https://ameliawallin.com.au ameliawallin Thu, 23 May 2024 02:48:43 +0000 https://ameliawallin.com.au en https://ameliawallin.com.au/Maternal-inheritances Thu, 23 May 2024 02:48:43 +0000 ameliawallin https://ameliawallin.com.au/Maternal-inheritances Maternal inheritances Maternal inheritances is an exhibition of Australian and international artists that explores the entanglements of motherhood and matriarchy with ideas of genealogy, influence and impact. The term ‘maternal inheritance’ refers to a biological phenomenon whereby mitochondrial DNA is transferred from mother to offspring. Despite being present in most multicellular organisms, the fact that mitochondrial DNA only contains maternal DNA continues to elude biologists. It is this phenomenon that enables the popular at-home ancestry kits, where a sample of saliva can trace maternal DNA to help us better understand our ancestral lineage. Maternal inheritances takes this biological occurrence as a starting point to develop an expanded understanding of the maternal that includes other experiences of kin-making. It proposes maternal inheritance as a state of entanglement that produces multiple, complex relations to and with the world. It expresses these positions through a range of artistic responses across disciplines and between generations. The exhibition presents artworks – sculpture, painting, multi-channel video and installation – that address Country and matrilineality, material and ancestral inheritance, anthropogenic catastrophies and intergenerational&nbsp;trauma. For the artists, ideas about maternal inheritance are linked to non-linear understandings of time and complex relations to memory, materials and motherhood. In this way, the exhibition is multidirectional; the artists look back at previous generations to glean knowledge, understanding of histories and a sense of self and identity, while contemplating the future. As we face climate emergencies of catastrophic proportions, to say that the future feels uncertain is an understatement. Yet the concept of inheritance, be it material or ancestral, is quietly optimistic. The notion of inheritance assumes that there are still resources – indeed, a future – to inherit. In drawing parallels between reproductive and ecological care, this exhibition invites artists and audiences to navigate and reflect on maternal inheritance both as a state of precarity and an optimistic blueprint for our future. Read more about the exhibition and the artists in the exhibition guide&nbsp;[PDF 223KB] <img width="1280" height="847" width_o="1280" height_o="847" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4ea7aab7c39ef9b1318f1a888b860588a8aca6b5fa755f31b5810e3e9c5cf196/noriko-nakamura-betty-chimney-raylene-walatinna-install-maternal-interitances-Large.jpeg" data-mid="211487132" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4ea7aab7c39ef9b1318f1a888b860588a8aca6b5fa755f31b5810e3e9c5cf196/noriko-nakamura-betty-chimney-raylene-walatinna-install-maternal-interitances-Large.jpeg" /> Image: Noriko Nakamura (foreground), Betty Chimney and Raylene Walatinna (background) <img width="1280" height="856" width_o="1280" height_o="856" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e93cedb8d631faa9eba645e006271e8872d98da97530ed4a3040834eff878a2d/jahnne-pasco-white-install-maternal-interitances-1-Large.jpeg" data-mid="211487057" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e93cedb8d631faa9eba645e006271e8872d98da97530ed4a3040834eff878a2d/jahnne-pasco-white-install-maternal-interitances-1-Large.jpeg" /> Image: Jhanne Pasco-White Photo: Leon Schoots <img width="2000" height="1334" width_o="2000" height_o="1334" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4a05d57232ed55e1e5be5e3d3f2a773c3174550d4af163c8591218e2dda41123/maternal-inheritances-29.jpg" data-mid="211487055" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4a05d57232ed55e1e5be5e3d3f2a773c3174550d4af163c8591218e2dda41123/maternal-inheritances-29.jpg" />Image: Darcey Bella Arnold (foreground), Yhonnie Scarce (background) Photo: Leon Schoots <img width="4800" height="3199" width_o="4800" height_o="3199" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/cd3b2950bfd9ecdf5169fe79dcdcb15f3a52cd1f4b0393d7a10f8389daaf424d/calista-lyon-carmen-winant-photo-calista-lyon.jpg" data-mid="211487059" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/cd3b2950bfd9ecdf5169fe79dcdcb15f3a52cd1f4b0393d7a10f8389daaf424d/calista-lyon-carmen-winant-photo-calista-lyon.jpg" />Image: Calista Lyon and Carmen Winant Photo: Calista Lyon <img width="1280" height="854" width_o="1280" height_o="854" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7264910adeb83c4cc57a0527ba94775f0792a00708affbcf607ce931993f0670/darcey-bella-arnold-yhonnie-scarce-install-maternal-inheritances-Large.jpeg" data-mid="211487164" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7264910adeb83c4cc57a0527ba94775f0792a00708affbcf607ce931993f0670/darcey-bella-arnold-yhonnie-scarce-install-maternal-inheritances-Large.jpeg" /> Image: Darcey Bella Arnold (foreground), Yhonnie Scarce (background)Photo: Leon Schoots <img width="4676" height="3120" width_o="4676" height_o="3120" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8184a61f04f76165916744e8dcd3dc67272a53a8dfae1de6cc5ae79682bad836/yhonnie-scarce-nucleus-detail-maternal-interitances.jpg" data-mid="211487058" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8184a61f04f76165916744e8dcd3dc67272a53a8dfae1de6cc5ae79682bad836/yhonnie-scarce-nucleus-detail-maternal-interitances.jpg" />Image: Yhonnie Scarce&nbsp;Photo: Leon Schoots https://ameliawallin.com.au/Amelia-Wallin Sun, 22 Apr 2018 17:04:18 +0000 ameliawallin https://ameliawallin.com.au/Amelia-Wallin Amelia Wallin&nbsp; curator, writer and researcher I am a curator and writer working across exhibition-making, research, publishing, collections and residency programs. Driven by an interest in health, labour, feminisms and alternative forms of instituting, my practice considers how artistic and institutional structures might be reorganised and imagined otherwise. +&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;Selected projects https://ameliawallin.com.au/Jahnne-Pasco-White Mon, 25 Nov 2019 10:25:49 +0000 ameliawallin https://ameliawallin.com.au/Jahnne-Pasco-White Becoming With Jahnne Pasco-White Dirts (materials) A neighbour’s bounty of olives imprints fleshy residue upon the cotton cloth of one of Jahnne Pasco-White’s paintings. The heavy yellow pollen of the wattle flower stains another, the pale mauve flesh of a Lilly-pilly, or Wanduin in Gunaikurnai language, smear the fabric of others. Some of the cloth surfaces are dyed with the skins of onions and avocados, the fibres intermixed with synthetic pigments. On the lands of the Kulin Nation, where Jahnne lives and works, it is Poorneet (Tadpole Season), or early spring, and the suburban gardens are abundant. Like fallen fruit driven into concrete footpaths under feet, juice, seeds, pulp, flesh, dust and pollen stain the paintings and matter, material and surface entangle.&nbsp; “Dirt”, stated the poet Anne Carson (2001: 202), “is matter out of place.” Defined by its context alone, dirt confounds categories, occupies where it shouldn’t, and mixes up forms. Western distrust of dirt and fear of contamination has prevailed since antiquity. Ancient Greek mythology posits women as distrust worthy by virtue of their ability to transform and deform. “That, of course,” writes Donna Haraway (1988: 39), “is why women have had so much trouble counting as individuals in modern Western discourses. Their personal, bounded individuality is compromised by their bodies’ troubling talent for making other bodies, whose individuality can take precedence over their own, even while the little bodies are fully contained.” Pregnancy can be understood as a process of intermingling genomes and cellular transfer between foetus and gestating body, but in fact all bodies are composites, host to parasites and bacteria. Somewhere between one to two kilograms of human microbiota colonize our skin, lungs, nose, and gut. We have more bacteria than cells, which is it, then, that defines us? Entanglements (processes) Jahnne’s earlier exhibition, messmates, examined her experience of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood, and the associated heightened awareness that her body was not entirely her own, nor was it ever. What Jahnne terms “the bacterial companions in and of the body” have always been there, acquired in the processes of birth, via the vaginal birthing canal, or through touch, colostrum, milk, and later food. Haraway’s phrase ‘becoming with’ lends itself to the title of this exhibition. It emphasises our indivisibility from the world around us, from the chemicals found in our blood and breastmilk to the messmates with whom we share our bodies.&nbsp; In her studio, Jahnne’s paintings encroach upon themselves, laid one upon another on the ground, and hanging from the ceiling, the cloth still tacky with substance. The composition of the paintings occurs collectively as Jahnne works on multiple canvases as one. Throughout her practice materials are reused, paintings are cut, glued and repurposed.&nbsp; The effect is such that colours, patterns, marks or stains transfer from one painting to another, sustaining motion between them. &nbsp;Assembled to form soft passageways through the gallery, the hanging system recreates the limitations of Jahnne’s studio, wherein the body of work far surpassed the wall and floor space. Here, the body of the viewer is drawn into intimate proximity to brush up against or bear witness to the matter and the material in detail. Our current understanding of dirt, contamination and immunity, particularly in relation to birth, has transformed. Amniotic fluid and vernix caseosa were routinely washed off babies directly after birth but are now understood to contain a spectrum of bioactivity that can offer protection against common bacterial and fungal pathogens. For Haraway, the notion of “becoming-with” is to be worldly. The way we enter the world and our first encounters of touch, provide us with our first microbes, our lifelong companions. From the moment we are born, we begin come to terms with the condition of becoming with. Jahnne’s paintings exist in symbiosis with each other and their environment, an expanded state of becoming-with. Amelia Wallin Buath Gurru (Grass Flowering Season), 2019 https://ameliawallin.com.au/Noriko-Nakamura Mon, 25 Nov 2019 10:17:21 +0000 ameliawallin https://ameliawallin.com.au/Noriko-Nakamura Some of the oldest recorded ceramics are carved from limestone, a soft stone recognised for its ability to be shaped, shed, smoothed over. Figures with heavy breasts and wide hips, what some believed to be sacred symbols of fertility, have been found carved from this substance. Due to its deeply absorbent and highly porous qualities, limestone is not recommended to hold water. It is a sedimentary rock, meaning that it is formed by the accumulation of geological and biological particles deep underwater. Often broken down to be repurposed in concrete, toothpaste or house paint, in the contemporary world we absorb it unknowingly. Encountering the limestone sculptures of Melbourne-based artist Noriko Nakamura recalls both these origins, the sacred and the everyday, from the humble and economically-titled Bowl (2019) to the many tentacled and mysterious form Becoming love’s expression (2019). <img height="533" src="https://www.artlink.com.au/images/CAVES_2.jpg" width="800" style="width: 795px; height: 529.66875px;">Noriko Nakamura, Becoming love’s expression, 2019, installation view, CAVES. Photo: Matthew Stanton Limestone, gouache and human hair are the materials through which Noriko realised her exhibition The force that the warrior adopts during the evolution of the pale pink rose at CAVES in Melbourne. It marked CAVES first exhibition in their new space – a lofty, light- filled room, less cave-like than their former space – as well as Noriko’s first exhibition since becoming a mother. Noriko’s limestone sculptures form a tableau on the floor of the space, watched over by a series of four paintings of Dogū (土偶). Dogū are clay figures that combine animal and human qualities that are dated to the Jōmon period, in prehistoric Japan. In Noriko’s paintings these humanoids read as symbols of fertility. In one a squatting figure reveals a face peering out of an opened vulva, the figure’s hands peacefully clasped in prayer position. In another painting titled Caesarean birth (2019) a gaping eye-shaped opening evokes both a vulva and a window into the reproductive organs. This painting takes on particular resonance when considered beside Noriko’s contribution to the West Space fundraising exhibition, The Process of Making, which was a photograph of the artist in the process of giving birth via c-section. In this photograph, a hospital-standard sheet of blue plastic curtains off the lower half of her body, behind which a cluster of medical practitioners appear to in the process of extracting the baby, while the artist looks directly at the camera. In this moment the experience of birth is twofold, as both the baby and the mother are born. <img height="925" src="https://www.artlink.com.au/images/CAVES__3(1).jpg" width="800" style="width: 795px; height: 919.21875px;">Noriko Nakamura, Caesarean birth, 2019. Gouache on paper. Installation view, CAVES. Photo: Matthew Stanton We don’t speak about birth, especially not caesarean birth, Norkio tells me. Silvia Federici has done important work in tracing how women became estranged and alienated from birth. Specifically, the Marxist feminist scholar has focused on how the social violence of early capitalism denied women control over their own bodies, severing them from traditional knowledge systems pertaining to reproductive health. As a result, in our contemporary moment of late capitalism, the experience of birth is paradoxically both singular and universal, shared and solitarily, and sometimes shameful. During the tea ceremony held last Saturday, a small audience of adults and toddlers gathered. The tea ceremony was important to Noriko as an offering for the audience, encapsulating how she thinks of motherhood as a gesture for offering. (“All welcome” the invitation insisted.) The ceremony was performed by Yuka Mikayama with ritualised precision. It took place amongst the sculptures, which became supports for the various implements involved in the making of the tea, the matcha whisk nestled inside of Milking my heart (2019), the tea canister disappearing inside of The child (2019). Water pooled underneath the sculptural vessel that collected the remnants of matcha tea and hot water. The permeability of the stone acted as a reminder of how the boundaries of the body are let down during birth and post partum. Blood flows, fluids leak, colostrum and milk drip out. <img height="1080" src="https://www.artlink.com.au/images/CAVES_Milking.jpg" width="800" style="width: 795px; height: 1073.25px;">Noriko Nakamura, Milking my heart, 2019, installation view, CAVES. Photo: Matthew Stanton The pregnant and birthing body is not orderly, and the pregnant body in particular is a site of evolutionary conflict and parasitic relations.&nbsp; The fleshy interdependence between mother and baby is a theme that the artist and academic Fayen D’Evie ruminates on in her essay Mother-Hooded which accompanies the exhibition. Mircochimerism is the name given to the common phenomenon of fetal cells escaping the uterus and becoming implanted in the organs of the mother, making her quite literally a chimera. The force that the warrior adopts during the evolution of the pale pink rose entangles the sacred and the everyday until there is no space between them at all. Published in Artlink 2019 https://ameliawallin.com.au/Nina-Ross-That-Takes-Balls Mon, 27 May 2019 10:33:22 +0000 ameliawallin https://ameliawallin.com.au/Nina-Ross-That-Takes-Balls Nina Ross’ video work That Takes Balls&nbsp;(2019)&nbsp;exists on the external walls of the Centre for Contemporary Photography as a counter-monument to the 69 women who died due to violence in Australia in 2018. The video begins with refusal. A hand-drawn cock and balls, that scrappy symbol of cheap masculinity found on school desks and public bathrooms, is erased by the artist's hand. No. The empty space left behind is filled one-by-one with the first-names of women who were fatal victims of violence. Each name is handwritten, backwards, by the artist on verso pane of glass. Even when it appears there is no more space, the smallest gap is filled with yet with another name. Individual names blur into a common sprawl of red text. The title of this work is another refusion, a reversal of admiration into accusation. &nbsp;“What is refused” writes essayist and poet Anne Boyer, in an essay titled No,“often amplifies what is not”. Counting Dead Women Australia, a subsection of the feminist collective Destroy The Joint are responsible for recording and publishing the circumstances of these violent deaths, as verified by police and media reports. Destroy The Joint keep a running tally on their facebook page: currently, 14 women have died due to violence in Australia this year, at the time of writing. In 2018 80% of the Australian women who died by violence was due to violence perpetrated by men. * “ Sometimes, I’ll read a novel written by a man in which a woman walks home alone, late at night, in America, without having a single thought about her physical safety, and it’s so implausible that I’ll put the book down” writes the American author R.O. Kwon.&nbsp;I, too, weaponize my keys, holding them tight in my hands as I walk dark streets, and find that the smell of metal lingers on my fingers long after I have made it safely into my door. Disbelief can be a kind of refusal, a wake-up call to different experiences of sexual violence. A refusal to accept women’s responsibility for their own “personal safety” as good enough. * Cuban American artist Ana Mendietarefused to be silent in 1973 when a fellow student,&nbsp;Sara Ann Otten, was murdered and raped in her dorm room on their Iowa University campus. In the months that proceeded this event, Mendieta produced a series of work that tested indifference against complicity. For Moffitt Building Piece(1973) she poured animal blood and viscera onto the street outside her apartment and secretly filmed the reactions of the passersby; the neat sidestep, the head turned away. &nbsp;Their failure to respond or react is far from a refusal, it is a convenient acceptance: a Yes. The same year Mendieta presented Rape Scene, staging herself as victim, pants around her ankles, blood poured down her leg. Fellow art students were invited to her studio to observe the scene for over two hours. &nbsp;Mendieta refused passivity, demanded that we look. No, No, No. In the 1985 trial for Ana Mendieta's murder, a doorman testified he heard a woman screaming "No" several times before hearing the thud of a body hitting the roof of the all-night delicatessen below. She had “somehow gone out the window” is what her accused murderer, husband and acclaimed artist Carl Andre told emergency services. &nbsp;Refusing to accept her death as accident or suicide, the activist group WHEREISANAMENDIETA routinely protest Andre’s exhibitions, in some cases recreating Moffitt Building Piece, nearly always staining their hands with blood-red paint. In 2018 68% of the Australian women died by violence at the hands of someone they know. According to a 2018 report by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, one in six Australian women have been subjected, since the age of 15, to physical and/or sexual violence by a current or previous cohabiting partner. * Ross’s artwork hovers between record and refusal. It refuses the normalization of sexual and gendered violence perpetrated by rape culture, at the same time memorializing its very victims. That Takes Balls does not accept the death of women due to violence as a hazard of gender. “Transpositions and upendings refuse and then reorder the world,”writes Boyer.&nbsp;Intersectional feminism is built upon refusing the various orders of the world. No to patriarchy, no to oppression, no&nbsp;to the capitalist yes. If we refuse, we are forced to confront an alternative. Amelia Wallin, April 2019 https://ameliawallin.com.au/Beyond-Polar-Thinking Fri, 07 Dec 2018 01:12:46 +0000 ameliawallin https://ameliawallin.com.au/Beyond-Polar-Thinking Beyond Polar Thinking The star Polaris has earned the title of the North Star due to its position above the northern celestial pole. It is used to identify true north for those navigating the corresponding hemisphere (it is invisible from the southern hemisphere), yet during our earth’s 25,700-year precession cycle Polaris will remain the indicator for “true north” for only a fraction of time before the globe’s rotation appoints another North Star. In antiquity Polaris was not yet the North Star – instead the main celestial reference point was the ancient constellation Cynosura – but by the Middle Ages it was a key point of navigation for the northern colonizers of the South. Our earth’s multidirectional orbit is a reminder that even our cardinal points are simply a matter of perspective. There is an inherent bias in our language of navigation. Colonial and capitalist projects have left a mark on the ways in which one orientates oneself: North is up, South is down. The South American modernist painter Joaquίn Torres-Garcίa famously reversed the map: “From now on,” he proclaimed, “the elongated tip of South America will point insistently to the South, our North. Our compass will incline irremediably and forever toward the South, toward our pole.” [1] Even as our physical marker of North is slipping, ‘north’ as a concept remains foundational within Western thought. Marjolijn Dijkman’s immersive film installation Navigating Polarities (2018) considers this entanglement between astrology, navigation, and colonization. In a work that spans the cosmic to the cellular, Dijkman examines how the natural forces of magnetism that guided geographical and astrophysical exploration can subsequently affect dualistic thinking and our own sense of morality. Projected into an inverse dome, encircled by wooden bench seating, Navigating Polarities can be viewed from any position. A sphere, of course, has no top or bottom. The visual imagery combines mappa mundi, drone footage of mines, hand-drawn compasses, radiating lines, scientific animations of electrons, stock footage of migrating animals, and scientific experiments with magnetic particles conducted in Dijkman’s studio. The images shift, rotate, hum, and create the effect of a mesmerizing pool. The design of the installation echoes the eighteenth-century invention of Franz Mesmer: a circular tub known as the baquet around which afflicted patients gathered to be cured by surges of ‘magnetism’. As a doctor and astronomy enthusiast, Mesmer theorized that the human body contained radiant fluids that were sensitive to the gravitational pull of the planets. If blockages of these fluids occurred, Mesmer was able to restore the natural equilibrium of his patients using his own ‘animal magnetism’. Now understood to have been a master hypnotist, the doctor’s quackery has been immortalized etymologically in the verb ‘mesmerize.’ Western thought is organized by binaries: North and South, top and bottom, male and female, right and wrong. These binaries are not equally weighted, they are subject to what Derrida called “a violent hierarchy.”[2] The opening line of the narrative voice-over in Navigating Polarities affirms this imbalance, stating that the universe is asymmetrical. The script disperses dualistic thinking with reference to the writing of scientists, philosophers, theorists, postcolonial thinkers, and new materialist feminists. From this myriad of voices comes a narrative of flux, imbalance, change, reversal, creation, movement, and leakage. It reminds us that preconceived notions, the climate, and the entire universe are ultimately unstable. An earlier moving image work by Dijkman, Prospect of Interception (2016), also created a narrative through the assemblage of quotes, drawing from over one hundred sources to speculate on the effects of an asteroid colliding with Earth. The text was presented in multilingual subtitles, with the effect of an impassive, collective voice. The voice-over of Navigating Polarities is read by a woman, recalling the commentary of a documentary or educational video, but in a stream-of-consciousness flow. It is cyclical, designed to be entered at any point, without conclusion or epiphany. New materialist feminist Karen Barad writes that “objectivity is a matter of responsibility and not a matter of distancing at all.”[3] So it is in Navigating Polarities: rather than experiencing the detached objectivity of a science film, the viewer is entirely immersed. &nbsp;The so-called “Age of Discovery” and its lasting effects on the world in regard to colonization and climate change are of continued interest to Dijkman. Previous works have looked to the Enlightenment to speculate about the possibilities for shared futures. Dijkman’s ongoing project LUNÄ (2011–present) is a replica of the eighteenth-century table of the Lunar Men – a secret society from the British Midlands, whose members have been deemed the “fathers of the Industrial Revolution” – which was used for their monthly meetings each full moon. LUNÄ now travels around the world for a discussion series with local speakers that expands the Lunar Society’s original scientific and technological debates to include diverse perspectives on art, education, and social justice. Since the era of the Lunar Society and the Industrial Revolution, human intervention has contributed to the rise in temperatures currently affecting all forms of life. NASA has reported that the earth’s poles are tipping as a result of accelerated ice loss. Climate change even affects us on a cellular level: geophysicists have found evidence of magnetites in the human brain, specifically a magnetic iron oxide compound that is the result of air pollution. Illuminating the inherent connection between colonization and climate change, images in Navigating Polarities show gaping holes in the landscape from mining, while the voice-over describes these extractive forces: “Mountains were displaced, rivers were rerouted, forests destroyed and people and animals were moved around.” [4] Spanning the macrocosmic to the microscopic, from the balance of the earth to the balance between the two hemispheres of the brain, Navigating Polarities draws parallels between heavenly bodies and the corporeality of humans and animals. The film hones in on our cellular makeup and extends out to the ways in which we orientate ourselves in sync with the magnetic fields of the universe. For Hannah Arendt, “in a universe where everything, if it moves at all, moves in a cyclical order,” mortality is a straight line that cuts through the cycles of biological life. [5] Navigating Polarities opposes the rectilinear life trajectory from birth to death – humans, the work suggests, are matter like any other matter, affected by the same laws of attraction and repulsion. Meditating on polarity enables Dijkman to think about the dualisms that govern Western thought and reside within our very cells, yet the core message of the work is one of plurality. In the affirmative words of Roland Barthes: “one must pluralize, refine, continuously.” [6] Beyond Polar Thinking was commissioned by Marjolijn Dijkman and published by NOME.[1]&nbsp; Joaquίn Torres-Garcίa, The School of the South Manifesto, 1935. [2]&nbsp;Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, 1978. [3]&nbsp;“Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers. Interview with Karen Barad,” New Materialism, Interviews &amp; Cartographies, 2012. [4]&nbsp; Françoise Vergès, “Like a Riot: The Politics of Forgetfulness, Relearning the South, and the Island of Dr. Moreau,” South as a State of Mind #6, 2017. [5]&nbsp;Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958. [6]&nbsp;Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, 1977. Exhibition Catalogue&nbsp; https://ameliawallin.com.au/Why-not-walk-backwards Wed, 09 Jan 2019 05:14:06 +0000 ameliawallin https://ameliawallin.com.au/Why-not-walk-backwards Why not walk backward? There is a longstanding historical relationship between visual art and performance, from Dada through to the happenings of the ‘60s and ‘70s, and the space between the two mediums is continually being redefined. ‘Why not walk backward?’, a new exhibition curated by Brooke Babington and Liang Luscombe, occupies this territory;&nbsp;live gestures are reinterpreted for the gallery spaces at Gertrude contemporary in Melbourne, and the original act of performance shifts to re-peformance, re-enactment and documentation. ‘Why not walk backward?’is a keynote exhibition as part of the Next Wave festival,and brings together the work of five international and Australian artists working at “the intersection of performance”[1]. Five different considerations of the act of re-enactment in relation to time, authenticity and appropriation - the works in Why not walk backward? are deliberately repetitive. Repetition too, is one of the central themes. Each artist repeats their own work or the works of others, from Dickens to Ana Mediata, through film, photography, sculpture, and installation. In all this repetition, the artists’ different methods are heightened, which is the success of the exhibition and also where it slightly disappoints. The first room at Gertrude gallery is striking: a shock of blue curtain from ceiling to floor, veiling nothing, contrasts with the rich deep reds of a young woman’s meticulous outfit. The same ensemble is strewn across a table. The former is&nbsp;Nina Beier’s ambiguous and&nbsp;painterlyinstallation Trauerspiel; the latter, thecaptivating Artist Actor, Artist Auteur byFiona Abicare. Artist Actor, Artist Auteur draws reference from two filmic representations of female artists at a precise point in time [2]. From these carefully placed parametersAbicare draws out a&nbsp;constellation of personal and schematicreferences, manifest across performance, sculpture and costume. The young woman (Georgie) introduces herself as part of the artwork. Her elaborate, almost Futurist costume is an amalgamation of outfits worn by the film’s protagonists. They have been created with local fashion designer Darsha Maurice. The outfit is for sale and Georgie offers to take measurements; I can stage my own re-performance of a re-performance. In Trauerspiel the role of the artist is again outsourced, this time to an actor who re/creates a sculpture from verbal instructions given by the artist. The result is a clumsy bird, textured with the heavy imprint of the actor-cum-sculptor. It will be destroyed at the end of the exhibition, only to be presumably remade by another actor in another reiteration. The restrained formalist considerations of Abicare and Beierdissolve in the following room into more traditional methods of documenting performance such as photography and video. A display ofprinted out emails, attachments, and Photoshopped images trace an irreverent dialogue between the collectiveCatherine or Kateand their mentors, whilst a video shows them re-performing their mentor’s interviews and artworks. It's a less considered approach to the act of appropriation and repetition, and the email exchange with their mentors reads empty of meaning. Whilst Abicare and Beier’s works are strengthened through their dialogue with each other, the works by Catherine or Kate, Marvin Gaye Chetwynd&nbsp;and Tania Bruguera&nbsp;in the second room lose their impact, either needing more space or more diverse interpretations on the themes.Why not walk backward?asks us to glance at the past, whilst firmly facing forwards. Gestures and actions are presented as images, and performance is engaged with as a historical medium. Amelia Wallin, 2014 [1] http://www.gertrude.org.au/exhibitions/gallery-11/past-14/why-not-walk-backward.phps [2]Chantal Akerman’s Les Rendez-vous D’Anna (1978) and John Cassavetes’ Opening Night (1978) https://ameliawallin.com.au/Justene-Williams-at-Performa15 Fri, 30 Nov 2018 02:27:43 +0000 ameliawallin https://ameliawallin.com.au/Justene-Williams-at-Performa15 Justene Williams at Performa15 Visually dense, decorative, and undone, Australian artist Justene Williams The Curtain Breathed Deeply, presented the artist’s interior mind across four immersive video installations. First premiering at Artspace, Sydney, Williams reconfigured her suite of video performances and sculptures into new constellations that filled the basement of Performa 15’s Hub. Amassing tropes and objects from the Australian vernacular, an adolescence spent between dance classes and musical recitals, and her father’s wrecking yard, Williams’ installation operated in a private economy, fueled by personal relationships and her bower-bird impulse to gather and assemble. Williams’ materials are tactile and eclectic signifiers. An inflated backyard pool, lattice fencing, astro-turf, tarpaulins-as-architecture, and moving imagery of dense bush-land functioned as autobiographical signposts that evoked and geographically localized the Australian Suburban fringe. The eponymous curtain was an expanse of decorative white vinyl tablecloths that traversed the whole of the space. Cross-hatched with blue utility tape and glittery gold adhesive, the curtain hung heavily, creating a passage through chromatically divided assemblages of video monitors, projections, soundscapes, screens, and crafted and found objects. In the two-channel video, Yves Klein Eyes, figures assembled in beaked masks, hats, and outfits fabricated from the same materials as the curtain, move and sing in trace-like collectivity, casting blue light back into the space. The rhythm and repetition across the video installations created a hypnotic effect. Bodies and body parts, both decorated and naked, gyrated and swayed to different tempos. Williams throws nothing away; materials were endlessly recast and reconstituted between backdrop, costume, and installation. The effect was akin to camouflage; as the materials seeped and overlapped, sources disappeared. Following the rhythm and repetition of the anthropomorphic breathing curtain, Williams’ installation expanded and contracted personal and geographical orientations. https://ameliawallin.com.au/Agatha-Gothe-Snape-at-Performa15 Fri, 30 Nov 2018 02:22:10 +0000 ameliawallin https://ameliawallin.com.au/Agatha-Gothe-Snape-at-Performa15 Agatha Gpthe-Snape at Perfoma15 The performance had already begun as the audience took their seats in the auditorium of the New York Society For Ethical Culture for Australian artist Agatha Gothe-Snape’s Rhetorical Chorus (L.W.); a video of conceptual art giant Lawrence Wiener gesticulating played on a small monitor and legendary experimental vocalist Joan La Barbara sat on a pew at the back of the ornate wooden stage, flanked by two projection screens. Above La Barbara, the dictum, “The place where people meet to seek the highest is holy ground” was inscribed in gold letters on dark wood. Throughout the three acts of the hour-long performance, this axiomatic inscription aligned art as the highest pursuit, and the audience as it’s secular worshippers, a fitting context for the work of Gothe-Snape and her long-standing interest in reorienting the aesthetics of late modernism through the relations of the body. The performance began with The Prelude: one of Gothe-Snape’s signature PowerPoint animations presented the audience with a “Provisional Vocabulary” of words and gestures drawn from Weiner’s lexicon. Hand gestures and phrases pulled from interviews and Weiner’s text work generated a performance score, then transmitted to the audience via the PowerPoint animations, and later through the bodies of The Prologue, performed by Brian Fuata, and The Transmitter (Actor), performed by La Barbara, and The Chorus. The second act began when Fuata, dressed in all white, took the stage and laid a paper score on the floor before him. Fuata cycled through Weiner’s gestures and phrases, alternating between staccato and legato, viscerally rolling the vowels and consonants around in his mouth. With each cycle, sound and movement were exaggerated and abstracted into two opposing forces. For the final act, La Barbara moved to the front of the stage to stand on a small podium. Strikingly silent, with her eyes on the monitor of Weiner, La Barbara’s arms and hands continued the refrain of gestures, her hands spectrally projected above the aforementioned inscription. The Chorus rose to the stage from the audience, cloaked in shifts of peach and blue, printed with giant images of Weiner’s hands and offset by white sneakers. La Barbara’s hands, reperforming the abstracted gestures of Weiner, became the tool through which she conducted and commanded the ten-person choir. Using strategies of improvisation and interpretation based off of La Barbara’s gestures, The Chorus created a vocal soundscape without language. Over thirty minutes, the sound was built, dissipated, texturized, and repeated. Meanwhile, the screens dimly cycled through gradients of color, creating the effect of digitized color field paintings. Referring to contemporary means of screen-based data compilation and distribution, techniques of improvisation drawn from Gothe-Snape’s background in performance making, as well as the historical tradition of Cheironomia — a notation of gestures used for oratory and religious meetings, Rhetorical Chorus (L.W.) exceeded the subject of Weiner. His rhetoric, enigmatic phrases and compelling hand gestures acted as a channel through which Gothe-Snape traced circuits of influence and meaning within the canon of modernism to consider the dissemination and consumption of knowledge. &nbsp;Gothe-Snape’s research documents — Excel spreadsheets of every Weiner text work, annotations of his oratory gesticulations as loosely illustrative marks — became teaching tools for The Choir, who Gothe-Snape considered the first audience of the work during a workshop hosted three days earlier, and the audience via the animated PowerPoint.Rhetorical Chorus (L.W.) collapsed the protagonist of conceptual art into the ensemble, to consider how knowledge is transmitted and mediated through bodies in the form of gesture and sound, as well as through improvisation and systemization. https://ameliawallin.com.au/Uncanny-Valley-Girl Sun, 28 Oct 2018 02:19:10 +0000 ameliawallin https://ameliawallin.com.au/Uncanny-Valley-Girl Uncanny Valley Girl, Angela Goh Published by Running Dog Silicone breast-enhancing inserts, self-massage tools, flat screen televisions and their associated cables, cans of ‘Mother’ energy drink, and a boxy wind blower. These objects of artificial simulation constitute the set of Angela Goh’s Uncanny Valley Girl at Liveworks Festival, and generate many of Goh’s performative actions. Everything appears synthetic, down to her pleather footwear and faux fur-lined parka. At the beginning of the performance, Goh stands on stage in a state of active inertia, like a stuck Sims character. The fluorescent lighting overhead means that the audience is watching each other, as much as watching her do nothing in particular. She exits, and, on re-entry, Goh is naked, except for a pair of sunglasses. Her arms open and close with such intensity that she seems to pulsate. With her feet anchored to the floor, she rotates like a display car, or a rotisserie chicken, her movement smooth enough so as to appear motorised. Flooded by bright white lights, and accompanied by Colin Iletro’s shuddering tones, she appears as a figure of light and sound. The wind machine blows clothes across the floor: bootcut low-waisted jeans, a cropped pink tee-shirt, and lime green boots. Goh dresses, and when she crosses the stage, boots unzipped, her steps are jarringly clunky and analogue. The cyborgian goddess brought down to us in human form. SOFT ROBOTICS We have entered the terrain of soft robotics. The current conception of the posthuman is not a clunky automaton salvaged from our rapidly reducing mineral resources, but rather one that is grown, tended, and nursed to life in a lab. Scientists have already discovered how to make fully soft robots. Without batteries, or internal hardware, they are instead powered by a microfluidic logic circuit sustained by an intricate networks of gasses. ‘Our best machines are made of sunshine’, writes cultural theorist and trained biologist Donna Haraway, in her ecofeminist essay The Cyborg Manifesto (1985)—‘the new machines are so light and clean. Their engineers are sun-worshippers mediating a new scientific revolution associated with the night dream of post-industrial society.’1 The ‘ocobot’, for instance, looks to the ingenuity of the octopus: without a skeleton, the octopus can perform feats of strength and dexterity.2 Our human opacity and materiality weighs us down. During Goh’s performance, clusters of nippleless silicone breast cups are placed on the floor. Goh peels back their plastic sheath and delicately adheres each cup to a rectangular neck massager, forming a mass of the same tone and texture as a Patricia Piccinini sculpture. But whilst Piccinini’s sculptures are remarkable for their lifelike qualities and unsettling stillness, this piece gently undulates. It’s a movement so smooth and precise that it can only be robotic, yet it resembles those early and unchanged ancestors of human animals—the jellyfish, who are predicted to outlive us all. STIMULATION ‘Tenders’ was the name given to the semi-skilled factory workers who oversaw machines in the 19th century factory, before the introduction of robotic automation systems made their work redundant. In Uncanny Valley Girl, technology tends to the needs of the (post)human. Fixed with the same silicone cups we saw before, the swirling orbs of a neck massager now also appear with stringy long brown hair. Goh slides across the floor; the massager held in place between her legs. In this position, and with Goh’s fingers guiding downwards, the object takes the form of a giant labia. Knees up, head reclined—Courbet’s L’Origine du monde (1866) as self pleasuring femmebot. Throughout Uncanny Valley Girl, every bodily desire is tended to with mechanical precision: urges are satisfied, climaxes are reached, a protruding twitching tongue is relieved with a drink from the can of ‘Mother’. Later in the performance, two white cube pleather footrests are repurposed as platform shoes, and another neck massager becomes impossibly hard breasts. This is the body augmented and extended to be more sensual and more powerful. SIMULATION In the final moments of Uncanny Valley Girl, scrolling text illuminates the flat screens. Accented with Australian and American intonation, and set against a soundtrack of accelerated typing, two female voices read these passages aloud. It is a text-to-speak program, the delivery jagged and unnatural, but still, certain words catch. Calibrate. Girls. Augmented. Slide. Simulate. Valley. Non sequiturs that are also loosely associative, these words recall early experiments in computer generated poetry, such as Alison Knowles’ House of Dust (1967), which relied on words fed into a random computer matrix to generate poetic juxtapositions. Such a fascination between poetry and technology remains, with the emerging field of ‘computational creativity’ continuing to explore AI’s capacity to write in verse. But in Uncanny Valley Girl, the text we are reading and listening to is not computer generated—it is another simulation: produced by writer Holly Childs, it is an artful appropriation of ‘random’ computer logic. The text acts as an epilogue to the performance, and reinstates the work’s ambivalent position between the human and the posthuman. As the boundaries between machine and organism become blurred, as robots become soft and humans appear to harden (particularly in relation to bodies and borders), Goh embraces the in-between, the hybrid, the cyborgian. Haraway’s cyborg is ‘resolutely committed to particiality, irony, intimacy and perversity’, and Uncanny Valley Girl appears cut from the same cloth. The sole inhabitant in a world ravaged by technocapitalism, she is at once indifferent and stimulated, passive and powerful, the contradictory offspring of our near future. Donna Haraway, Cary Wolfe (ed.), Manifestly Haraway: The Cyborg Manifesto and the Companion Species Manifesto, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), p. 201Leah Burrows, The first autonomous, entirely soft robot’, The Harvard Gazette, (24/08/16)