Feedback Loops

MADISON BYCROFT
born 1987, Adelaide
lives and works in Marseille, France

Ruses and refusals 2019
four channel digital video installation with sculptural elements
60:00 mins

Aidos team 2019
pastel and pigment on paper
535.0 x 760.0 cm (four panels, overall)

Bogged portamento 2019
concrete, pigment, found metal stool, trombone
120.0 x 120.0 x 40.0 cm
Courtesy the artist

Madison Bycroft’s diverse art practice – encompassing sculpture, costuming, drawing, surreal theatrics and video narrative – shares an aesthetic of kaleidoscopic excess that liberally samples imagery, text, ideas and language from references including social and political history, popular culture, philosophy, mythology, cinema and art history. This major new installation, with the chaptered suite of videos and sculptures in Ruses and refusals 2019 at its core, is rooted in a consideration of historical, fictional or mythological characters who have, as the title suggests, either refused to conform to – or otherwise wilfully subverted – social norms.

Those referenced include Julian of Norwich, a writer and anchoress of the Middle Ages, who is credited as authoring one of the earliest surviving books by a woman writer, and who lived in seclusion in a cell adjacent to a church; and who here occupies a space in ACCA’s wall cavity. Another figure is Diogenes of Sinope, a founder of Cynic philosophy, who chose to live, concealed, in a barrel in a market place, and is depicted in this work in slumped sculptural form and by way of reference to art historical images which Bycroft animated to music samples cut from 1990s R&B and hip hop hits. Another section of the video depicts the Greek mythological nereid Thetis, the mother of Achilles and a shapeshifter who once took the form of a cuttlefish and was entangled in the realms of Eros, empathy and desire.

A marvellous wordsmith, Bycroft pays careful attention to the subtle shifts in sound, meaning and intent made possible – and corruptible – by the English language. A key element of this is Bycroft’s playful complication of the role of the narrator, who at times aids, and at others obfuscates, meaning for us as viewers. Oscillating between objective and subjective perspectives, the narrator’s voice occasionally breaks the theatrical ‘fourth wall’, addressing a consciousness about the very production of the work, as well as prompting us to consider our complicity in the desire to make meaning from what we encounter.

SAHEJ RAHAL
born 1988, Mumbai
lives and works in New Delhi, India

Antraal 2019
artificial intelligence program presented on television monitors and as video projection

Other limbs 2019
enamel paint on polyurethane and found materials (three parts)
dimensions variable
Courtesy the artist and Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai
Commissioned with the residency support of Monash University, Melbourne

A sculptor, painter, performer and coder, Sahej Rahal’s works are characterised by surreal propositions and alternate worlds, which seem to be situated in an unfamiliar future, while firmly rooted in lessons from the past. Rahal describes his recent body of work as a ‘growing mythology’, one that is influenced by his deep interests in science fiction and contemporary new materialist philosophy, along with a critical engagement with the role of technology in our day-to-day lives, as well as a dark sense of humour.

The imagery that we see projected here at scale, and in the fishbowls of cathode-ray televisions, is not a series of videos, but rather the environments of Rahal’s artificial intelligence program. Antraal 2019 roughly translates from Sanskrit to mean an ‘interstice’, or a space between, and is home to Rahal’s cast of lanky characters, who have been devised by the artist, but are ultimately making their own ‘decisions’ about how they move through this world, based on the scripted poetry of algorithmic instruction. Riffing off a new materialist and post-humanist decentring of the human in thinking about the world in which we live and the future we could enter, Rahal asks us to consider the possibility that these creatures are capable of sentient thought, but that we as human viewers are not capable of comprehending their intellect due to the current limitations of our own.

The role of the loop or cycle in Rahal’s working methodology is most literally apparent in the relationship between the sculptures and AI programming. The abstract forms of Rahal’s armatures are initially informed by the shapes and movements of the characters that he first began coding in his first AI in 2018, Juggernaut. The shapes that the Juggernaut made in turn inspired new sculptural forms, which fed into the creatures we see in Antraal as well as these three newly-commissioned sculptures. The skeletons of Rahal’s sculptures are always comprised of found or discarded matter, ranging from furniture to industrial waste specific to the location in which they are made – in this case wooden offcuts from student graduate projects at Monash University’s Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, where Rahal undertook a residency in November 2019.

JUSTIN SHOULDER
born 1985, Sydney
lives and works in Sydney

MATTHEW STEGH
born 1973, Sydney
lives and works in Sydney

ANTHONY AITCH
born 1992, Sydney
lives and works in Sydney

Carrion cosmology 2018–ongoing
synthetic polymer paint on tyvek, found plastic, medical skeleton, plastic mask, found earphones, motors
dimensions variable
Courtesy the artists and Insite Arts, Melbourne

Working primarily in live performance, Justin Shoulder’s practice increasingly seeks to bridge the presentation of performance across the spaces of the theatre, night club and art gallery. Over one week from 17–22 February 2020, Shoulder will perform the character of Carrion, the most recent member of his cast of fantastic characters, building on Shoulder’s episodic approach to performance first developed during a residency at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris earlier in 2019. Shoulder’s embodiment of Carrion, initially introduced in a standalone theatre-based work in 2018, will comprise a deepening of the mythology and embodiment of this form’s approach to all manner of actions: how they might communicate, move, see, feel and experience the worlds that they inhabit.

Costuming and the sculptural construction of an environment are vital to Shoulder’s development of a character. Shoulder sets the scene for the post-apocalyptic world into which the Carrion finds itself, with notes towards scripting that offer a simultaneous sense of poetry, spiritedness and unsettling darkness that epitomises his work:

A dissimulation of finches in collective bird song tweet requiem in d-minor, polyphonic tones carry on the wind. Warm rain falling. Steam. Lyrebirds mimic chainsaws while Bower birds collect and angle sinews of iridescent cabling building the form of an ancient child’s body. Sign: a snake gets trapped in an endless loop of its own skin after shedding. Soft-bodied legless larva are downloaded, they slither beneath the old baby’s flesh. Leeches placed on the nervous system gently animate this lobotomized vessel. The Iris dilates red, timelines streaming abject horror punctuated by glistening moments of poetry. Its soft bony hands begin to scratch at the earth at the base of a tree, a pulsing heart is lifted from its base.

TIANZHUO CHEN
born 1985, Beijing
lives and works in Beijing and Shanghai

ANDREW THOMAS HUANG
born 1985
lives and works Los Angeles

Exo-performance / Baby Chinayu 2019
high definition video
5:43 mins
Music: Meuko!Meuko!

Exo-performance / Beio 2019
high definition video
5:43 mins

We can reveal, the shadow of a shadow 2019
vinyl lettering
dimensions variable
Courtesy the artists and MAB / Bank Gallery, Shanghai
Presented in association with AsiaTOPA 2020, with the support of Arts Centre Melbourne and the Sidney Myer Fund

Tianzhuo Chen’s practice is characterised by a high-energy sampling and re-imagining of influences ranging from Buddhist art and philosophy through to performance in contemporary underground club culture. Rooted in Chen’s interest in the nightclub as a contemporary form of temple – in which states of trance or transcendence, as well as transgression, are explored – these works evoke the extremes of human desire, belief and pleasure-seeking, along with our capacity to trigger chaos and entropy. There is an existential tenor to the seemingly binary offer of the post-apocalyptic worlds of inferno and ice and the question as to whether these are windows into another realm, or some kind of demonic divine warning for our near future.

Collaboration is a key part of Chen’s practice. Working across performance, installation video, fashion and music, Chen is also the driving force behind the multifaceted project Asian Dope Boys, within which the Beio and Baby Chinayu – depicted in these videos – have been long-time co performers. For these videos, Chen has worked closely with acclaimed digital artist and filmmaker Andrew Thomas Huang; with whom he shares a tendency towards the fantastical melding of the real and virtual, the past, present and future, as well as formal distinctions between performance, music videos and visual art. Their rule-busting approach to computer-generated imagery celebrates notions of the glitch and grid, contributing significantly to the work’s illusory and unsettling effect.

TIANZHUO CHEN
born 1985, Beijing
lives and works in Beijing and Shanghai

Brain damage freak show 2018
slide projection; fifty 35 mm slides
Courtesy the artist and MAB / Bank Gallery, Shanghai
Presented in association with AsiaTOPA 2020, with the support of Arts Centre Melbourne and the Sidney Myer Fund

In 2017 and 2018, Tianzhuo Chen internationally toured his major pop-opera titled An Atypical Brain Damage – a nod to the English psychedelic band Pink Floyd’s song Brain Damage, and to altered states of mind more broadly. An Atypical Brain Damage was spectacularly audacious in its liberal mash up of popular culture with mythology and folklore, along with personal and collective narratives and hybrid histories, in which binary constructs, including the beautiful and grotesque, along with notions of ‘East’ and ‘West’, are corrupted and dismantled.

An Atypical Brain Damage was documented as a record – an extract of which is shown here in slide form on continuous loop – as well as a provocation to inspire and inform the production of new work, including the Exo-performance videos. The vinyl lettering produced as part of this installation makes an absurdist and playful reference to a fevered dream in which two performers are visited by a spirit of contemporary art and receive the simultaneously loaded and abstracted divine missive that ‘only through art’ can they ‘reveal the shadow of a shadow.’

LU YANG
born 1984, Shanghai
lives and works in Shanghai

The Great Adventure of Material World 2019
single-player, role-playing computer game, LED neon, wallpaper duration variable
Courtesy the artist
Presented in association with AsiaTOPA, with the support of Arts Centre Melbourne and the Sidney Myer Fund

The Great Adventure of Material World 2019 is Lu Yang’s most ambitious computer game-based work to date, for which the audience are invited to interact and play the character of the Material World Knight. As players, we follow what at first appears to be a typical role-playing computer game format: with a narrative of completing ‘quests’, battling (or avoiding) enemies, and achieving ‘victory’ by way of growing in power and ability over the course of the ten stages. However, as is characteristic of Lu’s work, we soon learn that this storyline is provocatively tongue-in-cheek.

This game is ultimately constructed in antithesis to the medium’s popular ‘escapist' promise. While Lu’s aesthetic draws playfully from popular culture – from the Japanese anime and games arcades of her childhood, to the current commerce machines of pop music and ComiCon – her conceptual concerns are rooted at the intersection of a Buddhist upbringing and her contemporary scientific and philosophical research. In stage one of the game, Lu sets a scene in which the Knight encounters the character of Uterus Man, the androgynous star of an earlier game by Lu, who delivers – in the space where we would usually receive instruction or fantastical description – the artist’s musing that: ‘[w]e create various ideologies, mental states, and social systems in order to rationalise and justify the Material World’.

Wallpaper generously supported by Colour Factory, Melbourne. ACCA also acknowledges the advice of Mathew Spisbah, curator of AsiaTOPA’s Sinofuturists live performance program.

ZADIE XA
born 1983, Vancouver, Canada
lives and works in London

BENITO MAYOR VALLEJO
born 1981, Zaragoza, Spain
lives and works in London

Echoes of a Shapeshifter 2019
polymer resin, patina, acrylic paint, denim and synthetic hair
90 x 30.0 x 15.0 cm

The conch sea urchin and brass bell 2017
two-channel digital video
34:10 mins
Filmed sequences: Benito Mayor Vallejo
Editing and sound: Zadie Xa

Performance mask for Crash Boom Hisssssss. Legend of the Liquid Sword 2017
hand carved lime wood, acrylic paint, synthetic hair, leather and linen
67.0 x 28.0 x 15.0 cm

A pilgrimage 2 family through the portal of a blue ghost 2019
machine sewn and hand stitched bleached, dyed denim, iridescent fabric and oil on
canvas
330.0 x 166.5 x 5.0 cm
Courtesy the artists

ZADIE XA

A map, a scroll and a lyric 2: Froth foam 2018
machine-stitched and hand-sewn fabric, mother of pearl buttons, glass beads, repurposed vintage leather, faux fur and bamboo
160.0 x 140.0 x 4.0 cm
Courtesy the artist

Originally trained as a painter, Zadie Xa overcame her frustrations with the limitations of a two-dimensional surface, by expanding her practice to encompass performance, video, textiles and costuming. Xa’s works present a form of theatrical storytelling that imbricate fact and fiction and are characterised by a literal and metaphorical patchwork of what she describes as a ‘personalised system of semiotics’; a figurative, and literal stitching together of individually meaningful references from popular culture, art history, fashion, feminism and mythology. Xa’s narratives chart relations between the human, natural and supernatural worlds, matrilineal connection and a consideration of the self and family in diaspora.

The two-channel video The conch sea urchin and the brass bell 2017, was made around the time of Xa’s second trip to Korea, with her mother, and collaborating partner Benito Vallejo Major. Here, Xa enmeshes an imagined narrative of a shamanistic, shapeshifting grandmother figure, deeply connected to the ocean, with that of her Korean-born and Canadian-based Mother, and her own developing personal mythology. With a pace that builds with a beat and dream-like sequencing, Xa brings together ripped footage of oceanic life-forms, and cosmic voyages real and imagined, with purpose-filmed footage of her own new ritualistic performance. Xa’s highly distinctive textiles and costumes enable the artist to enact her own form of shape-shifting. In this installation they operate in a space of superb tension between static sculptural forms, and as potent evocations of the artist’s absent performing body.

This presentation of Xa’s work comprises new commissions alongside earlier costuming that has been brought together to chart the increasing significance of references to water and marine life in her practice. Xa has embraced water as a powerful metaphor for the unknown, and as an abstract notion of a ‘homeland’. She also taps into the phenomenal qualities of marine life forms, in their relationship to, and distance from, the human species. The octopus in particular, which Xa celebrates as akin to the closest imaginable lifeform to an ‘alien’, with its brain structure so completely foreign to humans, performs a co-starring role in the video; while the orca, a species with a strong matrilineal social structure, is celebrated in a new performance mask and the two recent large-scale central textile and painting commissions.