaphor to illustrate the small struggles of our daily lives. Bound to labour, family and cultural narratives, we toil in a society of our own creation, perpetuating on a daily basis what Camus described as ‘the habit of living’.1 Camus’ genius was to invert a Modernist idea of the absurd: to turn a negative view of the futility of labour to a positive vision of modern man finding meaning through embracing the absurdity of his own life.

O’Brien is occupied with interrogating aspects of our existences that relate to political systems, employment, occupation and labour: the repeated motions with which we fill our time and which in turn fill our wallets with money and our lives with the stuff of consumerist dreams. Perceived knowledge implies that the important truths of our real lives happen outside these repeated motions—our real lives, our inner truths, are merely framed by employment, death and taxes.

But O’Brien, like Camus, turns this way of thinking inside out, seeking beauty and truth in the simple motions of our quotidian routines. Without recourse to nostalgia and without renouncing the possibility of violence as a logical conclusion, O’Brien harnesses his dogged lucidity to generate a new way of seeing.

For Albert Camus, the artist fulfils a vital role in society: the absurd creator who gives ‘the void its colours’. 2 Acting in full knowledge of our godless existence and denying the option of suicide, the artist seeks out reason in the face of futility, making creations that consider the often-overlooked subjects all around us. Liam O’Brien involves himself in this sort of Sisyphean labour, giving the viewer a renewed respect for their own actions throughout the day, the small quirks of their language, the leaps of logic and the missed connections, the beauty of ordinary things. As Camus wrote, a lifetime ago, ‘this is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future’ 3 ; but in O’Brien’s work, we receive the bounty in the here and now.

— CKS 1 ‘We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.’ Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, Penguin, London, 2005, p 6.

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2 ibid., p 111.

3 Albert Camus, in Resistance, Rebellion and Death: Essays, Knopf, New York, 2012, p 242.

↑ Liam O’Brien The Glaze, 2013 high definition single channel video, duration 18 min 27 secs installation view, DNA Projects

Liam O’Brien video still from The Glaze, 2013 high definition single channel video, duration 18 min 27 secs Image courtesy of the Artist

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Sam Songailo Sam Songailo is a time traveller. Drawing from futurism, science fiction, philosophy and hard-edge abstraction, his synesthetic installations continually pendulate between the past and the future, while pausing momentarily in the present moment.

Over the past six years, he has developed a distinctly experiential practice, creating site-specific works that, when the viewer is fully immersed in, induce an almost transcendental state of being.

For SafARI 2014, Songailo transformed the Kings Cross Car Park, known as ALASKA Projects1, into an incandescent and untitled landscape. Covering the exposed walls and structural beams of the car park in blue and pink geometric patterning, Untitled was, as the artist described it, a kind of ‘three-dimensional painting’.

Reflective pools of water covered the floor, further enhancing the experiential nature of Songailo’s work.

Speaking about previous work, Songailo states, ‘There is no concept to be grasped, just an invitation to meditation’.2 The same can be said of Untitled. There was an ambiguity that encouraged the viewer to fully surrender him or herself to a momentary experience. It was in this fleeting moment—this immense space that Songailo created—that the mind could wander. To where that might have been was left entirely up to the onlooker.

Although Songailo’s work alludes to a preoccupation with the future, he refuses to dictate his own vision. Rather, he allows the viewer, fully engrossed in the present moment, to arbitrate. Fellow artist and writer Roy Ananda notes:

A number of commentators (including Songailo himself) have highlighted the futuristic character of the artist’s work, but to what future does it belong? ... Songailo’s vision more closely resembles what we thought the future might be like in the eighties: the neon noir of Blade Runner, the cyberspace of Tron, even the 2015 posited by Back to the Future II.3

Global warming, nuclear war and the ever-expanding fast food industry—it’s all terrifying stuff. But standing immersed in one of Songailo’s futurescapes, we cannot help but pause and reconsider. And maybe in that precise moment, we can see that it is not so scary after all. — LN

These references, which can be found across Songailo’s oeuvre, situate his practice within retro-futurism, a term used to describe the future as seen from the past or the past as seen by the future.

Unlike at the turn of the twentieth century, when the future was a fascinating and thrilling prospect, we live in an age where the outlook is rather grim—the end of the world is imminent and the plethora of post-apocalyptic movies available for download will attest to this. While Songailo’s vision is neither arcadian nor dystopian, perhaps the very fact that he is delineating a neutral space for us to contemplate our future is cause for optimism. In this context, Untitled proffered a blank canvas, one on which the viewer is free to ruminate over his or her own reimagining of the world.

1 The ALASKA Projects gallery space occupies the lower second level of the Kings Cross Car Park.

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2 Correspondence between the artist and the author in J Sommerville, ‘Sam Songalio’, Art and Australia, issue no 51.3, 2014, p 461.

3 R Ananda, ‘FELTspace GOLD: a survey of emerging contemporary art practice in South Australia 2011’, in FELTspace GOLD: a survey of emerging contemporary art practice in South Australia 2011, M Huppatz (ed), FELTspace, South Australia, 2011.

↑ Sam Songailo Untitled, 2014 mixed media, site specific installation

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Leyla Stevens Including Leyla Steven’s film Ngendag/Rise Up, 2010–2013, in SafARI 2014 was an inevitable, yet difficult, decision for us. This video was unlike any we had ever seen, with its intimate, familial gaze, somewhat disturbing subject matter and high production values, which combined to create a work of great power. Transfixed and intrigued upon viewing Stevens’ proposal, we delved further into her output and uncovered a body of work by an artist of great strength, lyricism and promise.

One side of Leyla Stevens’ family hails from the Indonesian island of Bali. Known to many Australians only as a holiday destination, Bali has a complex and unique culture, and religious practices that merge aspects of Buddhism, Hinduism and animism. For Stevens, an interest in culturally-specific gesture, embodied histories and ritual performance led to her focusing on her own Balinese family for this particular work.

The video documented a private Balinese ritual that occurs prior to a cremation (a more public event). The private ceremony involves the bodies of deceased relatives, already buried for some years, being exhumed, ritually washed and carefully reassembled and wrapped before cremation. For Western viewers, the sight of incompletely decomposed bodies can be confronting, and our reaction to this artwork hinted at the considerable cultural differences surrounding death and the body.

This confrontation, a subversion of viewer’s expectations of an artwork within a gallery space, was compounded by the form the film takes: a documentarystyle footage without subtitles or a clear narrative to explain what is taking place as the bones are washed and wrapped. This strategy, as well as subverting colonial documentary film tropes, also put the emphasis squarely on the gestures of the living: their handling of the dead, their careful placement of the bones into their shrouds. This is also a family film, a home movie, a visual memorial, and the documentation of an important event.1 The absence of description heightened for the viewer the impact of the gestures shown on screen. Encouraging contemplation of our own rituals, our own gestures, is part of the work’s power.

An artwork that turns the viewer’s gaze back upon him or herself, that turns our thoughts inwards, is inevitably a compelling work of art. After the initial shock on seeing this work, the viewer begins to perceive the tenderness and shared effort of this collective undertaking, and perceives the more subtle aspects of the work: the constant stream of casual chatter, the group dynamics, the beauty of the final fire. To have been permitted to witness this family ceremony is to appreciate our cultural differences and simultaneously to see how similar we actually are, under the skin. — CKS 1 ‘Photography, film and the archive are associated with the concept of memory, functioning as surrogate, or virtual sites of remembrance, or as metaphors for the processes of recalling the past.’ J Connarty, Introduction to Ghosting: The Role of the Archive within Contemporary Artists' Film and Video, Picture This, Bristol, 14, 2009.

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↩↑→ Leyla Stevens video still from Ngendag/Rise Up, 2010 - 2013 two-channel video projection, duration 12 min Images courtesy of the Artist

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Paul Williams & Christopher Dolman In Pieter Claesz’s seventeeth-century masterpiece, Vanitas Still Life, the image of an artfully-arranged skull, pocket watch and upturned glass is a sobering reminder of life’s brevity and the worthlessness of material objects. In a similar way, OTHER DAY ORNAMENTAL, the first collaboration between Paul Williams and Christopher Dolman, sought to interrogate the inherent worth, or lack thereof, of commonplace objects. Meticulously recreating household and studio detritus using only ceramic and glaze, Williams and Dolman created an ambitious installation that was as much indebted to art history as it was to their everyday lives.

Both Williams and Dolman are accomplished artists in their own right— the former a painter, and the latter trained in printmaking. Lifelong friends, the two artists grew increasingly interested in collaborating after they undertook a joint residency at the Bundanon Trust in southern New South Wales. Shortly after this, Lynda Draper, a mutual friend and master ceramicist, invited Williams and Dolman to undertake an informal ceramics residency at Gymea TAFE. Ceramics proved a highly experimental medium for both artists, and the ideal platform for collaborating.

Existing within OTHER DAY ORNAMENTAL were over 65 unique objects, each formally laid out on a large timber tabletop. Seemingly benign, these trinkets and relics had been recreated from memory and forever memorialised in ceramic. The choice of such a fragile material was very much intentional. If we are to consider where ceramics sit within the traditional hierarchy of materials, it is far higher than the cheap plastic these objects were originally cast from. By immortalising worthless ‘junk’ in ceramics, Williams and Dolman created an air of reverence, one that transformed these pieces into curious oddities and forced us to reconsider our perceived sense of value.

Both artists consider themselves modernists, and this is perhaps most evident in OTHER DAY ORNAMENTAL. Although the objects depicted were more reminiscent of those found in a teenage boy’s bedroom than those in a Dutch still life, there was layer upon layer of art historical references to be discovered.

Movements such as constructivism, pop art and cubism were playfully interwoven throughout the installation. Within the one work were any number of competing ideas and aesthetics, ranging from the naive to the highly refined. Indeed, so realistic were some of the objects in the installation, they created a similar optical illusion to the trompe l’oeil murals of Europe.

Despite these historical attriibutes, OTHER DAY ORNAMENTAL still sat very much within the realm of contemporary art. Drawing largely from popular culture, Williams and Dolman’s grand monument paid tribute to modern life.

Humourous, delicate and often a little awkward, OTHER DAY ORNAMENTAL was a marriage between #modernlyfe and Art History—a work that is both relevant to the now and indebted to the past. — LN

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↑ Paul Williams & Christopher Dolman OTHER DAY ORNAMENTAL (detail), 2014 fired and unfired clay with underglaze, plywood and timber, dimensions variable

Paul Williams and Christopher Dolman would like to thank The Ceramic Design Studio TAFE Sydney Institute.

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Frances Barrett One of the concerns of artists who work in and around performance is that their work will be framed as entertainment or theatre. Frances Barrett’s practice steadily challenges this idea: demanding an intellectual and often visceral engagement from her audience, she enumerates with each new work the ways in which her performances are more than mere escapist experiences for the viewer. Just because it isn’t light entertainment, however, doesn’t mean it can’t be funny—after all, the repetition of a particularly absurd or pointless gesture is one of the classic mechanisms of slapstick. In Barrett’s work, this absurdity—the taking of things a little too far—is a method for examining the habitual actions and routines of our daily lives.

For SafARI LIVE, Barrett decided to consume sleeping pills, taken under medical supervision, and sleep within various gallery spaces where other SafARI 2014 artists were showing their work. This form of interventionist performance art was one of the most interesting aspects of the SafARI 2014 program: an opportunity to encourage interaction between very different works and media.

For us, it was a wild sort of curating and a thoroughly unpredictable experiment.

Barrett’s inspiration and intention for this work can be uncovered in its title: Occupation, a word fraught with association. The recent Occupy movement reflected contemporary responses to financial inequality worldwide. In Australia, ‘occupation’ also refers to the violent colonisation and occupation of this land. These days, the word is also often used to describe what we do for a living and how we kill time.

The artist and philosopher Hito Steyerl pointed out1 that what used to be called one’s ‘job’ is in contemporary Western society usually labelled one’s ‘occupation’. This, she suggests, is echoed in art, where a concurrent shift from object to activity, from painting to performance, has occurred since the inception of modernism. But there has been a shift in meaning. For Steyerl, occupation is not the same as work: it does not demand productivity per se. An occupation does not necessarily have a tangible outcome—the ends have been removed from the means.

Frances Barrett, in her performance for SafARI LIVE, inverted traditional capitalist notions and personified non-productivity in an all-embracing rejection of the idea of ‘work’. But, in typically absurdist fashion, she also took this to an almost dangerous conclusion, physically risking her health to essentially turn a leisure activity—sleep—into the ultimate form of non-productivity. This was endurance slacking.

The work presented a response to the interminable business of our postmodern condition, a refutation of the frenzied pace of our daily lives. Here 1. H Steyerl, 2011. Art as occupation: Claims for an autonomy of life, e-flux journal #30

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2. T Kreider, ‘The “busy” trap’, New York Times, 30 June 2012.

was an artist tuning in, dropping out and ‘idly dreaming’2 officially, on our time, in the name of art, within the white cube. This performance could be interpreted as a renunciation of the artist as authorial presence, of relationality and the trend towards participation. The artist stated that for her, the time was blank, as if erased entirely. We, the audience, were not even there.

This was indeed paid labour, but without a product, it became an occupation in many senses of the word. Hiding in plain sight, the artist not only rejected her own individual presence and voice, her audience and the potential for interaction, she also upended within the gallery space a traditional image of a supine female figure. This was not a body for our visual consumption, like countless painted nudes. It was cloaked, covered, fast asleep, gently snoring and totally oblivious to our gaze. It had the air of a silent protest, the body a solid, immovable statement. It was a work that proved, once and for all, that art has become the everyday, and that the barrier between art and life has been entirely dissolved, to reveal a beautiful sight: the artist, fast asleep on the floor, dreaming. — CKS

↑ Frances Barrett Occupation at The Corner Cooperative (29 March 2014), 2014 live performance Image courtesy Susannah Wimberley

Frances Barrett Occupation at ALASKA Projects (15 March 2014), 2014 live performance Image courtesy Susannah Wimberley

Watch this performance at: vimeo.com/98923881 Password: sleepingpills

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Kate Blackmore Kate Blackmore is an artist whose work often deals with themes of control, power and violence. Her original proposal for SafARI 2014 was a confronting video work that made both curators feel more than slightly discomfited. The strength of that proposal was backed up by Blackmore’s work to date, which includes both her solo practice and her work with Brown Council, a Sydney performance and video artist collaboration.

Blackmore excels at getting under the viewer’s skin. Her performance and video-based work often incorporates ritualised actions, repeated motions and directed gestures that, when removed from their usual contexts and repeated in meaningful scenarios, become challenging and often confrontational. Using her own body and often turning the viewer into an uncomfortable witness, Blackmore takes a clear-eyed look at difficult aspects of our personal and national histories.

Becoming a physical manifestation of a cultural or historical idea is no doubt a difficult process for the artist herself. This approach utilises in tangible form Judith Butler’s notion of performativity, whereby the identity of the artist is redefined by the words and actions of this assumed character. In the work produced for SafARI 2014, titled Ngallowan (They Remain), Blackmore inhabited the role of history’s whitewasher, a tactic that made us admire her and somehow be simultaneously repelled. At no small risk to her own health, she painted an entire room white and then herself, upending the bucket of paint over her own head. Meanwhile, in the accompanying video, Dharug elder and songwoman Jacinta Tobin embodied the resilience and continuation of her Indigenous culture through singing in language, ‘Dooruk goomeda ngallowan’ (‘Dharug spirits live, they remain’).

The Dharug nation spans the Sydney Basin and is centred on the Cumberland Plain in Western Sydney. Jacinta is one of few remaining Dharug speakers, and teaches language and culture through song. In this collaborative work (a split-screen video installation) both Blackmore and Tobin responded to the idea of whitewashing. Blackmore’s more literal interpretation was balanced by the subtlety and stillness of Tobin’s piece, which she performed in the bush, on her country. The simple and undeniable fact of her presence defied the act of violent whitewashing that continued on a loop in the next screen.

It was a perfectly balanced and moving work, which encapsulated Blackmore’s continuing critique of our collective histories. Tobin’s contribution brought dignity and strength, reassuring the viewer—in case there was any doubt— that Australian history has been woven by many voices, many languages and many songs, and that our shared future will be the product of this diversity. — CKS

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This project was supported by Arts NSW’s NSW Artists’ Grant Scheme, a devolved funding program administered by the National Association for the Visual Arts on behalf of the NSW Government.

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↩↑→ Kate Blackmore & Jacinta Tobin video stills from Ngallowan (They Remain), 2014 dual channel HD video installation, duration 15 min 55 secs looped Images courtesy of the Artists

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Watch an excerpt from this work at: vimeo.com/98919866 Password: splitscreen

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Linda Brescia Linda Brescia is an artist who works across media, defying simple descriptions and vanquishing spatial limitations. Her work is performance-based, but also incorporates printmaking, sculpture, installation and photography. Living and working as an artist in Western Sydney, Brescia uses her practice to convey some of the challenges she faces in her multiple roles of artist, wife and mother.

Linda’s proposal for SafARI 2014 was unusual in its forthrightness and clarity of expression. These are also attributes of her work, which cuts straight to the viewer’s heart and directly engages their compassionate and empathetic responses. There is honesty in her work, which somehow, despite its use of roleplay, manages to discard artifice and superficiality.

One of the aspects of daily life that Brescia confronts is the invisibility of the middle-aged woman in Australian society. Her experience of life in the suburbs resonates with the personal histories and stories of many Australians. As a mother and wife, Brescia also reflects the extraordinary, unsung heroism of many Australian women, who quietly manage multiple responsibilities and dependents, while receiving little or no gratitude or accolades. This is a reality for countless women across the globe and, in her performances, Brescia is paying homage and offering a small recompense to the faceless, anonymous, unrecognised women of the world.

For the viewer, Brescia’s performances can be confronting. Her masks allow her to view the observer, to engage and speak with them. This blurring of the traditional lines of performance, a disintegration of the boundaries of social convention, allows Brescia not only to perform but also to observe. The artist has mentioned the component of her work that only she can see: the reactions and verbal interactions between herself and her viewers. Whether these will be integrated or recorded in some way in the future remains to be seen.

Brescia describes her performance as fitting somewhere between the works of Leigh Bowery and Julia Child. For SafARI LIVE, she inhabited two different female personas across three performances. One character was a domestic and quasi-religious icon, a housewife goddess wearing a veil made from Chux wipes and sometimes a crown of coloured dishwashing sponges. The other identity was a more classicised female figure: an archetypal, stylised nude, albeit more active and mobile than the objectified female nude that recurs throughout art history. Brescia’s reanimation of this figure is a wonderfully confronting act, and these performances reached deep into our cultural conditioning, posing some uncomfortable questions about what we think a woman should be, and how she should act in the public realm. — CKS

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↖ Linda Brescia Persona and Performance in Everyday Life, 2014 digital image Images courtesy of the Artist

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↑ Linda Brescia Persona and Performance in Everyday Life, 2014 performance

Watch an excerpt from this performance at: vimeo.com/98433170 Password: domesticgoddess

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Alexandra Clapham & Penelope Benton The SafARI LIVE program for 2014 included Alexandra Clapham and Penelope Benton’s Self-Portrait in a Room, 2014. Growing from previous explorations into the dynamics of meals and communal eating, this project extended the concept out into the spaces of the psyche, interpersonal relationships, domesticity and shared lives. Taking inspiration from the 1999 Spike Jonze film, Being John Malkovich, the artists constructed a double-decker set with two miniature floors, much like the 7 ½ floor in the film, which contained the artists themselves performing living self-portraits.

In between times, the structure occupied the gallery space, continuing to evoke the personalities of the two identities even in their absence.

The self-portraits took the form of tableaux vivant, and were conceived as a response to the Biennale of Sydney’s curatorial theme, ‘You imagine what you desire’. The tableau vivant (or ‘living picture’) was a fashionable form of artistic interpretation in the 19th century. It is a form that explores the conjunction of theatre and visual art: a stage set that contains statues that are in fact living people. The medium has its roots in pictorialism and early photography, and was also coopted by political groups such as the suffragettes. An attempt to transmit artistic masterpieces to a wider public in the days before radio or television, the silent, breathing sculptures also embodied allegorical or religious messages, cultural ideals and even erotic narratives in an era predating pornography.

For Benton and Clapham, the form presents an opportunity to examine identity, group dynamics and the friction between public and private selves. In this work, Penelope Benton sat in the upper ‘storey’, in a plush interior manifesting Baroque tendencies and queer aesthetics. The spectacle of this performance on opening night was enhanced by the large crowd that made the gallery temperature rise, resulting in delicate beads of sweat forming on Benton’s face, adding an endurance aspect to her stationary performance. The audience could smell her glass of dessert wine, and see the title of the book in her lap. Down below, Benton’s collaborator and real-life partner, Alexandra Clapham, sat with her back to the audience within a very different space. This lower floor reflected Clapham’s interests in architectural design, a material reduction back to raw and a playful approach to spatial dynamics. Clapham drank beer, wore headphones and watched films such as Fight Club (also 1999) and Back to the Future (1985). The internalised focus of both performers made a voyeur of the viewer, allowing us to examine the artists themselves in minute detail, as if they were indeed statues.

This work lifted two very real people into stylised, allegorical versions of themselves. They were almost like living avatars, taking their own personalities and habits to the extreme. The entire performance and installation suggested the ↗ Alexandra Clapham & Penelope Benton Self-Portrait in a Room, 2014 performance and mixed media installation, dimensions variable Images courtesy of Alex Davies

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inherent impossibility of ever truly knowing another person, no matter how close we are to another. One’s personality is a distinct sphere of reality, and arguably this separateness is rarely breached, even in the closeness of a relationship, be it artistic or personal. Another way to consider this work was as a celebration of difference; of the eternal mysteries contained in the spaces of the human psyche; of art’s provision of spaces where differences can coexist; and of the human connections that can join two such different creatures together in a partnership. — CKS

Watch an excerpt from this performance at: vimeo.com/98914556 Password: doublestorey

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Beth Dillon When fellow co-curator Christiane and I began reviewing the applications submitted to SafARI 2014, we were immediately struck by the prevalence of performance art in Sydney. In response to this we established SafARI LIVE, a second component of the SafARI festival, which saw seven Sydney-based performance artists staging live interventions throughout the exhibition period. One of those selected was Beth Dillon, a cross-disciplinary artist working in performance, video and participatory installation.

When we first invited Dillon to participate, she informed us that she was relocating to Berlin and would have to regretfully decline. Rather than see this as a hindrance, Christiane and I invited Dillon to develop an internationally-facilitated performance work. In an increasingly globalised world, it is crucial that curators and artists alike embrace the virtual world and find new modes of creative expression. For SafARI 2014, this resulted in Best Wishes.

Dillon is particularly interested in personal identities, place and the broader role of the artist. In Best Wishes, she scrutinised these ideas through a performance installation in two parts. The first was a performance for which Dillon hired an actress to perform a ‘virtual toast’ on the opening night of SafARI. Congratulating the artists and SafARI team on a job well done, the speech was delivered with a hint of self-depreciation and humour. Throughout her delivery, the actor emphasised Dillon’s burgeoning career, commenting:

Dillon skillfully probed this fragile and complex psyche, revealing a work that, like the theatre of ancient Greece, was equal parts comedy and tragedy.

Best Wishes loosely fitted within Dillon’s interest in collaboration. Although there were no active or identified collaborators, the existence of this work relies upon the presence of the remaining SafARI LIVE artists. This interplay between presence and absence was marked by the wilting flowers, which also acted as a selfendorsed monument or shrine to Dillon. Furthermore, Best Wishes demonstrated that one needn’t see their physical absence as a boundary in the realm of performance art.

Dillon’s work reminds us that an artist can demand our presence simply through the power of suggestion. — LN

Beth has assured me that if circumstances were different, if she wasn’t in the middle of an international residency program, funded by a very generous university scholarship, surrounded by an international community of artists and curators … if she could have been here tonight, in the flesh, standing before you, she would have presented you with a performance intervention so powerful, so unnerving and experimental that it would have stirred your hearts and minds for months to come.

Accompanying this performance was an installation of seven floral bouquets addressed to fellow SafARI LIVE artists, myself and Christiane. Attached to each, a thoughtfully written card echoing a similar sentiment to the ‘virtual toast’. Following opening night, these flowers were left to wilt and disintegrate over the three-week exhibition period, becoming a kind of memento mori.

The inevitability of death was an important element in this work, as was the reference to still-life painting. However, and perhaps most crucially, Best Wishes is best understood as a grand tribute to the clichéd egocentric artist—outwardly boastful and over confident, but in fact riddled with insecurities. Through satire and theatrics, ↗ Beth Dillon Best Wishes, 2014 performance and flowers, site specific installation

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Watch this performance at: vimeo.com/97789273 Password: wiltedflowers

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Kelly Doley Titled Cold Calling A Revolution (Sydney Residential A-Z), 2014, Kelly Doley’s work for SafARI LIVE involved the artist temporarily occupying a set within the gallery space: a desk with a lamp, landline phone, a residential phone book and a pot plant. From this position, Doley commenced telephoning every name alphabetically in the Sydney phone book, asking a set of questions about the idea of revolution. In this way the space was activated and the performance proceeded, with the responses of the telephone participants recorded on the walls around the desk, which had been covered in blackboard paint. Recording the responses created an ephemeral document, a map of where Sydneysiders stand on the concept of revolution.

The questions posed by the artist followed a script, which started with Doley stating her position as an artist, her location in Sydney, and her autonomy and independence from any commercial, media or political group. Doley told each participant that they were part of an artwork, and that their responses would become the actual content of the artwork. The questions that followed were: If there was a revolution (social or political), what would it look like? What would it be about?

What does a social or political revolution mean to you?

Do you think there is any possibility a revolution will occur in your lifetime?

The telephone participants’ responses ranged widely. Interestingly for us, but no doubt frustratingly for the artist, the majority of people did not answer their telephones at all: the call went straight to voicemail, or the respondent hung up during Doley’s introduction. This reflected the dominance of mobile phones and the increasing obsolescence of landline phones, but also indicated people’s suspicion when answering their phone: they are expecting bad news, or a sales person. It also highlighted the difficult and mundane nature of cold-calling work, an aspect that is rarely considered during our own conversations with call centre workers and telemarketers.

The responses successfully gathered by the artist were clearly affected by the current political climate and issues such as asylum-seeker rights. Although the majority of numbers dialled garnered no response, the people who were reached were willing to engage in conversation about the topic, proving that the idea of revolution lives on in the imaginations and minds of Sydneysiders. Their responses were enthusiastic, arguably misguided or uninformed, but passionately held and occasionally fiercely debated with the artist.

This work was an extension of Doley’s work, The Learning Centre (2010–2012), in which the artist occupied a similar set and invited the audience to teach her things.

1. C Kraus and S Loringer (eds), Hatred of Capitalism: A Semiotext(e) Reader, 1st edition, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, 2001.

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Doley’s performance work often revolves around exchange and engagement, seeking a public dialogue concerning cultural ideals, systems and histories. Her use in the SafARI LIVE performance of an outdated communication system—the landline phone and the residential phone book—was compounded and highlighted by the actual difficulty of engaging people through this medium. Visitors within the space during the performance mitigated this problem somewhat, by providing an extension to discussions around capitalist structures and the meaning of revolution. The concept of revolution itself could be considered old-fashioned, although this did not seem to be an opinion voiced by many respondents, who applied the idea to contemporary political and cultural issues without hesitation. Every Saturday at 4pm, Doley also gave readings from Hatred of Capitalism1, a text that contextualised her own approach and motivations behind the performance to some degree.

This was one of the most process-based works in the entire exhibition: it was conceived as an open dialogue, continued as a work in progress and closed without any permanent resolution. In these volatile political times, the work posed some vital questions, with fascinating results, and pointed out some of the cultural threads and technological currents in contemporary Australian society. It brought home the fact that artists and the greater Sydney public are engaged with thinking about political systems, and are happy to discuss these issues—if you can get them on the phone. — CKS

↑ Kelly Doley Cold Calling A Revolution (Sydney Residential A-Z), 2014 performance installation

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↑ Kelly Doley Phone calls logged by Kelly Doley during SafARI 2014 Courtesy of the Artist

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↗ Kelly Doley Cold Calling A Revolution (Sydney Residential A-Z), 2014 performance installation

Watch an excerpt from this performance at: vimeo.com/97795675 Password: whitepages

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OK YEAH COOL GREAT Multi-disciplinary collective OK YEAH COOL GREAT formed in 2010 due to a shared interest in minimalist aesthetics, fashion and design. Its two members, Kate Beckingham and Anna McMahon, are both accomplished solo practitioners who regard their collaborative practice as an opportunity to break away from the formal constraints of ‘Fine Art’.

For SafARI 2014 OK YEAH COOL GREAT presented Battle Royale, the collective’s first performance work to date. Employing their trademark wit and frivolity, Battle Royale saw Beckingham and McMahon undertake the ultimate Art History challenge, competing against each other in a test of memory. In each round, the two participants were given five minutes to study 25 images of works of art. Pitted against each other, the duo then had one minute to redraw each of these images from memory. Adjudicated by an independent judge, and a crowd of vocal onlookers, the performances were as unpredictable as they were lighthearted and astute.

After four heated rounds, McMahon came out in first place.

LN: I’m interested in the process of collaboration. OK YEAH COOL GREAT (OYCG) is very different from your own individual practices.

OYCG: The work we create as OK YEAH COOL GREAT is always about what it means to work in collaboration. Battle Royale developed very slowly, as it was our first time presenting a performance and also because we discussed every single decision. We had endless conversations standing in Bunnings and Ikea about how the work should look and what it should be about. This is how we always operate—getting together and talking things out. It's often more difficult than it seems because, like most artists, we can both be super strong willed.

LN: How did Battle Royale develop?

OYCG: Battle Royale actually came out of a conversation we had about competition between emerging artists. The work aimed to look at this competition, in a way that was lighthearted but that also produced an art object.

rarely discussed. The performance was sort of a way of making light of this, but also drawing on the negative aspects of our industry too. At art school we’re first introduced to competition and criticism in a very harsh way. We all make shitty work and we all fail at being an artist probably more often then we’d care to admit, so it is perhaps about these failings too.

LN: When I saw the First Round of Battle Royale, I was surprised by your costumes. Can you tell me about those?

OYCG: The padded suits occupied this weird dream space that was halfway between the past and the future, but not necessarily the present. The suits were both modernist and futuristic, and we thought this complemented that 'mash up' of the slideshow images. Our minds had to remember all these works from all these times periods, so it was appropriate that the suits sat somewhere in this imaginary time travel as well. It was also fitting as we were both going in to battle, and so having a bit of extra padding was relevant.

LN: I like the word ‘battle’—it infers a sense of spectacle and grandeur.

The onlookers watching the performance were really invested, which made for a lively performance. As a performer, how did you find this interaction?

OYCG: People became strangely attached to either one of us during the performance, and in a way took it personally if the judge went against what they thought was the better drawing. Surprisingly, the drawings that were considered to be 'failures' actually became most interesting, as they offered a fascinating insight into what was remembered, if not the correct image. These supposed failures allowed for conversation and interaction with the audience around themes of perception, time and memory.

— OK YEAH COOL GREAT in conversation with LN

LN: The notion of failure is a very popular subject in contemporary art, both in Australia and internationally. I really got the sense that Battle Royale was mocking the construct of art schools, or perhaps Art History as a whole. It seemed to highlight the futility of art and the likelihood of failing as an artist. Is that the sentiment you were trying to capture?

OYCG: We didn’t approach this work with any form of political agenda—however, evidently we can see how this interpretation could come out of the performance. We were mainly interested in the idea of competition, and how competition generally is something that is always present in the art community but

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↑ OK YEAH COOL GREAT Sketches from Battle Royale Images courtesy the Artists

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↗ OK YEAH COOL GREAT Battle Royale, 2014 performance

Watch an excerpt from this performance at: vimeo.com/97799441 Password: ultimatebattle

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ALASKA Projects Level 2, Kings Cross Carpark 9A Elizabeth Bay Rd Elizabeth Bay, NSW 2011 www.alaskaprojects.com ALASKA Projects is a multidisciplinary art space located in the basement of the Kings Cross Car Park. Since opening in October 2011, the space has held over 50 exhibition from over 250 artists as well as a dedicated, film, dance, performance and music program.

ALASKA is defined by a diverse offering of works and is solely focused on providing artists a space for exhibition and experimentation.

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Conductors Projects

St James & Museum Stations Sydney, NSW 2000 www.conductorsproject.com Conductors Project is a public art initiative utilising two of Sydney’s busiest train stations. By transforming the disused display cabinets of St James and Museum into exhibition space, the daily commute of approx. 5800 people becomes a cultural experience.

Committed to exhibiting the work of both emerging and established artists, Conductors Project connects artists to new audiences and enriches the lives of Sydney’s commuters.

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The Corner Cooperative

116 Abercrombie Street, Chippendale, NSW 2008 www.thecornercooperative.com www.facebook.com/ CornerCooperative @thecornercooperative The Corner Cooperative is an Artist Run Initiative that grew from the interchangeability between art and design. Established by design studio Dear Henri in 2012, The Corner Cooperative offers a physical exhibition space that is accessible to both emerging and established Australian artists, as well as diverse audiences. Providing a platform for artists and designers to transcend disciplinary boundaries, we facilitate curated exhibition and residency programs that span across two spaces – the main gallery and the renovated garage space.

The Corner Cooperative aims to sustain a dialogue between traditional and contemporary mediums, through the integration of sound, music, installation, photography, video, performance, painting, sculpture and mixed media works. We welcome the use of the space for both traditional and experimental practices.

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The Cross Art Projects

8 Llankelly Place Kings Cross, NSW 2011 www.crossart.com.au The Cross Art Projects foregrounds contemporary work and curatorial projects that reflect the multiple relationships between art and life, art and the public sphere and explores the boundaries of this context. We are attentive to the local without sacrificing the scope of indigenous and international views. Cross Art enhances its projects with conversations, walks and events on contemporary art, urban planning, architecture and heritage.

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DNA Projects | Contemporary Art

www.dnaprojects.com.au dna_projects@me.com DNA Projects is a contemporary art presenter, consultancy and curatorial project, specialising in contemporary art from Austronesia, Oceania, Africa and Latin America, with a focus on emerging artists and experimental projects. Until May 2014 we operated from a 'bricks-and-mortar' space in Chippendale, and mounted 20 diverse projects there, including experimental performance and digital works, painting, photomedia, installation and works on paper. Around half of these projects involved guest curators and artist/ curators, and included work from Australia, Iran, France, Indonesia and North Asia. An archive can be found here: www.dnaprojects. com.au/dna/future_past.html Future projects will be mounted in a range of unusual spaces around Sydney and further afield. DNA projects' Director David Corbet is currently developing a major international exhibition series, titled 'SOUTH', with the first instalment opening at Hazelhurst Regional Gallery & Arts Centre (Sydney) on 8 August and running until 5 October 2014. SOUTH features 14 artists from Australia, Mexico and South Africa: dnaprojects.com.au/dna/south_3. html

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In addition to presenting new contemporary art, we advise on collecting, commissioning, curating, presentation, exhibition identity and publications design. DNA projects does not represent individual artists, however we have direct links with many featured artists and their galleries worldwide.

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Wellington St Projects

19-25 Wellington St Chippendale, NSW 2008 www.wellingtonstprojects.com Wellington St Projects is an Artist Run Initiative founded by artists Belem Lett and Katherine Brickman in 2013. Located on the ground floor in a warehouse of shared studio spaces, Wellington St Projects fosters creative exchange between artists, the community and a national audience.

Wellington St Projects will house a series of exhibitions and projects spread throughout the year.

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SafORUM If you look for traces of Inhibodress, arguably Australia’s earliest Artist Run Initiative, you’ll find desolate shops under a concrete railway pass. Instead of artists, you’ll meet a range of homeless or otherwise disenfranchised men and women.

The short-lived but influential 1970s gallery now resides purely inside catalogues, garages and memories.

In the undergrowth surrounding our major institutions, Australia’s art scene operates as an ecosystem of temporary spaces, small organisations and social networks. Yet it’s easy for the topsoil to desiccate, a victim of Australia’s recurrent cultural amnesia. Further, amidst the constant sociopathy around funding, we risk forgetting why artists, curators and fellow art workers initiate and sustain their independent ventures.

For this reason we hosted SafORUM to recall and better understand the social, political, economic and cultural landscapes that ARIs emerge from and operate within. It allowed us to query the basic tenets of ARIs in Australia and the region.

How do they negotiate the various boundaries of resistance? Do they necessarily operate in opposition to the mainstream? Do they really provide an alternative, or is this a delusion?

SafORUM brought together key individuals who have shaped the ARI scene locally and in the region. Within the intimate Kudos Gallery in Paddington, a venue generously provided by Arc @ COFA, the discussion unfolded around three strands: the ‘contemporary scenario’, ‘alternative models’ and ‘past and future’.

Mike Parr described the art scene of 40 years ago and the impetus behind co-founding Inhibodress in Sydney’s Woolloomooloo. Inhibodress emerged at a time when landscape painting was the accepted status quo and was considered the marker of Australia’s cultural sophistication. The Inhibodress initiative confronted this painterly tradition and injected moving image, performance and conceptual art.

This revolt forged a new path and is a pivotal moment for understanding the development of performance as a visual arts practice in Australia today. Parr's visceral image of the dead horse’s head being dragged along the beach coaxing worms to surface will remain with those of us who experienced it.

Reza Afisina from Jakarta’s ruangrupa offered a counterpoint to such democratic forms of resistance. This ARI started in a vacuum outside the infrastructure of commercial galleries and museums in Indonesia. Off the back of the Suharto presidency, ruangrupa interrogated the construction of cities and the development of a cultural practice destined to tell its story to future generations. Afisina clearly demonstrated that the political and social territory from which ruangrupa emerged remains complex and volatile. This comparison provided a weighty anchor to further contemplate the role and motivations for ARIs everywhere and their inherent connection to society.

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Many Australian ARIs sprang from a pure desire to create opportunities, expand horizons and contribute to the cultural landscape. SafARI’s birth in 2004 was certainly part of this fabric, as opposed to the political necessity of social expression.

In this spirit Lisa Havilah and Glenn Barkley shared their experience of setting up Project Contemporary Art in Wollongong in 1995, as did Caleb Kelly who helped establish PELT to highlight emergent sound and media art practices.

Real estate will always be an issue for ARIs in Australian cities, as noted

by Louise Bennett from Accidentally Annie Street in Brisbane, Brigid Noone from Fontanelle in Adelaide and Kate Beckingham from Sydney’s MOP. Lisa Radford from Melbourne’s TCB art inc. offered a wonderful resistance model in which the absence of money has sparked necessary inventiveness. Macushla Robinson added a refreshing ‘unreal estate’ alternative through her experience with Runway journal, which has recently transitioned from hard copy to completely digital. The Internet disintegrates geographical boundaries whilst posing new questions about the archive, documentation and remnants.

Will French spoke further about challenges faced by Firstdraft, Australia’s longest running ARI. However, Nick Spratt from RM in Auckland brought us back to what drives us all. Yes, money makes our heads spin and we are always looking at inventive ways to do the best with what we've got.

But if we spend too much time focused on that, we risk compromising the very things that compelled us in the first place – the art and the people that make it.

— Lisa Corsi and Julian Day

SafORUM was moderated by Julian Day and Amy Griffiths and organised by Julian Day, Dara Gill, Tom Polo and Lisa Corsi with input from Leahlani Johnson and David Capra.

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L-R: Reza Afisina, Julian Day, Nick Spratt, Lisa Radford, Mike Parr, Will French, Glenn Barkley and Kate Beckingham during SafORUM

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SafORUM 115

SafARI 2014 Opening Night

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Opening Night 117

SafARI 2014 Team

Christiane Keys-Statham Co-curator

Liz Nowell Co-curator

Carrie Mulford Exhibition Coordinator

Christiane Keys-Statham is a freelance curator, writer, scuba diver and photographer. She has lived and worked in Germany, the Netherlands, Mongolia, Thailand and the UK, with various groups and institutions. These include London publishing house Thames & Hudson, the Arts Council of Mongolia in Ulaanbaatar, small galleries in Europe, and performance art events and public art installations across the UK and Wales.

She completed her Bachelor of Art Theory at COFA and the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten in Utrecht, the Netherlands, graduating in 2000. She eventually returned to COFA to complete a Master of Art Administration in 2013. She has curated gallery exhibitions of works on paper, digital art and contemporary photography, and was co-curator of SafARI 2014.

Liz Nowell is an independent Sydney-based curator, writer and project manager. She has worked for a diverse range of arts organisations including Tandanya, Country Arts SA, College of Fine Arts and most recently Hazelhurst Regional Gallery & Arts Centre, where she was Curator and Exhibition Coordinator from 2011 – 2013. Her curatorial projects are largely focused on emerging, Indigenous and cross-cultural practice and include Putsch: proppaNOW (2010), Home & Hosed (2013), Ruark Lewis Survey: 1982 – 2012 (co-curator, 2012) and People of Substance (2011). In 2013 she was the recipient of both an Early Career Residency and New Work grant from the Australia Council for the Arts. Liz has contributed to publications such as Art & Australia and Art Monthly and is currently working on several independent curatorial projects in both Sydney and abroad.

Carrie Mulford is an arts administrator with experience working for both commercial and noncommercial organisations. She has been employed at Object: Australian Design Centre since 2012 and recently co-curated New Weave: Contemporary Approaches to the Traditions of Weaving at Object Gallery. She also worked in commercial galleries for three years, progressing to Curator and Senior Art Consultant. Carrie has held many volunteer positions, including with the 18th Biennale of Sydney and two National Institute for Experimental Arts projects. In 2011, Carrie acted as a research and writing assistant to Hetti Perkins on her City of Sydney-commissioned report, Eora Journey: International Review of Contemporary Interpretation Practice.

Carrie has received a Bachelor of Arts/Bachelor of Fine Arts (2007) and a Master of Arts Administration (2012) from COFA, UNSW.

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Alessandra Orsi Marketing Manager

Elliott Bryce Foulkes Designer

Maria Smit Designer

Alessandra Orsi is a freelance arts marketer and event manager.

Originally from Milan, she completed a Bachelor of Literature and Philosophy at Università degli Studi di Milano, and relocated to Australia three years ago. She spent a year in Perth, immersing herself in the local art scene.

Among other roles, she collaborated with the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA) and assisted in the organisation of the Artillery Activist Arts Festival, which is presented by Amnesty International.

She moved to Sydney in 2012 and recently completed her Master of Art Administration at COFA. She was the SafARI Marketing Manager, and currently works at Merrigong Theatre Company as Assistant to the Artistic Director.

Elliott Bryce Foulkes is an art director, graphic designer and artist based in Sydney. He is an Associate at Leuver Design, current co-director at Firstdraft, and Art Director of Das Superpaper and Manuscript. His commercial work across identity, editorial and publication design is complimented by an art practice that focuses on typography, language and the rearticulation of graphic forms and spaces. His work has has been exhibited at Kudos Gallery, William Wright Artists Projects, Saatchi and Saatchi Gallery Sydney, and in solo exhibitions at Alaska Projects and Gallery PomPom.

Maria Smit is a Sydney based designer working primarily within the fields of graphics, art direction and textiles. She holds a bachelors degree in Design from COFA, UNSW which was further enriched by study at the Willem De Kooning Academie in the Netherlands.

She has a concentrated interest in the visual arts and cultural sector, and has worked with a range of both emerging and established institutions and practitioners including the Biennale of Sydney, Firstdraft, Object Gallery, Critical Animals and AFAAAR. Her work is informed by a keen interest in experimental print techniques, textile design and patterning. She currently works as a designer at Boccalatte.

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SafARI 2014 Artists

ACAB Collective

Madison Bycroft

James Carey

Ben Johanson b 1988, lives and works in Melbourne

b 1987, lives and works in New York

b. 1977, lives and works in Melbourne

Zinzi Kennedy b 1986, lives and works in Melbourne

Madison Bycroft is an artist from Adelaide, SA, who is currently living in Brooklyn, NY. She completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts with first class Honours at the University of South Australia in 2012. She has exhibited in group and solo shows in public, commercial and artist-run galleries, as well as experimenting with non-traditional sites. She has a multimedia practice, including video, sculpture, ceramics and performance. Currently, Madison is exploring empathy, and tries to encourage a reconnection with a wider multiplicity of ‘Persons’.

Videos that document performance processes in unlearning the self and engaging with the other, or present as social experiments into non-normalised modes of being, form a major component of this exploration.

Madison Bycroft is the recipient of the prestigious 2014 Samstag Scholarship. The Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarships are awarded for one year of study overseas in the visual arts. She has also been selected to exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art as part of Primavera 2014: Young Australian Artists.

James Carey’s artistic practice involves researching sites in transition, and using immediate [im] material, immersive and inhabitable situations are constructed.

Preconceived notions of familiarity are ruptured in order to create new proposals for interiorities.

Carey’s methodology is to work site responsively, allowing particular qualities and conditions to reveal themselves, which have potential for specific outcomes. Sites are inhabited through a slow material engagement, and then reconstructed through occupation, maintenance and certain recognisable activities. It is a material, temporal and spatial practice, and is also connected to the exploratory process of drawing.

Melbourne-based Zinzi Kennedy and Ben Johanson make up ACAB Collective. Formed after they graduated from Fine Art (Honours) at Monash University, the collective has been exhibiting since 2012, primarily producing largescale multimedia installations that reinvent locally sourced materials using accumulation, manipulation and transformation. In 2012 ACAB exhibited works at Platform, VIC; NG Gallery, NSW; exURBAN screen festival, VIC; and Chippendale Beams Festival, NSW, and was awarded the Substation Contemporary Art Prize People’s Choice Award. In 2013 ACAB presented new work for Five Walls, VIC and New Low, VIC, and was part of Modern Ruin, curated by Aaron Martin and Michael Brennan at The Substation, VIC.

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Benjamin Forster

Patrick Francis

Emma Hamilton

b 1985, lives and works Sydney

b 1991, lives and works in Melbourne

b 1987, lives and works in Melbourne

Benjamin Forster is . ( Primavera, MCA 12 ) sure . ( NEW13, ACCA 13 ) was perhaps. ( coediting with rc, un magazine, 14 ) o I am . ( , , Firstdraft, 13 ) ACT, WA, NSW based . ( Bachelor of Visual Arts Honours, ANU, 08 ) or (Kynic, CCAS, 13) he will . ( Residencies: MCA 13, SymbioticA 09, PICA 09, CIA 12-13, FAC 11, Helsinki 14, etc ) no. I assure you. you may ( My Brain Is in My Inkstand, Cranbrook Art Museum, 13 ) be unsure. ( SafARI, around SYD, 14 ) of acronym . of number .

Patrick Francis’s paintings explore aspects of his personal experience, resulting in distilled images that represent various portraits and still-life installations. Using acrylic on paper as his chosen medium, Francis references imagery from art history and visual culture.

However his innovation is the stripping back of these well-worn images, reducing them to their basic visual elements, flattening form and line into sweeping bright blocks of colour.

Francis is a Melbourne-based artist who has been working with Arts Project Australia since 2009.

His work received the Art & Australia/Credit Suisse Private Banking Contemporary Art Award in 2012, and has been shown in exhibitions nationally including at the National Gallery of Victoria, Arts Project Australia, Sheffer Gallery, Tanks Art Centre and at the 2012 Melbourne Art Fair.

Emma Hamilton has exhibited her work, which explores our perception of landscape, across Melbourne, regional Victoria, interstate, and in Nantes (France).

In 2013 she completed her Masters of Fine Art by Research at the Victorian College of the Arts.

Awarded second place at the inaugural Linden Art Prize in early 2014, she is a studio resident at Linden Centre for Contemporary Art for 12 months. In 2014, Hamilton will take up a three-month residency at the Cité International des Arts, Paris, awarded by the Australia Council.

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SafARI 2014 Artists Dale Harding

Nikki Lam

b 1982, lives and works in Brisbane

b 1988, lives and works in Melbourne

Dale Harding was born in 1982 in Moranbah, a descendent of the Bidjara, Ghungalu and Garingbal peoples of Central QLD. Harding has gained recognition for works that explore the untold histories of his communities. Recently Harding has been investigating the social and political realities experienced by members of his family who lived under government control in Queensland.

Harding’s first solo exhibition, Colour by Number, was curated

by Tony Albert at Brisbane’s Metro Arts in 2012. He has participated in a number of group exhibitions, including string theory: Focus on Contemporary Australian Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2013); My Country, I Still Call Australia Home: Contemporary Art from Black Australia, Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art (2013).

Focusing on self, memory and space, Nikki Lam's practice examines the complexity of identity and belonging. Falling Leaf Returns to its Roots, (2013)—a Chinese analogy for the ecology of life, nature and belonging—is a video reinterpretation of the iconic Australian image Sunbaker (1937). The work questions the enduring process of becoming Australian, the limits and absurdity this process entails, as well as the never-ending cycle of our quest to belong.

Nikki is the Visual Arts Editor at Peril Magazine and the Curator at The Curious Other, a hybrid project on contemporary art and culture.

Messih|Bisshop

Messih|Bisshop met while studying fine art at COFA in Sydney, and were drawn together by a shared interest in exploring subtle materiality, process, and the ways in which we are both connected to and abstracted from nature. An old chaos of the sun is their first collaboration.

Messih b 1989, lives and works in Sydney Messih is a visual artist based in Sydney, Australia. Recent exhibitions include A matter of time, Firstdraft (solo), 2014; Sometimes it’s hard to tell who is moving, MOP Projects (solo), 2013; Mono No Aware, curated by SuperKaleidoscope at Linden Centre for Contemporary Art, 2013; Home and Hosed, Hazelhurst Regional Gallery & Arts Centre, 2011; and The Big Picture, Stills Gallery, 2013. Messih has undertaken artist residency programs at NES, Skagaströnd, Iceland in 2012, and at The Green House, Fowlers Gap, Broken Hill in 2011. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (First Class Honours) from the College of Fine Arts, UNSW (2013) and has recently been awarded an ArtStart Grant from the Australia Council.

Laura Moore

Liam O’Brien

Sam Songailo

b 1987, lives and works in Sydney

b 1987, lives and works in Brisbane

b 1979, lives and works in Melbourne

Laura Moore is an emerging artist based in Sydney. Currently studying photomedia at Sydney College of the Arts, she is also a regular exhibitor and won the 2012 Digital Portraiture Award with her series, Hereinbefore (2012). Moore’s work examines the nature of photography itself, experimenting with the capacity of the photographic portrait to represent complex meanings about identity and human relationships. Often inspired and informed by her everyday life, observations and memory, Moore's work can hold very personal content. But ultimately it expands beyond its autobiographical nature by actively inviting speculation and projection.

With a particular interest in the ambiguity of personal freedom and the construction of individuality, Liam O’Brien utilises personal experience, intuition and theoretical texts to produce video and performance works that explore the human condition under advanced capitalism.

Graduating from the Queensland College of Art (Griffith University) with First Class Honours in 2010, Liam O’Brien has spent the last three years developing his practice in a number of local and interstate exhibitions. Over the last 12 months, he has completed a commission for Artbank’s Performutations video series; undertaken a residency at 501 Artspace in Chongqing, China; been selected for Boxcopy ARI’s Emerging Artist Program; and been named a recipient of the Art & Australia/ Credit Suisse Private Banking Contemporary Art Award.

Sam Songailo is a painter and installation artist. Working across a range of media, including installation, sound and video, his practice centres on exploring our ongoing categorisation of and adaptation to the physical space around us.

Songailo studied Visual Communication at the University of South Australia, graduating in 1999 with a graphic design major. Consequently his practice has skirted the boundaries of graphic design and fine art. Making the transition to fine art around 2007, he is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, most notably the South Australian Critics Circle Emerging Artist of the Year award (2010) and the Adelaide Fringe Festival award for Best Visual Art (2012).

He has exhibited at artist-run and commercial galleries in Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne.

Ally Bisshop b 1976, lives and works in Berlin Ally Bisshop is an artist and researcher living in Berlin. She studied Microbiology at UQ, Sculpture and Installation at COFA, UNSW and undertook a one-year exchange studying with the artist Olafur Eliasson at the Institut fur Raumexperimente, Berlin. She is currently enrolled in a PhD through the National Institute of Experimental Arts, UNSW.

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SafARI 2014 Artists

SafARI LIVE 2014 Artists

Leyla Stevens

Paul Williams & Christopher Dolman

b 1982, lives and works in Sydney

Paul Williams, b 1977, lives and works in Sydney

Leyla Stevens’ current practice involves photographic and videobased media, and explores the relationship between ritual, place and belonging and the ways in which the body is culturally scripted. Her work primarily focuses on the codified communication of gestures, and how these actions migrate and translate through different cultural subjects. A large part of her practice is informed by her Australian–Indonesian heritage, and is situated within a cross-cultural discourse.

In 2011 she received her Masters of Fine Art degree from Sydney College of the Arts, and she has been exhibiting in Australia and internationally since 2008. In 2013 she was awarded an ArtStart grant from the Australia Council, and completed a three-month residency at Cemeti Art House in Jogjakarta as part of the gallery’s Hotwave program.

Paul Williams completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (First Class Honours) at the College of Fine Arts, UNSW in 2007 and was awarded the prestigious University Medal, before completing a Master of Fine Arts there in 2011. He recently staged solo exhibitions at Gallery 9, as well as at artist-run spaces MOP Projects, Firstdraft and Kudos Gallery, and at the Ray Hughes Gallery and Bathurst Regional Art Gallery. He has been in curated shows across Sydney.

Williams has undertaken residencies at Hill End, ILIRI Fowlers Gap Research Station, The Bundanon Tust, BigCi, Ceramic Design Studio (Sydney Institute) and the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, and was a co-director of Firstdraft for 2012–13. Several of his works are in Artbank’s collection and in private collections in Australia and the US.

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Frances Barrett

Kate Blackmore

Linda Brescia

Christopher Dolman, b 1977, lives and works in Sydney

b 1983, lives and works in Sydney

b 1982, lives and works in Sydney

b 1962, lives and works in Sydney

Drawing on the histories of geometric abstraction, pop and postpunk, Dolman's cross-disciplinary practice attempts to blend the sincerity of modernism with an irreverent and self-deprecating humour. Exploring the futurities of the past and the derivative nature of novelty, his work mixes high- and low-brow materials with both ad hoc and traditional artistic methods to upend notions of the mistake as a failure, and engage themes of loss and imperfection.

Dolman graduated from the VCA, University of Melbourne with First Class Honours in 2010. His awards include VCA Wallara Travelling Scholarship (2009), Australia Council New Work (2011) and ArtStart (2013). He has had residencies at Bundanon Trust and BigCi, both in NSW. His recent solo shows include Trompe L'ol, Firstdraft, NSW; Sicks'&Sevens, West Space, VIC; Arrange Rearrange Deranged, MARS, VIC.

Frances Barrett is a Sydney-based artist whose practice focuses on performance. She is a member of the Brown Council collective, who in 2014 are the Museum of Contemporary Art's Jackson Bella Room commissioned artists.

Between 2009 and 2013 she was Co-Director of Serial Space, and in 2012 curated Time Machine, a festival of experimental timebased art. In 2013 Frances undertook an Australia Council studio residency in Liverpool (UK) and in 2014 will present new work as part of Performance Space, Tiny Stadiums and Restaging Restaging programs. She is currently Curator of Contemporary Performance at Campbelltown Arts Centre.

Kate Blackmore is a Sydney-based artist who works across video, installation and performance.

Blackmore's approach to art is interdisciplinary, with collaborative and curatorial projects playing a central role in her praxis. She is a founding member of artist-collaboration Brown Council (with Kelly Doley, Frances Barrett and Diana Smith), whose live performances and video works have been shown in a range of Australian and international contexts. Between 2009 and 2013 Blackmore was a Co-Director of Serial Space, a curatorial collective made up of five artists dedicated to providing a platform for the development and presentation of time-based art practice in Sydney. In 2013 Blackmore undertook an Australia Council studio residency in Barcelona and presented two new major works: Top Down, ALASKA Projects, Sydney; and Box Set (in collaboration with Frances Barrett), as part of Emma Ramsay and Alex White's curatorial project, 'Tele visions', at Performance Space, Sydney.

Linda Brescia’s work investigates the complex experiences of everyday life through painting, photography and performance.

Using personas, she creates characters that are re-introduced and performed in domestic and social environments.

Linda received her Advanced Diploma Fine Arts from Western Sydney Institute of TAFE, Nepean in 2007, and she also works within the community as an arts facilitator. She has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions since 2009, including Exit Pursued by a Bear, Sheffer Gallery (2013); Life and Death, MOP (2012); Licorice Allsorts (curated by Peter Fay), King Street Gallery on William (2009); and Welcome to the Death Show, Parramatta Artist Studios (2009).

Linda has been awarded the Fishers Ghost Art Award Sculpture Prize in 2011 and 2009, an Australia Council ArtStart grant in 2010, and she is currently a resident at Parramatta Artists Studios. Her work has been collected by Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Artcell Collection Management and private collectors.

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SafARI LIVE 2014 Artists

Alexandra Clapham & Penelope Benton

Beth Dillon

Kelly Doley

Alexandra Clapham, b 1984, lives and works in Sydney Penelope Benton, b 1976, lives and works in Sydney

b 1987, lives and works in Berlin

b 1984, lives and works in Sydney

Alexandra Clapham & Penelope Benton are emerging artists working across sculpture, performance and installation. Collaborating since early 2011, their practice considers tools employed by architecture and spatial design in perishable and ephemeral media. The focus of their work is on people and space, spectacle, the domestic, modes of exchange and the (un)limits of the imagination.

Alexandra is a recent graduate of the College of Fine Arts, UNSW. She is the Visual Arts Coordinator at 107 Projects, Redfern and recently completed a three-year term as Gallery Coordinator at Kudos Gallery, and a two-year directorship at Firstdraft. Penelope is a current MFA candidate at COFA—she has a BA Visual Arts from the University of Newcastle, MArtAdmin from COFA UNSW, and a Grad Dip in Arts Mgmt from UTS. She completed a two-year directorship at Firstdraft Gallery in 2008, and was one of the co-founders of The Red Rattler Theatre. Alexandra and Penelope were also joint Artistic Directors of Art Month Sydney 2013.

Beth Dillon’s solo and collaborative work has been shown in Australia and internationally at a range of experimental art festivals, independent galleries and contemporary art institutions.

Dillon has undertaken artist residencies in Iceland, China, Germany and regional Australia.

In 2013, she was awarded a Bachelor of Fine Arts with First Class Honours and the University Medal for Sculpture, Performance and Installation from the College of Fine Arts (COFA), Sydney. In 2014 Dillon is undertaking independent research in Europe using funding from the Georgina and Max Melville Memorial Travelling Scholarship (COFA).

Kelly Doley takes a socially engaged, thematic and interdisciplinary approach to her practice.

Since 2008 she has been working on participatory, curatorial and publishing projects. She holds a Master of Fine Arts from Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney (2011), as well as a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Hons) from COFA, UNSW (2006). Doley has also worked collaboratively with artist collective Brown Council since 2007. She has exhibited and presented solo and collaboratively in a range of contexts and spaces nationally and internationally, including at International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York; Campbelltown Arts Centre; Artspace, Sydney; MCA, Sydney; Westspace, Melbourne; Fremantle Arts Centre, WA; and National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul. In 2012 she was the recipient of the Redlands Emerging Artist Award, and in 2011 Brown Council received the QANTAS Encouragement of Contemporary Art Award.

126 Artists

OK YEAH COOL GREAT

Kate Beckingham, b 1985, lives and works in Sydney Anna McMahon, b 1986, lives and works in Sydney Kate Beckingham and Anna McMahon met in 2010 during their Honours year at Sydney College of the Arts. Drawn together by their love of clean lines and simple aesthetics, Beckingham and McMahon formed OK YEAH COOL GREAT. Collectively they are interested in making art grounded in a common aesthetic understanding, rather than a shared conceptualism. They endeavour to explore through their collaboration what it means to produce artworks as a duo. Concerned with elements drawn from both art history and theory, OK YEAH COOL GREAT approaches their subjects with both light-hearted and sober wit.

Biographies 127

Works

ACAB Collective things we need, 2014 mixed media, site specific installation Bisshop | Messih An old chaos of the sun, 2014 performance, publication and distributed structures and interventions Madison Bycroft Blobjection, 2013 video, duration 28 secs looped Eulogy, 2014 video feat. Neighkid Horse, earthenware, dimensions variable Unfolded Beneath, 2014 video, duration 16 min looped James Carey 89964 seconds [paces] of drawing [walking], 2014 panel 1, pencil on linen, 150 x 120cm panel 2, pencil on canvas, 90 x 90cm panel 3, pencil on linen, 150 x 120cm excuse me mate, I don't want to put any pressure on you, but are you leaving soon? no. sorry mate. we just ordered another beer, 2014, found object and enamel paint, dimensions variable the lightness of legitimate liveability [o captain, my captain], 2014 found object and enamel paint, dimensions variable she hastily enters on business the flower crown and exits with golden coat and yellow boots [killer bees], 2014 dead bees, dimensions variable

saying goodbye to a friend when you know it could be the last time you see him, 2014 dust, detritus, glue and varnish on 100% cotton rag paper, 56 x 76cm Benjamin Forster _______________, 2014 custom electronics and lcd screens, dimensions variable Patrick Francis Geisha, 2010 acrylic on paper, image size 50 x 35cm Not titled, 2011 acrylic on paper, image size 56 x 38cm Not titled (abstracted figure), 2013 acrylic on paper, image size 70 x 50cm

Acknowledgements

Horizon Level, 2014 glass, salt, rubber stoppers and liquid, 152 x 2 x 2cm

Frances Barrett Occupation, 2014 performance

Liz Nowell would like to thank the following:

Christiane Keys-Statham would like to thank the following:

Dale Harding punishment tree: Queensland crucifix, 2014 steel, wax, acrylic and online video, 70 x 160 x 160cm overall

Kate Blackmore & Jacinta Tobin Ngallowan (They Remain), 2014 dual channel HD video installation, duration 15 min 55 secs looped edition of 3

Firstly, and most importantly, I’d like to thank my amazing friend and co-curator Christiane KeysStatham for her tireless efforts in helping make SafARI 2014 the success that it was (yay, we did it!). Levelheaded, endlessly supportive and always good fun, Chris is an inspirational colleague and friend. We were fortunate enough to have the most incredible team supporting us; to Carrie Mulford, Alessandra Orsi, Elliot Bryce-Foulkes and Maria Smit a million thanks! I am so lucky to have met and worked with such an awesome bunch of people.

To all the artists who participated in SafARI 2014: thank you for your vision, your creativity and your friendship - you inspire me.

To the ever-accommodating venues, we are so grateful for your trust, generosity and flexibility.

Thanks to the many people who assisted with SafARI’s public programs, including Gilbert Grace and Linda Brescia. Thanks must also go to the SafARI Board and in particular, Lisa Corsi and Xavier Modoux who kindly volunteer their time day in, day out. I’d also like to thank Board members Tom Polo, Julian Day, David Capra and Leahlani Johnson, as well as Dara Gill, who pulled together the wonderful SafORUM event.

To the contributing tech team, specifically Arnel Rodriguez, Lara Merrington and Dom Kirkwood, I say thank you. Finally, I'd like to extend heartfelt gratitude to my partner, family and friends who volunteered their time, patience, support and cuddles throughout this whole journey. I could not have done any of this without you xx

SafARI 2014 was a colossal undertaking and could not have been realised at all without the efforts of a number of wonderful people.

The proposals of the artists were our inspiration, and my sincere thanks goes out to all of the SafARI 2014 and SafARI LIVE artists for their wonderful work and for giving us the opportunity to present it. You were the spirit of this exhibition and its reason for being. Thank you also to the SafARI Board and to Lisa Corsi, Nina Stromqvist and Xavier Modoux for their guidance. The Board members who gave their time to create the SafORUM event did an excellent job and the great success of that symposium is to their credit.

My heartfelt admiration and gratitude to our amazing core team: Carrie, Alessandra, Elliot and Maria.

Thank you! I’m also extremely grateful to all of our venues, to the artists, designers and curators who with their vibrant gallery spaces make the Sydney art scene so diverse and lively, despite all the difficulties and obstacles.

To my family and my friends, my love and eternal thanks for supporting me through this project and for keeping the home fires burning. Last but definitely not least, to the amazing Liz Nowell: the success of this exhibition is a tribute to your energy, vivacity and resolve. You’re a marvel and an inspiration, and I’ll always be proud of what we achieved together x

Nikki Lam Falling Leaf Returns to its Roots, 2013 high definition video, duration 4 min 39 secs edition v of 5 Laura Moore Proof #1 - #7, 2007 – 2013 from the series ‘From Plato’s Cave’ pigment print, 80 x 120cm each

Not titled (After Mona Lisa by Leonardo DaVinci), 2011 acrylic on paper, image size 70 x 50cm

Liam O’Brien The Glaze, 2013 high definition single channel video, duration 18 min 27 secs edition of 5

Not titled (After Sidney Nolan), 2012 acrylic on paper, image size 70 x 50cm

Sam Songailo Untitled, 2014 mixed media, site specific installation

Not titled (After Vermeer Girl with a Pearl Earring), 2011 acrylic on paper, image size 56 x 38cm Not titled (Bette Davis as Queen Elizabeth), 2013 acrylic on paper, image size 70 x 50cm Not titled (Mona Lisa), 2011 acrylic on paper, image size 70 x 50cm Not titled (woman in white dress with red lipstick), 2013 acrylic on paper, image size 70 x 50cm Emma Hamilton Landscape (touching/not touching), 2014 Perspex and salt, dimensions variable

128 Works

LIVE Works

Leyla Stevens Ngendag/Rise Up, 2010 - 2013 two-channel video projection, duration 12 min Kynan Tan (with Benjamin Forster) Metonymy, 2014 custom electronics and speakers, dimensions variable Paul Williams & Christopher Dolman OTHER DAY ORNAMENTAL, 2014 fired and unfired clay with underglaze, plywood and timber, dimensions variable

Linda Brescia Persona and Performance in Everyday Life, 2014 performance Alexandra Clapham & Penelope Benton Self Portrait in a Room, 2014 performance and mixed media installation, dimensions variable Beth Dillon Best Wishes, 2014 performance and flowers, site specific installation Kelly Doley Cold Calling A Revolution (Sydney Residential A-Z), 2014 performance installation OK YEAH COOL GREAT Battle Royale, 2014 performance

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