Disrupted Histories 2022

04 Feb 2022 : Articulate Project Space, Sydney

Part of the group exhhibition per.doc, the 4th Decade Show, Documenting Articulate 2010-2020 (delayed until 2022 due to Covid 19) This exhibition had a focus on performance. The catalogue includes an Introductory essay I wrote and can be downloaded via this link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cVNP16fXuv53C_qjBuPIsLoEByVz_0Q0/view

I presented a short performance for the opening event on 5 February with celery and buckets, perhaps a ‘celerymony’ coinciding with Chinese New Year.

I’ve performed at Articulate on separate occasions since 2011. With various people, mediums, and in shifting locations. The materials and objects exhibited here are the streams of connection between actions, ideas, times. Perhaps the relics hold memory and constitute a form of documentation, they also conflate to new associations. This accumulation of bits and pieces refers backwards and assumes its own narrative of connectedness. Besides their intrinsic histories as found and pre-used items, these objects constitute a contextual relationship. They speak of and extend the means by which I am able to suggest the outsider, the refugee, homelessness and survival. I’ve put together old buckets, some containing refined white flour, white sugar and salt, ‘the three white poisons’, introduced as staple foods on Missions. The army blanket, suggestive of refugee crises, could also recall the smallpox infected blankets given to Aboriginals by the British. As a ground I’ve added hand-shredded black paper, used as a reference to reductive art, it here might also allude to ruptured histories.

Materials:  grey woollen army blanket with blue stripe, Australian dated 1942 6 galvanised and/or black-painted metal buckets  flour, sugar and salt (approx 8  kilograms each) black A4 paper sheets and hand-shredded strips

Performances referenced: Spin (detail and excerpt), Old Darlington School, University of Sydney (1993), The Gravity of the Situation, Gravity Feed, Millers Point, Sydney (1998),  Diasporic Body, Da Dao Live Art Festival, Beijing (2006),  The Stirring, DeQuincey Co., Carriageworks (2007),  The Bland Project, Gravity Research Institute, Carriageworks (2008), Two Men Scenarios, with Peter Fraser, Articulate Project Space (2011), Two Men Scenarios, with Peter Fraser, Platform 5, Fraser Studios (2012), Diasporic Body, Articulate Project Space (2015), Performature:Performateur 1, curated by WeiZen Ho, Articulate Project Space (2019), Black Reamer, Biennale of RNOA, Stores Building, Old Parramatta Gaol (2019), Rain on my Parade, Blue Too, MAPBM, Wayout Art Space, Kandos (2021)



Project Details
Dates 04 Feb 2022 to 20 Feb 2022
Duration 9 days
Collaborators The exhibition included works by Alison Clouston + Boyd, Elizabeth Hogan + Lisa Sage, Sydney Art Exchange, Emma Wise, John Gillies, Linda Luke, Kit Bylett + Katya Petetskaya, Rakini Devi, Tom Isaacs, Renay Pepita, Lucky Lartey + Lucinda Clutterbuck + Shane Rozario, Jo Truman + Andy Milne, Barbara Campbell + Clare Grant.
Producer Articulate Project Space
Category installations
Credits

Photos by Vsevolod Vlaskine, WeiZen Ho, Elke Wohlfhart, Rakini Devi, Alan Schacher