Farnaz Dadfar, Infinite Spaces of the Beloved, 2019 | Courtesy the artist.

Daniel R Marks, GIVING MYSELF OVER , 2019. Installation (aluminium frames, digital prints on cartridge paper and fabric, plastic bowl, rusted steel beams, tape, tissue paper, fabric strips, latex, plasticine, clay, acrylic, glue, ce

Juan Rodriguez Sandoval, Bed, 2019. Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung soil, stones, pholia moss, dicranales moss, sphagnum moss, wood, fescues, grass, roots, aluminium, rust, oxide pigment, cement | Courtesy the artist.

Tina Stephanou, Antiphonea, 2019, single channel video, colour, two channel audio, 9:01min. Cinematography: Andrew Kaineder Performers: Joseph Franklin, Jacques Emery, Will Hanson. | Courtesy the artist.

Sarah Ujmaia , Leaning Into Breakage (Wall) | Courtesy the artist.

Stephanie Symington, Fragmented (2), seashells, 2020. | Courtesy the artist.

DEBUT XVI: TO LOVE IT ALL AGAIN

6 - 22 Feb 2020

Opening Night | Thursday 6 Feb, 6pm–8pm

PERFORMANCE SERIES | Giving Myself Over | Daniel R Marks with Sam Nugent

Opening Night |Thursday 6 Feb – 7pm
Thursday 13 Feb – 2pm
Thursday 20 Feb – 2pm

An accumulation of artefacts-as-language lies as a foundational diagram for live space. Two performers attempt an intimate collectivism through acts of “telling”, their bodies serving as a binary of observed autonomies to be mechanised and/or disrupted. Becoming tools for documentation, a private recording is listened to and diagrammed in responsive action: prior labour being excavated and “figured out” through ear, eye and touch. In the pulling, cutting and reconfiguration of agency through mimetic interactions, Marks and Nugent evoke/invoke movement-scaffolds for potential architectures.

CURATORS | Lucie McIntosh + Jake Treacy

An annual curated exhibition of works by recent graduates from Melbourne’s major art institutions. Celebrating its sixteenth year, Debut is a BLINDSIDE PROJECT committed to fostering new talent.

Farnaz Dadfar, David Green, Edwina Green, Daniel R Marks, Juan Rodriguez Sandoval, Tina Stefanou, Sarah Ujmaia, Stephanie Symington

DEBUT XIV: To Love it All Again envelopes an ecological ethic of radical love, soft power, togetherness, and community. This year’s exhibition critically engages with concerns surrounding current environmental and social climates, celebrating ways to better care and offer tenderness within our geographical and communal landscapes. In light of Australia’s recent devastating bushfires, this exhibition seeks to nurture young and emerging talent, whose practices each forecast hope and make visible healthy, shared, liveable and breathable futures altogether.

Farnaz Dadfar is an Iranian-born Australian artist, based in Melbourne. She has shown her work in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Iran, Australia and Indonesia since 2004. Dadfar has recently exhibited at the churchie 2017_National Emerging Art Prize Australia, Kings ARI, Flinders Lane Galley, Seventh Gallery, Incinerator Gallery, Islamic Museum of Australia, and Sarang Buliding Yogyakarta. She was also selected as one of the finalists for Linden Art Prize 2019, and Keith and Elisabeth Murdoch Travelling Fellowship; and she has been the recipient of a number of awards including The Victorian College of the Arts Galloway Lawson prize (2017), VCA Access mentorship (2019), and The David Richards Drawing Award (2019). Dadfar graduated from a Bachelor of Painting at The University of Science and Culture, Tehran, and then completed a Graduate Certificate in Visual Arts, a Master of Contemporary Art, and a Master of Fine Arts (visual art) by research at Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, The University of Melbourne.

David Green is an emerging artist that is driven by his interests in perception, place and the environment. His work spans the mediums of installation, projection, and photography. David’s art practice is an important means for him to turn his theoretical ideas into the physical, a process he believes can be a catalyst for conversation and contemplation. Not limited to the bounds of the gallery, David’s practice also engages within the public field through his interventions within civic space. Within the public sphere, his work explores how public space can be transformed and integrated into a more harmonious relationship with the surrounding environment.

Working across installation, film, painting, photography and sculpture, Edwina Green’s practice is informed by her Aboriginal heritage as a Trawlwoolway woman, from North-East Tasmania. Exploring concepts of culture, religion, Indigenous erasure and the post-colonial paradigm and its effects on people and place, Edwina creates narratives that engage, provoke, and question our place within society and our interaction with Indigenous Australia. Growing up between a mining town on the West coast of Tasmania, and Naarm, she explores the environmental damage that is relative to place, an abrupt necessity, alongside questioning institutional Indigenous erasure, Indigenous reclamation of cultural practices, and how blak presence is inherently political. Edwina’s work has been exhibited across Naarm, and internationally.

Daniel R Marks is a trans-disciplinary artist based in Melbourne, Australia, working within an expanded performance methodology. Their practice and research look into the expansion and dissolution of bodily singularity within relational structures: this is materialised in experimental processes which manipulate the distinction between subject and object, forming fragmented narratives of slippage and redistribution. They are currently interrogating the roles of the diagrammatic in reforming/disrupting borders of spatial embodiment, and are preparing to commence their PhD research into this area at RMIT University in 2020.

Juan Rodriguez Sandoval is a Guatemalan-born- Australian interdisciplinary artist, and current Monash University Graduate (Bachelor of Fine art), based and working in Melbourne, Australia. Rodriguez’s work investigates and documents the ideologies and themes of locality, transnationalism, space exploration and environmental/historical preservation. His work accentuates on manufacturing fictional spaces and entities, that revolve on once existing providences that have now become humanly, historically and geographically distant. Rodriguez’s work is often informed and moulded by archaeological, pantological and astronomical methodologies. He works with an array of earthly, found, daily recycled materials, and contemporary technologies. Through his work, he aims to bring a consensus to further remind the spectator(s) on environmental preservation, as well as, ethical and moral approaches to art-making. Juan has shown with Trocadero Art Space, School House Studios, Noir Darkroom Gallery and Intermission Gallery, Monash University.

Tina Stefanou is an Australian-Greek artist from Melbourne. She works across performance, installation, painting, sculpture, video and sound/music. Stefanou, whose prima materia is voice, explores the relationship between the human voice and the voice of things, ideas and situations. Influenced by her immediate environment, she involves family members, non-singers, children, musicians, peers, animals and objects as subject and medium. Interested in multi-species interactions and expanded notions of both composition and care, the artist explores the human voice as a multi-faceted instrument, expanding traditional boundaries in collaboration with visual language to explore social and poetic spaces. The artist can never comprehend the totality of the work. She takes part in the field of tension between the visual parameters and the voice, allowing the materials and composition to co-author the work.

In 2016, she performed her eleven-hour durational work entitled 11 Years at Salt Museum in Istanbul. In 2017, Stefanou was selected to perform in Alexandra Pirici’s piece entitled Pathernon Marbles at Kadist Gallery in Paris. In 2018 her work Ghost Potential was featured as part of the touring All We Can’t See Exhibition. In 2019 her work Pop Song was exhibited at Stacks Projects in Sydney and Horse Power at The Ian Potter Museum in Melbourne. Stefanou is a composer and vocalist in Sydney based new music ensemble The Music box Project as well as co-founder, artist director, and performer with The Opera Company. She is currently a Masters of Fine Arts candidate at Victorian College of The Arts.

Stephanie Symington examines the preciousness of nature and the environment around us. Stephanie has a deep interest in Australian flora and fauna which she explores through a transdisciplinary practice. Objects of nature can evoke feelings of nostalgia and wonder. Stephanie sets out to juxtapose the casualty, informality and ephemerality of natural objects with materials of lavishness such as; precious metals and gemstones. This juxtaposition seen throughout Stephanie’s work highlights the simple beauty of nature, while also heightening this beauty and reinforcing an otherwise transitory form.

Sarah Ujmaia (b.1995) is a first generation Chaldean Iraqi woman living and practicing in so called Australia. Her art practice is underpinned and informed by extended drawing strategies within imposed parameters and the position which she operates from.

IMAGES | Farnaz Dadfar, Infinite Spaces of the Beloved, 2019 | David Green | Edwina Green | Daniel R Marks, Giving Myself Over, 2019. Installation (aluminium frames, digital prints on cartridge paper and fabric, plastic bowl, rusted steel beams, tape, tissue paper, fabric strips, latex, plasticine, clay, acrylic, glue, cement, soil, wallpaper paste, water) and single-channel performance video. Dimensions variable, 26:53min. | Juan Rodriguez Sandoval, Bed, 2019. Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung soil, stones, pholia moss, dicranales moss, sphagnum moss, wood, fescues, grass, roots, aluminium, rust, oxide pigment, cement | Tina Stephanou, Antiphonea, 2019, single channel video, colour, two channel audio, 9:01min. Cinematography: Andrew Kaineder Performers: Joseph Franklin, Jacques Emery, Will Hanson | Stephanie Symington, Fragmented (2), seashells, 2020 | Courtesy the artists.