TRACTION

Online 16 Oct 2020


Lauren Dunn, Sam Longmore, Amaara Raheem, Joel Stern

Convenor | Josephine Mead

PIVOT headshots.png



Under the umbrella title of TRACTION, BLINDSIDE will present four artist-focused professional development online presentations: PIVOT, ACCUMULATE, GAIN and PRIME.

ACCUMULATE  | will be a discussion around free / accessible new models of learning and sharing in the arts.
GAIN | will be a discussion around artist's rights and the call for an artist's union.
PRIME | will be a discussion about matriarchal power, ageing and ageism in the arts, with mature artists discussing their lived experience. 











PIVOT


TRACTION is a four-part discussion series that will examine ideas of modification and renewal within creative practice, the needs for upholding artist’s rights, the power of mature knowledge, and new modes of education and exchange. 

PIVOT is a discussion between artists / arts organisations who have had to pivot their art practice to come up with alternative creative solutions in-light of changing opportunities at this time.  

Lauren Dunn is an artist based in Melbourne, while predominantly working with photography she also occupies the idea of photographic thinking through other materials such as sculpture and video as a means of twisting the codes and conventions of photography. As an active participant in post-photographic discourse Lauren believes the many images we encounter on a daily basis are an indicator of broader political and social issues. With an inherent interest in the of popular consumption trends and their associated images, she utilises her practise to question the power structures influencing our consumer desires and the broader impact of commodity culture. Lauren is the founder of Image Collective and graduated from the VCA with a BA in Fine Art Honours in 2018. Her work is held in various public and private collections and she has been the recipient of a number of grants and awards.

Sam Longmore is an artist, electronic-musician and writer based in Auckland, New Zealand. His work is informed by the relationships between geography and acoustics, soundscape and phenomenology, installation and architecture.
Sam has been employed at The Audio Foundation since 2016, and worked on the external editorial board for the Writing Around Sound Sonic Arts Journal. 

Sam completed a MFA (1st hons) through the Elam School of Fine Arts between 2014 - 2016, during which time he twice received the Paul Beadle post-graduate research scholarship. He has performed and exhibited at galleries and project spaces throughout Aotearoa and abroad, and contributed writing to several institutions and journals, notably a pieces for Artspace about Julian Priest’s 2014 Chartwell commission, La Scala, and the Goethe-Institut Neuseeland's Themendossier around Hanno Leichtmann's 2018 artist residency. 
In addition, he runs the mf/mp imprint with artist and musician Karl Leisky.
mf/mp is a small operation dedicated to producers of marginal, peripheral, or otherwise experimental electronic music. Principally, this involves the curation of limited-edition split releases on which geographically separate artists are paired, as well as releases on cassette and CDr. 
Sam's work has been supported by Creative New Zealand and the New Zealand Music Commission.
This year Sam curated an online audio project for BLINDSIDE - SONIC.LAND

Amaara Raheem’s practice of choreography and performance is deeply shaped by her history of migration and multiple belongings. Born in Colombo, Sri Lanka, grown up in Melbourne, she lived fifteen years in London, and now splits her life between Naarm, Melbourne and Djab Wurrung country, rural Victoria. Recently Amaara pivoted her practice to collaborate with artist Caitlin Franzmann and Indigenous scholar and storyteller, Dr. Christine Black on a project called, Fortunes of the Forest: Divination, Dance, and Story, a live streamed, participatory performance that incorporated a deck of divination cards created by Caitlin of native plants found in Karawatha Forest, Brisbane. Together Amaara, Caitlin and Christine gave a "divination plant reading" to planetary questions posed by the audience, for which Amaara also choreographed a participatory dance (on zoom), as part of the first digital residency at the New Museum's Department of Education and Public Engagement, in New York City. Amaara is currently completing a practice led PhD at School of Architecture & Urban Design, RMIT University.

Joel Stern is a curator, researcher, and artist living and working on Wurundjeri land in Melbourne, Australia.
Stern’s work deals with a range of issues, themes and questions connected with theories and practises of sound and listening. Interests include: sound, power and control; covert listening and panacoustic surveillance; polyphony as social practice; experimental music and community ritual; speech, voice, subjectivity; eavesdropping and ventriloquism; techno-politics of machine listening; rhetorics of nonsense and bullshit; pandemic soundscapes; acoustic justice; silence as testimony; post, trans, and non-human listening.
Since 2013, Stern has been Artistic Director at Liquid Architecture, a leading Australian organisation that creates spaces for sonic experience and critical listening at the intersection of contemporary art and experimental music. In this capacity he has been responsible for hundreds of festivals, symposia, exhibitions, concerts and publications realised in Australia and internationally, with collaborators ranging from major museums and institutions through to community organisations and artist-led initiatives.
In addition to Liquid Architecture, Stern has led numerous independent organisations including: OtherFilm, a collective working with artists moving image and the legacy of avant-garde cinema; and Instrument Builders Project, a workshop, residency, exhibition series featuring artists, musicians and craftspeople from across Australia and Asia.
In 2018, with critical legal scholar James Parker, Stern curated Eavesdropping, an expansive project connecting Liquid Architecture, Melbourne Law School, Ian Potter Museum of Art, and City Gallery Wellington, which comprised exhibitions, public programs, working groups, tours, and a publication, addressing the ‘politics of listening’ through work by artists, researchers, writers, detainees and activists from Australia and around the world. Stern’s PhD thesis ‘Eavesdropping: The Politics, Ethics, and Art of Listening’ was completed through the Curatorial Practice program at Monash University, where he also teaches on sonic art.

Josephine Mead is a visual artist and writer based in Naarm (Melbourne). She is currently working as an Artistic Director for BLINDSIDE. She works through photography, sculpture, installation and writing to explore personal notions of support. Her recent work has positioned female family members as support-structures, considered the body as a site of discursive practice, explored notions of deep listening, and examined the temporal and sonic nature of writing and photography. She has held solo exhibitions at c3 contemporary art space, TAB Gallery (Turkey), Bus Projects and the Monash and RMIT faculty galleries. She has shown work in group exhibitions at a wide range of venues, including Blindside, Stockroom, Craft Victoria, Stacks Projects, Counihan Gallery, Five Walls, St Heliers Street Gallery, Kings Artist Run, Seventh, Blue Oyster Space (New Zealand) and as part of the TOMI Arts Festival (Japan). In 2018 she undertook the Arquetopia Foundation Residency (Puebla, Mexico), the Kings Emerging Writer’s Program, the Macfarlane Fund Residency (Kyneton, Victoria) and was published by Art+Australia and un projects. In 2019 she was awarded a Career Development Grant through the Australia Council for the Arts to undertake the Tasarim Bakkali TAB Residency (Istanbul, Turkey) and the Córtex Frontal Residency (Arraiolos, Portugal). In 2020 she commenced the ZK/U Residency at Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik (Berlin, Germany). She is a current Room to Create studio artist at Collingwood Yards (supported by City of Yarra) and is a founding member of the Image Collective.

PIVOT | Conversation # in BLINDSIDE TRACTION Series | Lauren Dunn, Sam Longmore, Joel Stern, Amaara Raheem, Josephine Mead. 1:37min. | Courtesy the speakers.