MEDIA RELEASE
15 Jan 2025

Tina Stefanou: You Can’t See Speed

4 April – 9 June 2025

A major solo exhibition by Greek-Australian artist Tina Stefanou, You Can’t See Speed features a new collaborative commission with blind motorcycle mechanic and rider Matthew Cassar, and surveys the artists’ diverse interests in experimental forms of performance, film, sculpture, ethnographic research and socially engaged practice.

Continuing ACCA’s history of highlighting Australian artists at critical moments in their practice, Tina Stefanou: You Can’t See Speed attends to the interconnected and multisensory experience of film beyond vision. The exhibition continues Stefanou’s interest in the voice as medium; co-creative collaboration, communal gathering and breaking bread; and solidary between humans and animals. Her work is also known to challenge institutions of power and capitalism, embedding the commons – from the planetary to the everyday – and her diasporic, working-class ethic within her work and practice.  

Presented across ACCA’s four galleries, Tina Stefanou: You Can’t See Speed transforms the building into a living instrument, merging its subterrain engines with the intimacy of voice, all within a haptic, tactile labyrinth of sculptures, films, live performances and dirt bikes. Altering perceptions and cultural hierarchies of sight and social access, the exhibition blurs the boundaries between vision-sound-touch to create an experiential landscape for blind, low vision and sighted audiences.

The new film and sculptural commission coincides with blind motorcyclist and collaborator, Matthew Cassar’s journey of riding dirt bikes in high performance contexts. Concerned with the ideals of collaboration and trust, Stefanou’s film follows Cassar along a surrealist voyage of adrenalin and self-actualisation. Shot across Super 8, 16mm, digital and high-definition film stocks – tracing the material histories of motion picture – the work interrogates notions of speed, long-euro-modernity and mechanical process captured on film, referencing Eadweard Muybridge’s images of the horse in movement to the machismo of contemporary motorcycle racing. Accompanying the film is a large-scale, site-specific stunt ramp emblazoned with totemic and ritualistic symbols such as evil eyes, crystals and rosettes, designed to protect from and ward against threats, both imagined and very-much real.

Alongside the new commission, Stefanou presents a modified configuration of her body of cinematic performance works. Featuring rural and regional collaborators, the films form a complex ecology of multispecies, class realities and rural poetics, from migrant, farmer and youth perspectives. The multiple screens are scaffolded by a field of sculptural materials, from salted horse-hooves to found agri-materials, which trespass across the galleries shifting them into a metaphorical nervous system made up of more-than-human, animal and machine parts. A chorus of poetic audio descriptions and closed captions accompany the films, scripted and narrated with existing and long-time collaborators including musicians, family members, friends and high-school students.

Tina Stefanou is a Greek-Australian visual artist, performer, researcher, and filmmaker. With a background as a vocalist, she works undisciplined, with and across a diverse range of mediums, practices, approaches and labours: an embodied practice that she calls voice in the expanded field. Stefanou has performed, presented, published and exhibited locally and internationally including most recently in the 2023 Melbourne Now exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria and the 2024 Adelaide Biennial of Contemporary Art. Stefanou was the recipient of the 68th Blake Prize (Emerging Artist Category) and is a PhD candidate in Fine Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.

Tina Stefanou – You Can’t See Speed

4 April – 9 June 2025

Curated by Elyse Goldfinch

Australian Centre for Contemporary Art  

111 Sturt Street, Southbank VIC 3006  

Melbourne, Australia

Opening hours: Tuesday – Friday 10am–5pm, Weekends 11am–5pm, Free entry

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For further media information: 

Katrina Hall 

Publicity/Communications 

0421153046 

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