For the extraordinary season of events initiated by SymbioticA to make the bicenteenary of the publication of Mary Godwin Shelley’s Frankenstein, I have several works and activities that are part of Unhallowed Arts.
The first is the final keynote for the beautifully titled Quite Frankly It’s A Monster Conference during which I will present key note "Unseam’ed: A performed assemblage of utterances, sighs and breaths", a performative text, a performance lecture or sorts that forms a sort of prologue for a performance I will present on Sunday.
The work on Sunday commences at 17.00 and ends at 20.00 and can be entered at any point, viewers are welcome to come and go as they please and to spend as long or as short a time as they wish.
What if This Was the Only World She Knew?
Date: Sunday 21 October 2018
Opening time: 17.00 – 20.00 (3 Hours)
Location: Old Girls' School, East Perth
The auditorium is a bare space, too big, too huge. It is an invisible forest. She is the only person who is allowed to walk on the forest floor. Everything exists more on the level of incipience, inchoate dreams and pre-articulate sensations. But some huge currents are moving - too deep to put into words - or thoughts even.’ The materials try to speak themselves, eggs, earth, glitter, wind, breath, carpet, flesh. Everything is exactly what it is. Everything is exactly something else. It is an entire world. A prefixal world.
Over three hours, as day moves to dusk and night falls, a series of material embodiments and immaterial disembodiments will be performed in the large auditorium, it’s stage and a small room to the side of the stage.
Viewers are welcome to enter this other world, to remain for as long or as short a time as they wish, or to come and go.
In addition I also have works in two group shows, the first is Hyperprometheus
19 Oct – 23 December 2018
Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts
Hyperprometheus takes specific meanings derived from Frankenstein and presents them within the realm of emerging and historical artistic disciplines. Considering specific meanings of the novel within the 21st century context, Hyperprometheus combines these with Timothy Morton's notion of Hyperobjects. The selected artworks are drawn from experimental, contemporary and biological arts and tackle ideas of life and death, the creation and assemblage of life, the reanimation of the non-living, future life, synthetic biology, the technological non-human and the responsibility of creators.
This exhibition focuses on the intersection of the living and the non-living, artifice and nature, reproductive and biomedical technologies and other scientific and technological practices of our age. Mary Shelley ‘looked to the creative aspects of Prometheus’ persona to ask important questions about the limits of the artistic and scientific imagination' and in Hyperprometheus we consider such limits within the context of the new millennium. Curated by Eugenio Viola, Laetitia Wilson and Oron Catts.
Artists, AES+F, Tarsh Bates, Erich Berger and Mari Keto, Erin Coates, Thomas Feuerstein, Hayden Fowler, Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Heather Dewey Hagborg and Chelsea E. Manning, Sam Jinks, Olga Kisseleva, Daniel Lee, Kira O’Reilly, ORLAN, Nina Sellars, Justin Shoulder, Stelarc, Lu Yang
The second is Dark Skies Ahead
Opening Oct 20
Paper Mountain
Curated By Jenn Garland
Written in the ‘year without a summer’ of 1816, Frankenstein was a product of extreme weather across the globe due to volcanic winter following the Mount Tambora eruption. This brief period of climate change triggered devastating worldwide harvest failures and provided fertile ground for speculative and gothic fiction.
Two hundred years later, as dark clouds gather on the horizon, what can we draw from Mary Shelley’s cautionary tale of unnatural life born of human hubris and unrestricted techno-science? Dark Skies Ahead, explores science as a contestable power field which offers shelter from the forecasted storm while hastening its arrival and fuelling its intensity. Local and international artists present works which consider ecological futures, spatial and atmospheric perceptions and the dual potential of science.
Artists: Amy Perejuan-Capone, Devon Ward, Nathan Thompson, Angela Garrick, Yanai Toister, Kira O'Reilly + Jennifer Willett
Studies for what is this were the only world she knew