Micro-(bial) Tenancies

BLINDSIDE 2020 EMERGING CURATOR MENTORSHIP

ONLINE | 18 Dec 2020 - 31 Mar 2021

ONSITE | 24 Feb - 13 Mar 2021

Curator | Abbra Kotlarczyk

Mentor | Kyla McFarlane

The 2020 Emerging Curator Mentor program is focused on curatorial research and the development of an exhibition at BLINDSIDE.

The annual Emerging Curator Mentorship is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria and the City of Melbourne. 

110%, Beth Sometimes, Debris Facility Pty Ltd, Isadora Vaughan, Kate Hill, Sarita Gálvez, Stefanie Hessler and others TBC.

Micro-(bial) Tenancies is a multi-platform project. It will be delivered through an evolving and staggered program of conversations, events and material incubations and interrogations ONLINE and ON-SITE at BLINDSIDE.

PART I :: MATTER LIAISON ≈ Debris Facility Pty Ltd
PART II :: TEXTUAL TRACT ≈ Abbra Kotlarczyk
PART III :: PROTRACTED HOSPITALITY ≈ Kate Hill & Sarita Gálvez
PART IV :: PARA-SITE ≈ guest curated by Stefanie Hessler
PART V :: ARTIST AS HOST ≈ Isadora Vaughan & 110% @110.percent
PART VI :: MICRO-DISPATCHES ≈ Beth Sometimes

Through an expanded view to microbial processes of disease and fermentation, Micro-(bial) Tenancies centres feminist and queer practices concerned with ethics and gestures of hospitality. The always aporetic term hospitality, as Jacques Derrida points out, shares a close etymological and philosophical terrain with its seeming contra-term hostility. From this troubled premise, this project aims to facilitate a decentred approach to host/guest relations within a multi-site exhibition context, in considering the micro-tenancies and transgressions of bodies—broadly defined—in times of crisis.

Abbra Kotlarczyk (based Naarm/Melbourne) maintains a research-based practice that is articulated through modes of conceptual art making and writing of criticism, poetry and prose. She is a freelance academic editor for socially-engaged artistic research and practice as well as an independent curator. Her practice is hinged on visual and linguistic inquiries that often take place trans-historically through expanded notions of care, queerness, publication, citizenry and embodied poetics. Curatorial projects include Queer Economies with Madé Spencer Castle (Bus Projects, St Heliers Street Gallery Abbotsford Convent and Centre for Contemporary Photography, presented by Midsumma Festival with support from Perimeter Editions and the David McDiarmid Estate, VIC, 2018-19); and m_othering the perceptual ars poetica with Antonia Sellbach (Counihan Gallery, VIC, 2019). Recently she accompanied West Space Director Amelia Wallin on a walk along Edgar’s Creek on Woiworung Country (Coburg, VIC) as part of their COVID-lockdown response series of audio conversations: Artist Walks.

Kyla McFarlane is Senior Academic Programs Curator, Museums and Collections, at the University of Melbourne. She has worked both independently and held key curatorial positions at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne and Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne. McFarlane has written and curated extensively on visual art in Australasia, with a particular emphasis on lens-based, performative and feminist practice. Prior to joining The Ian Potter Museum of Art she was Acting Curatorial Manager, Australian Art at Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane and in 2014 she was an Asialink Arts resident in Singapore. 

Debris Facility is a para-corporate entity who engages im/material contexts with the view to highlight and disrupt administrative forms and their embedded power relations. Deploying print, design, installation, and wearables as the most visible parts of operations, they also work in experimental pedagogy and expanded performance through labour. They are a white-settler and acknowledge theft and dispossession as the implicated ground from which they work. They currently hold contracts with Liquid Architecture, Victorian College of the Arts, Monash University and Debris Facility Pty Ltd.

Kate Hill (based Naarm/Melbourne) maintains an installation and research based practice that draws on materials and processes connected to ceramics—earth, clay, water and fire—as matter to explore place based narratives in particular sites. Kate completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at RMIT in 2010, and a Masters of Community Cultural Development at Victorian College of the Arts in 2014 where she was awarded the Jim Marks Postgraduate Scholarship. Kate has undertaken residencies and site-based research in regional and urban Australia and is a current PhD candidate with the Faculty of Fine Art at Monash University, where she is further exploring the politics of land use.

Sarita Gálvez is a Chilean/Australian educator, artist and mother living in the unceded lands of Ilwempe Ilwempe on Arrernte country. She was recently awarded a PhD in Education at Monash University. As a mestizx woman, i.e. with mixed Indigenous and Spanish heritage she investigates the representation of First Nations knowledges and practices in her work and how she can learn with young people from the Traditional Custodians to care for the lands and waters she and her family inhabit as uninvited guests. In 2019 she was awarded a grant from the Victorian Government to conceptualise and coordinate an interdisciplinary Creekulum along the Merri Merri Creek. Nowadays, she is committed to her family-artist practice through Galambitxs, she and her partner Bryan are homeschooling their children in deep collaboration with them as co-designers of a family curricula. They learn together how to practice care for land and water and sky as they question and resist the ongoing colonial force of the Australian and Chilean nation states.

Stefanie Hessler is a curator, writer and editor. Her work focuses ecologies, technology and expanded definitions of life and non-life from an intersectional feminist perspective. Recent curatorial projects include “Down to Earth” at the Gropius Bau/Berliner Festspiele in Berlin (2020); “Joan Jonas: Moving Off the Land II” at the Museo Thyssen in Madrid (2020); the 6th Athens Biennale (2018); and the symposium “Practices of Attention” at the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo (2018). She has edited books like Tidalectics. Imagining an Oceanic Worldview through Art and Science, published by The MIT Press (2018). Her monographic book Prospecting Ocean was published by The MIT Press and TBA21–Academy in 2019. Hessler is visiting research scholar at Westminster University in London and curator of the 17th MOMENTA Biennale in Montreal (2021) titled “Sensing Nature". Since 2019, she is the director of Kunsthall Trondheim in Norway, where she recently curated a solo exhibition by Jenna Sutela and is currently working on the research and commissions-based exhibition “Sex Ecologies” together with The Seed Box environmental humanities collaboratory.

Isadora Vaughan is a Naarm/Melbourne-based sculptor with a research-driven practice informed by interests in material intelligence and the interdependence of human and non-human life. Vaughan’s immersive environments and sculptural language are characterised by the tension between materiality and form, as well as an urgency to find ways of making that are simultaneously productive, resourceful, enveloping and unsettling.

110% (Kieran Bryant, Beth Dillon & Lachlan Herd) are emerging artists currently based between Australia and Switzerland who create site-responsive works of live performance, video, installation and sculpture. Their collaboration stems from the intimacy and playfulness of friendship, and continues to grow through conversation, humour, and mutual care. Their practice has developed from a shared interest in amateur choreographies of the body in space; the aesthetics of uniformed labour; and modes of hosting and participation in performance. Previous works have investigated competitive cultures of positive thinking; explored the relationship between art appreciation and the pursuit of leisure; tested the dynamics of artist-audience relationships; and considered the impact of long-distance separation on collaborative practice and motivation. 110% often stage interventions that play with the presentation of performance in festival, fair and gallery contexts. These interventions may take the form of an interruption, an invitation, an oasis, a sweaty mess.

Beth Sometimes is a Pākehā artist, interpreter/translator and language worker from Aotearoa living in Arrernte Country. She works regularly with Arrernte and Pitjantjatjara people across a range of projects, collaborating to invigorate language and song knowledge. She is interested in language care and land care and the associated interrogation of coloniality and extractive relations. Together with Central Arrernte people, she produced Apmere Angkentye-kenhe (A Place for Language) from 2016-2020. Beth locates her practices and labours in and around Watch This Space artist run initiative and is part of a network of caretakers there. In 2020 she was gifted a microscope which is assisting her to think with tiny beings and the questions they present us with.

IMAGES | Debris Facility Pty Ltd, Matter Liaison, 2020, graphic interface and project design. Courtesy the artist. | 110%, Wet Nurse, 2019. Photograph 110%. Performance development video still, Ella Sowinska. Courtesy the artists. | Isadora Vaughan, Ogives 2020, installation view, Overlapping Magisteria, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. Photograph Andrew Curtis | Courtesy the artist and STATION, Melbourne.