Choreographic experiments on screen
Saturday 11 February, 4pm – 6pm.
Body-Cites has been curated by Centre for Projection Art (CPA) artistic director Priya Namana for FRAME: a biennial of dance 2023.
Taking place across multiple sites in March, Body-Cites, as part of FRAME, will include a series of exhibitions, screenings and artist conversations, presented by CPA.
As part of this, Body-Cites: choreographic experiments on screen, in collaboration with Composite Moving Image Agency and Media Bank, is a film program with works by The Third Thing, Luna Mrozik Gawler, Wendy Yu and Harrison Hall and Sam McGilp. The program will be presented at Metro Arts in Meanjin (Brisbane), with a complimentary program being satellite to Composite and Bunjil Place in Naarm (Melbourne). Accompanying the expansive program will be a series of artist talks presented in unison with their works at various sites in Naarm (Melbourne).
The exhibition at Metro Arts is presented in two parts:
Part One: 11 February – 25 February, features work by Luna Mrozik Gawler and Wendy Yu.
Part Two: 27 February – 11 March, features work by The Third Thing and Harrison Hall and Sam McGilp.
This exhibition forms part of a collaboration between Composite and Metro Arts, with Composite presenting work by Queensland-based artist, Tyza Hart, in August 2023.
Image: Harrison Hall and Sam Mcgilp, Still from BONANZA!, 2020. Photo courtesy of the artists
ARTIST STATEMENTS
LUNA MROZIK GAWLER
Utilising experimental composition methods and centering more-than-human voices, Intertidal, is the second work in the ongoing research project Interspecies Scores. The scores attempt to distress anthropocentric habits, positioning non-human actants as vital collaborators and querying what knowledge is made available by attuning to the dynamic discourse of ecologic fields, forces, and forms. Generated through the movement of 320 waves at Mullaloo Beach in Wadjuk country, Boorloo, the visual score performed/translated in Intertidal rejects the binary lure of dystopic or utopic visions, offering imaginaries of perpetual and iterative reconfiguration in their place. Reveling in the tensions and timescales of transition, the Intertidal zone embraces the transversal bleed between worlds and epochs, identifying alterity as an invitation, not the marker of collapse.
WENDY YU
Acts of Holding Dance was developed out of a creative arts residency with the Centre for Projection Arts 2020 and had its first public appearance in January 2021. Conceptually, this work was heavily inspired by the academic writings of researchers Andre Lepecki and Anne McDonald who articulate the efficiency of dance as a communicator of mourning and loss through its ephemeral experience. Therefore, the stylistic intentions of capturing the dance that has passed in a, “script-like”, manner emphasizes the fleetingness of time felt through dance. The work was developed and filmed in Collingwood Yards.
THE THIRD THING
Khora is a video work that accompanies An Experiment in Intervals III – Violet Desert. Working with the theme of monstrosity as opportunity, the image centres on a body sitting within the crumbling arches of the Barreiro Industrial Park in Portugal – the site of what was once the largest industrial processing plant in the country. In the work, a monstrous figure spouts milk endlessly onto the barren and toxic grounds of the site. Historically, the monster exists as the deformation of ‘natural law’ – the corrupted off-spring of the classical Man as perturbed by the fecundity of the Feminine. In the context of colonial, patriarchal and capitalist ideologies, the children of modernity have grown to represent this off-spring; our alienation and hybridity a contemporary monstrosity.
Khora seeks to articulate this phenomena. Referencing the Greek term associated with a philosophy of radical otherness, a transitory form, a space or receptacle of change, it invites reflection on the deconstruction and reconstruction of our present-futures. In this way, the work questions whether monstrosity can be an opportunity to arrive to our living-being despite the ideological hauntings that history imposes.
HARRISON HALL AND SAM MCGILP
BONANZA! is a playful blend of dance/ film/ digital animation/ artist dialogue, filmed in Alpha60’s Chapter House. Created by Harrison Hall and Sam Mcgilp with Justin Kane, BONANZA! is ArtxDialogue with guests NAXS Corp (Taiwan) and Lu Yang (China). Digital and performance practices are accelerated to dizzying speeds before colliding explosively. This is the resulting detritus, an uneasy, humanist-futurism, a lament for our physical bodies and an exaltation of digital reincarnation.
Luna Mrozik Gawler is a transdisciplinary artist, working with fugitive and feral narratives to un/remake worlds. Working across diverse mediums and scales, their work favours species, scales and futures beyond the human. Their work has recently programmed or published by: The Australian Network of Art and Technology, The Powerhouse Museum of Art & Science, Platform Arts, The University of Melbourne Centre for Visual Art, Utrecht University, Kings run ARI and The Association for the Study of Literature, Environment & Culture. Luna is one-half of the queer-time lab GEOFADE and a founding member of L&NDLESS collective.
Wendy Yu is an interdisciplinary artist who works at the intersections of dance and urban media art. With particular consideration of elevating local street dancer’s through computer systems, she designs and builds large-scale immersive experiences for public spaces to broadcast dance to a wider and more diverse audience. Yu holds experience as a choreographer and dancer as well as an experience designer for web applications and motion design.
The Third Thing (PT/AUS) is an arts-based research collaboration seeking to investigate experimental methodologies in the negotiation, actualisation and instrumentalisation of the body in space. Working across audio-visual, textual and performance-based mediums, they are currently interested in conjoining philosophical provocations with phenomenological practices to surface movements, sites, imageries and relationalities of alterity and futurity. Within their practice is the commitment to the notion of a utopia-of-process that necessarily works with unpredictability, uncertainty and uncanniness as a means of grappling with existential thresholds.
Harrison Hall is a choreographer, performer and teacher based in Melbourne, Australia. Hall has created and presented his choreographic works throughout Australia (Sydney, Melbourne, Northern Nsw and Townsville), In Japan at Kinosaki International Arts Centre + DOSO in Fujiyoshia, in Germany for the Ponderosa Tanzland Festival, Malaysia at MAPFEST and was commissioned by Dancenorth to co-choreograph Tectonic a site specific work, in collaboration with the Poruma Island Dancers of the Torres Straits, as part of the Strand Ephemera Festival.
Sam Mcgilp is a media artist and researcher working in contemporary performance contexts. He seeks to create digital states of play that foreground somatic and performative knowledge in digital work. His PhD research with Chambermade and RMIT was awarded the Vice-chancellor’s Phd Scholarship and the emerging scholar award.
Centre for Projection Art activates public spaces through artistic outcomes engaging projection art that invites our audiences to be curious, and reflective and to bring their sense of discovery with them. We work responsively through site-specific works and use projection art as a way to gather and be in conversation with our community.
Working with both practising and emerging artists, to help them explore, learn and develop their language around projection art, we resource and support artists interested in this medium with the digital literacy that allows them to expand and realise their practice further. From staging workshops, masterclasses, and mentorship programs, to running artist residencies and more, we are committed to developing the integration and use of Projection Art within a range of artistic mediums.
We’re also passionate about sharing what we do with others by producing and consulting on events that showcase the scope of Projection as an art form, continuing to present the much loved Gertrude Street Projection Festival. The festival is Australia’s longest-running projection festival. We have a reputation for discovering artists, uncovering interesting sites, exploring ideas and bringing together locals and visitors by night to experience playful, thoughtful and inspiring new media work.
Our events are a chance to share what we love with the wider communities and we celebrate the opportunity to bring people together.
FRAME: A biennial of dance is a new pilot festival in Melbourne and surrounds occurring throughout March 2023.
FRAME has been created following three years of consultation and co-design and exists through the collective will, desire and need of the dance sector comprising artists, organisations, arts workers, presenters and advocates.
Composite: Moving Image Agency & Media Bank is an Artist-Run agency dedicated to supporting artists’ moving image practices in Australia through exhibition, research, education and distribution.
Housed within a dedicated screening room and production space at the Collingwood Yards, Composite is an organisation of many parts. It works in concert with other organisations, initiatives and festivals to champion artists’ moving image practice in the visual arts to a wide audience and create new income opportunities for individual working artists.
Composite hosts a year-round exhibition program; facilitate screening events, workshops and education programs; build an online database of artists’ video and film works; develop a distribution and licensing model for Australian artists video and film works; and house a Media Bank to provide free loans of technical equipment for artists working with moving image.
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Acknowledgement of Country
Metro Arts acknowledge the Jagera and Turrbal peoples, as the custodians of the land we work on, recognising their connection to land, waters and community. We honour the story-telling and art-making at the heart of First Nations’ cultures, and the enrichment it gives to the lives of all Australians.
Metro Arts accepts the invitation of the Uluru Statement from the Heart and supports a First Nations Voice to Parliament enshrined in the Australian Constitution.