Speakers:
Colleen Chen – Lawyer and President, Young Workers Centre and founder of Interns Australia
Ben Eltham – Writer, Journalist, Researcher, Creative Producer & Social Commentator
Sarah Gory – General Manager, un Projects and former Director, Queensland Poetry Festival
Lucie McIntosh – Artist, Curator and Chair of Directors at BLINDSIDE
Hosted within the common space of Céline Condorelli’s installation, this discussion will respond to expanded notions of organised labour in the arts, who are the risk-bearers and for what reward. Presenters will discuss forms of solidarity and reflect on the potential of artists as a global activist workforce.
All Conference is a national organising network comprised of 15 artist-led, experimental and cross-disciplinary arts organisations. Representing a crucial stratum of the Australian arts ecology, All Conference members present diverse and innovative artistic programs which support the practices of living Australian artists. They connect these practices to diverse audiences via a passionate localism coupled with significant national and international peer-to-peer networks.
Speaker bios:
Colleen Chen is an advocate and researcher on emerging workplace relations issues. As the co-founder of Interns Australia and president of the Young Workers Centre, she has driven public awareness on the prevalence of unpaid work among young people, and has called for law reform to protect interns in the workplace. Chen speaks regularly to universities, community organisations and industry groups on the importance of developing quality pathways to employment, and has presented her findings to state and federal policymakers as well as at the International Labour Organisation in Geneva. In 2015 Chen was the recipient of the Commonwealth Government’s National Youth Award and was named the 2017 Law Student of the Year by the Law Institute of Victoria.
Dr Ben Eltham is a journalist, essayist and a lecturer in Media and Communications at Monash University School of Media, Film and Journalism. Eltham’s primary research interest is the public policy of culture in Australia, particularly at federal level. He has published peer-reviewed journal articles, conference presentations, creative works, edited book chapters, and published a monograph, When the Goal Posts Move: Patronage, Power and Resistance in Australian Cultural Policy 2013-2016 with Currency House in 2016. His current key research collaborations are with Professor Justin O’Connor’s cultural industries group at Monash University, and Professor Deb Verhoeven’s Kinomatics Group for digital humanities at Deakin University. Eltham has been the National Affairs Correspondent for federal politics at New Matilda for a decade and is a regular contributor to Crikey, Overland, Meanjin and the Sydney Review of Books among others.
Sarah Gory is a writer, editor, creative facilitator and cultural producer. Gory is the current General Manager of un Projects and has worked in the arts for over ten years, holding leadership positions with the Queensland Poetry Festival, Queensland Writers Centre, and National Young Writers Festival. Sarah’s creative non-fiction writing has been published in various literary journals, including the Lifted Brow and Stilts.
Lucie McIntosh is a visual artist, photographer and curator based in Melbourne, Australia. Lucie has a deep commitment to the independent arts community and has volunteered her time to a number of not–for–profit and contemporary art projects. She is currently a Director of BLINDSIDE, an independent, artist–run space based in the heart of Melbourne. Lucie’s exhibition and research based practice explores the politics surrounding notions of the image and the materialities of the photographic ‘image object’. Lucie engages with themes of knowledge, perception and representation, reflecting upon the nature of seeing by building relationships between viewers, objects and space.
