Burnt Stars: resistance, resilience and systems - Opening Friday 13 November 6-8pm

a multi-screen installation by Jenny Brown,

Curated by Nicholas Tsoutas.

Open 11am - 5pm Friday - Sunday 14 -22 November.

Burnt Stars is a multi-screen installation that draws on the revolutionary horizon of German-born political thinker, Hannah Arendt (1906 – 1975), in the context of action for the common good. Burnt Stars uses the actions of three actors to juxtapose different representations of being in the world for this. These are Lena as herself and Hannah Arendt, Adam Nankervis as Joseph Beuys (1921 – 1986) and Jean Denis Romer as German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889 – 1976). 

Jenny Brown Burnt Stars 2015 (detail showing prop from the production:  Hannah Arendt's book 'On Revolution' and perforated metal tins for scraping sustenance from trees in concentration camps.)

Jenny Brown Burnt Stars 2015 (detail of prop from the production:  
Joseph Beuy's parachute from his crash landing on Martin Heidegger's hut.)

Burnt Stars developed out of research to creatively interpret the life and legacy of  Hannah Arendt that Jenny Brown undertook in 2012 and 2013 while in Germany on a Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) scholarship. This research focused on the reassessment of critical readings of her work as well as the story of her life, framed by an investigation of contemporary activism more broadly. 

The Burnt Stars installation consists of wall and floor screens depicting both Lena’s activism within the city of Hamburg and more abstract references to the theoretical positions of Hannah Arendt. Lena is proactively building community awareness about the rich history and potential of a derelict building, the former Schiller-Oper, by holding events around it. In its first year this was a large street festival. Burnt Stars includes documentation of the festival, together with the animations projected onto the building as part of it made by Gerald Rocketson and Petronius Amund (Rocket and Wink).

The screens also depict exterior scenes of Joseph Beuys’ fictional rescue by the Tartars, which is extended to include a crash landing on the roof of Martin Heidegger’s hut. Burnt Stars includes props used in the filming and a version of the hut Heidegger regularly stayed in in Todtnauberg. Like the original, it includes a picture of a young woman from the Black Forest and a wreath. The hut represents Heidegger’s narrow thinking along with his sentimentality about nature and dwelling places, a sentimentality that glorifies the native and excludes the foreign, and which underpins the ethnic chauvinism of Nazism.

The central motif in the work is the star in various states including when it is hurtling forward when already burnt out. The different representations include light from the torch, a bulb suspended from the ceiling in the Beuys performance, fireworks, stained glass windows, as well as their prismatic effects in the animation sequence that was projected onto the Schiller-Oper as part of Lena’s festival. Another representation is the light bulb from the Marburg building where the young Arendt met her teacher and lover Heidegger in his office, when he left the light on to indicate he was available to see her.

The individual performances by all the characters in the film, set theatrically within a Berlin gallery space, provide another thread in the work. In her role as Arendt, Lena repeats some of the text on remembrance, whilst climbing a two-metre high platform from which prisoners of the Gurs prison camp in France in 1940 would defecate into large tubs that collected excrement. Setting Arendt’s theorising of poetic thinking against her experience of this amplifies the origins of her fears of totalitarianism.

More detail on Burnt Stars here.

http://jennybrownjenny.com/

Longford Project Lab artist/curators talks Friday 21 February 6 - 8 pm

The Longford Project Lab begins today: Liz Day, Anna Gibbs, Julie Gough & Noelene Lucas

The Longford Project Lab is an ongoing project between Liz Day, Anna Gibbs, Julie Gough and Noelene Lucas exploring global and local connectedness - diaspora and reconciliation between people of Aboriginal and European descent. The Longford Project Lab is curated by Nicholas Tsoutis and Brianna Munting.

The artists are working in the project space between 8 - 23 February and it will be open to the public each Saturday and Sunday from 11am to 5pm.

Artists' & Curators' talk: Friday 21 February 6-8pm
Closing event: Sunday 23 February 2 - 4 pm.

above: Liz Day, Julie Gough, Noelene Lucas, Anna Gibbs at Longford, January 2014

 photo:  B. Munting. 

The Longford Project Lab follows on from a  residency during January 2014 in Longford Tasmania during which time connections to the community were formed. The residency will be ground work for the lab at Articulate.

The Longford Group is investigating the intersection of family and cultural histories through residencies developing skills through collaboration, community immersion and critical dialogues between the Longford community, Indigenous peoples, artists, writers & curators.The residencies interrogate the ideological, personal and geographical relationships between people, landscape, history and home and the tensions surrounding the group's personal connection to Longford, Tasmania. The residencies will be an interrogation of genealogical, colonial and post colonial histories of settlement and displacement, and community stories.

The residencies provide the opportunity for new collaborative practices to emerge expanding on the Group's previous work, Alchemy 2012. This residency will explore Longford as a point of departure for mapping our colonial and post colonial connections. It will engage with community to discover relations and interconnections of the local and global diaspora and Indigenous peoples. It will document the stories of those who came into Longford, or were always there, and then radiated out. 

By engaging with the participants’ family histories and the Longford residents' memories and their family histories, the research will identify the relationship of these family stories to the larger political and cultural histories of Tasmania and Australia, developing a philosophy of history and an the ethics of responsibility for the present made possible by the past.This opportunity emphasises the importance of meaningful exchange through immersion, negotiation and partnerships in and with cultures and across disciplines.

The first Longford Project Lab took place during Alchemy,
artist and philosophers' collaborations curated by Mireille Astore
 and Nicholas Tsoutas 2012, Sydney College of the Arts.