to listen, not to preserve

8 - 25 Apr 2020

Curators| Isabella Hone-Saunders and Sebastian Henry-Jones

Archie Barry, Kevin Diallo, Debris Facility Pty Ltd., Snack Syndicate, Shivanjani Lal
, Jess Gall

While popularly understood as an unproductive space, we wish to demonstrate anonymous positions as dynamic and occupied by many. In considering the relationship of this location to power, a central question of the show is that of image production, value, and the efficacy of pictures in truth-telling processes. We hope to touch upon ideas of surveillance, representation, and the influence of technology in these. Such an undertaking requires a sensitivity to the nuances and history of display, and recognises opaqueness as a useful strategy for preserving meaning. Inaudibility can be a powerful quality when art is so often an arena for giving and interpreting evidence: when the expression is politics or pain, there is power in withholding information, dignity in silence and value in avoiding translation. With this is mind, we wish to take time thinking about the exhibition format for how it regulates modes of voyeurism, testimony and witnessing, spectacle and categorisation.

Snack Syndicate is a two-person critical art collective comprised of Astrid Lorange and Andrew Brooks. We make exhibitions, publications, and public programs. Our work is motivated by an ongoing commitment to study as a practice of everyday life and seeks to find new forms for the expression of this activity. We aim to develop projects that open spaces of encounter and foreground dialogue, exchange, collaborative learning, and shared resources. We are interested in the regulation and mediation of bodies, systems of power and discipline, and histories of resistance and survival. We are close readers of critical race theory, gender and sexuality studies, poetry, music, and popular media. We work towards a better understanding of and resources for resistance against racial capitalism in its many different forms and expression – for example, white supremacy, patriarchy, and climate change. Our work has been presented at venues and events such as Artspace, Alaska Projects, MADA Gallery, the Biennale of Sydney, Firstdraft, Liquid Architecture, and more.

Shivanjani Lal is a twice removed Fijian Indian Australian Artist. Her history is shaped by the Kala Pani [Black Waters]. She is from the indentured labour diaspora of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. She works across mediums to explore her dislocation that seeks to account for memory, erasure, healing, and the archive. Currently Lal uses spatial and material activations along with video to create documents and site specific healing spaces which analyse her personal narratives and those of her ancestors in relationship to the broader context of the social and political history which brought her family from India to Fiji and now to Australia. Her work is for the women in her family.

Kevin Diallo is a Sydney based artist originally from the Ivory-Coast, whose practice suggests Blackness’ relationship to the future. Rooted in post-colonial discourse and race politics, Diallo’s work investigates how institutionalised ideas of Black and African authenticity can be deconstructed and challenged by means of juxtaposition through a variety of mediums, more particularly with alternative photographic processes, installations, sculptures and new media.

Archie Barry is an interdisciplinary visual artist based in Melbourne, Australia. Their work embeds language (spoken, sung or written) into gestures, serving to de-form and re-form words as embodied experiences. Through curating ontological spaces between what is and what can be, Barry’s work aims towards envisaging alternate possibilities for ever-evolving architectures of personhood.
Their work has been exhibited at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, the Centre for Contemporary Photography, The State Library of Victoria, Neon Parc (all Melbourne), Artspace Sydney and ALASKA Projects (Sydney) and Contemporary Art Tasmania amongst other spaces. Barry completed a Masters of Contemporary Art at Victorian College of the Arts in 2017.

Jess Gall, based in Naarm, works across multiple platforms using improvisation as a method of enquiry. Their work seeks to rupture, fragment and re-learn processes and values of composing collective and intimate experiences. Jess completed their BFA with Honours at RMIT, and is currently a resident at Dancehouse for the Emerging Choreographers Program. They have shown at TCB, Bus Projects, C3 contemporary art space, Neon Parc project space and BLINDSIDE

Debris Facility Pty Ltd. born 1986, Incorporated 2015. Lives and works in “Melbourne” Recent selected group exhibitions include TarraWarra Biennial 2016: Endless Circulation, TarraWarraMuseum of Art, Vic (2016); Ancient msg, Gertrude Glasshouse, Melbourne (2015); Losing spree, Studio 17, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne (2015); 2nd Tbilisi triennial Rustavi billboard, Tbilisi, Georgia (2015); BanyakBanyak, Langeng Art Foundation, Yogyakarta, Indonesia (2015); Incursions, Slopes gallery, Melbourne (2014); Interrupted expenditure, RM Project space, Auckland, New Zealand (2014); Dusty Chair, George Paton Gallery, Melbourne (2014); Brimming dissolution, buoyant expenditure, Dog park, Christchurch, New Zealand (2013); Pretty Air and Useful things, Monash Museum of Art, Melbourne (2012); Two-room exhibition, Rearview gallery, Melbourne (2013); Anything, Everything and One other thing (Parts1-5) Alaska Project Space, Sydney (2012); Impossible Objects I, Utopian slumps, Melbourne (2011); Make Do, C3 gallery, Melbourne (2011); Rock Solid, Pieces of Eight, Melbourne (2011); Zero dollar show, West Space, Melbourne (2011); Friends, TCB, Melbourne (2010); Territorial Pissings, Utopian Slumps, Melbourne (2010); De Tetris Totems, Sutton Project Space, Melbourne (2010); New World Records, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne (2009). Their work is held in the Shepparton Art Museum (SAM) Collection, Liquid Architecture, MUMA, multiple private collections, and landfill.

We, the curators and artists, acknowledge the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation as the custodians of the land and water ways on which we live and make work from, to these people, present, past and emerging; we pay our respect. Sovereignty has never been ceded.