ARTICULATE: Alexandra Mitchell

Showing posts with label Alexandra Mitchell. Show all posts

4.3.18

t h e s u b t l e b e i n g s - WeiZen Ho - open from 11 March

t h e s u b t l e b e i n g s

by WeiZen Ho

@ Articulate project space

497 Parramatta Road, Leichardt

2018 Performances:

Thursday 22nd March, 6:30 - 8pm

Friday 23rd March, 6:30 - 8pm

Saturday 24th March, 2:00 - 3:30pm & 6:30 - 8pm followed by closing drinks.

Forum: Sunday 25th March, 2pm

Forum speakers are:

Julie Vulcan - Research based practice underpins much of Julie's work, which is developed through intensive residencies, participatory laboratories and exchange. Interested in questioning the veracity of mediated memory, Julie examines constructed histories and the motivations behind how we remember, record and re-write our actions, bodies and traces - past, present and future.

Phillip Mar means Horselover Horse in Greek and Chinese. He has an interest in cultural translation and interaction that has taken various forms, including music, writing, and the sociology and anthropology of migration.

Iqbal Barkat is a digital artist and filmmaker originally from Singapore, teaches screen production at Macquarie University. He is interested in thinking novelty in cinema and in the intersection between the real and the imaginary. He is currently working on a project that explores the outsider and Islam.

WeiZen Ho is the artist behind t h e s u b t l e b e i n g s

Alan Schacher as moderator

Open Hours:

11am-5pm, Thur-Sun, 11^th-25^th March 2018 (installation-in-progress open for viewing)
(from 10am Sunday 11 March for IWOST)

Please RSVP to weiofzen@gmail.com or call 0416 038 897

t h e s u b t l e b e i n g s is a performance installation that is the result of WeiZen’s two years of travel in Asia to research and witness of rituals in Sabah (East Malaysia) and Hanoi (Vietnam), rituals that are connected to her own geographical and socio-cultural heritage.

The work uses hair, text, sound, reflective film, sound circuitry, movement, vocals and video.

My collaborators are Katja Handt (costume designer), Iqbal Barkat (

associate director – film, dramaturgy, installation), Vincent Tay (cinematographer), Binh Ta (cultural artist-guide in Hanoi), Damian Castaldi (sound circuitry, kinetic sound-to-body designer), Michael Toisuta (sound design collaborator + engineer) and Oliver Damian (performance ritual helper). The installation team includes volunteers Sarah Keighery, William Seeto, Louise Morgan, Alexandra Mitchell and Naomi Ullmann.

The project was been made possible by Australia Council's Arts Project grant for WeiZen to study and develop ‘Performances, Interpreted & Reimagined of Asian Animistic & Shamanistic Rituals’_2016-2018.

“I am interested in the performance of ritual-like experiences of being possessed as a transformative experience for both the performer and onlooker. Then there is the notion of possession as the filling in of, and mediating of, many kinds of absences. It makes me wonder about the kinds of qualitative states that may make possession possible: mental vulnerability, uncertainty of social identity, lack of access to deeper communion or devotional spaces (and I don’t mean just religious institutional buildings), the thinning veil between life and death, the need for empowerment, unbelonging, dislocation, displacement and uprooting.

Coming from a lineage of Fujian people who migrated into Malaysia and Indonesia before the Cultural Revolution in China, the above-mentioned states are familiar. I suspect the migration process can exacerbate them, depending on the level of trauma and degree of choice involved. Migrants have to grapple with the cultural distance they have travelled from as well. I guess for some, a migrant’s world can be akin to a state of perpetual purgatory…

Possession can possibly be an instrument against despair and humiliation, where perhaps even a person dispossessed of country of origin, who is part of an invisible class in society or whose sense of identity is porous, can experience a sense of spiritual authority and communion, for example.
Part of my practice is the continual search for a performance structure that has integrity and yet is so minimal that it allows sixty to seventy percent space for improvisation and thereby hopefully, mediumship to occur. By mediumship I mean heightening my sensitivity to the guts of the performance, body imageries I am working on, and the presence of the space I am inhabiting..."

WeiZen Ho, Potus Sedere: Part of the Stories from the Body Performance Series; Rabbit 20 - Dance (A Journal for Non-fiction Poetry) published by RMIT in 2017

Background information:

http://www.weizenho.com/performance-installationinprogress/

http://articulate497.blogspot.com.au/p/comin-weizen-ho.html

WeiZen Ho from Stories from the Body #5 (PLATFORM 2017)

WeiZen Ho and Alan Schacher from Hungry Ghosts and Golem 2011

This project has been made possible by Australia Council's Arts Project grant for WeiZen to study and develop Performances, Interpreted & Reimagined of Asian Animistic & Shamanistic Rituals (2016-2018)

14.6.17

FINAL SOLIDARITY WEEKEND COMING UP

SOLIDARITY is open 11am - 5pm Fri-Sun Sunday 18th June

Curated by Akil Ahamat, Sarah Fitzgerald, Delilah Lyses-sApo and Alexandra Mitchell, Solidarity shows the work of sixteen current and recent students of Sydney College of the Arts, National Art School, UNSW Art & Design and UTS. The exhibition demonstrates the need to secure the diversity of art education in Sydney. Throughout the duration of the exhibition sixteen artists will use the project space as their studio space, working in sixteen mini studio spaces. The studios are open to the public who are invited in to see the process of art making, to talk with the artists and to see the final work at the Closing Party on Saturday 17th June from 6-8pm.

SATURDAY 17th JUNE

4-5pm: Performance: Mending the Memory Gap #3 - Stella Chen.

5:30-5:45pm: Performance: Matter and Musical Motion (plate bells, piano and voce) - Marta Ferracin with Kim Cunio and Heather Lee: Kim Cunio and Heather Lee will play with plate bells and intervals of piano and voce to generate a cosmic musical motion inspired by the concept of growing found in nature. The cyclic nature of the music is designed to mirror the organic motion happening in the installation itself.

6.15pm Address by local Greens NSW MP, Jamie Parker

7 pm: Performance by Liz Hogan

6-8pm: CLOSING PARTY

THE ARTISTS PARTICIPATING:

SCA - Kalanjay Dhir, Marta Ferracin, Delilah Lyses-sApo, Sophie Suttonberg

NAS - Dominic Byrne, Sarah Fitzgerald, Elizabeth Hogan, Elizabeth Rankin

UNSW A&D - Stella Chen, Alexandra Mitchell, Caoife Power, Douglas Schofield
UTS - Akil Ahamat, Ayesha Wasique, Kristina Savic, Rathai Manivannan

Photos Alexandra Mitchell

11.6.17

Solidarity afternoon of performances and talks

Mending the Memory Gap #3: Stella Chen used water to make the temporary language of the body's imprint and of its words

Caoife Power talked about her practice of collecting parts of the city and bringing them into her studio . . .

Rathai Mannivannan talked about using her art practice to explore her Tamil culture in Australia

Marta Ferracin talked about experimenting with the effect of sound on the growth of slime

Alexandra Mitchell discussed the incorporation of sound into her art practice

Kristina Savic discussed the struggles she has with making art without a studio

Sarah Fitzgerald discussed how she is using her location beside Parramatta Road in her work

Elizabeth Rankin discussed her use of narrative in her work and how it so often turns out to the narrative of her own life

28.5.17

SOLIDARITY artists' studios

One of the things Marta Ferracin is doing in her SOLIDARITY studio is working out how to grow single cells Physarum Polycephalum (slime mold) by protecting them from light and bacteria. She is also working with sound that resonates the concept of growing found in nature. Find out more about this on Saturday 10 June at 2.30 - 3.30pm (see program in earlier post). Photo: Marta Ferracin

21.5.17

SOLIDARITY - EXHIBITION EXPLANATION

There is no stability without solidarity and no solidarity without stability.

-Jose Manuel Barroso (2010)

There has been much disruptive rumour and speculation about the future of the art schools in Sydney and this has resulted in an overwhelming feeling that an arts education is undervalued and unsupported by current governments. Threats of closures and mergers have led to an atmosphere of uncertainty that makes it almost impossible for both academics and students to function let alone thrive as they should.

(Image credit – Sarah Fitzgerald, ‘Visions of utopia: Bauhaus’)

Studios are a vital part of an art education and the community of an art school. The studio is a place where creative freedom is supported within a challenging, academically critical environment and this is where an arts community, that continues beyond art school, is established.

(Image credit –Sarah Fitzgerald, ‘Dividing the space’)

Throughout the duration of Solidarity, Articulate project space downstairs gallery will be converted into sixteen studio spaces. Tape will be used to divide the gallery into studio spaces. How each studio space is inhabited will be up to the discretion of each artist and collective. Some artists may choose to use the space as a studio, some as an exhibition space and others may simply leave their space empty.

By focusing on the studio, Solidarity seeks to address what is lost amidst the current rumour and speculation about the future of the art schools of Sydney. What is lost? It is time. Time in the studio to think and contemplate. Time to make mistakes. Time to have breakthroughs. And ultimately – time to focus on art and the creation of art.

In conjunction with the exhibition there will be will be a program of events including a talk (that will focus on the current uncertainty and instability of Sydney's art schools and meditate on what needs to be done in order to ensure the security and diversity of art education in Sydney for the future) and a day of performance art. Program details will be released shortly.

It is hoped that this exhibition will be the start of fruitful collaboration between current and past art school students of Sydney and that future exhibitions will occur, Solidarity simply the first of many to come.