Please contact us to book AUSLAN interpretation for this event.
Join us for an evening of performance exploring feminist practice, with key historical performance works by Barbara Campbell and Linda Sproul alongside new works by Archie Barry, Embittered Swish and Técha Noble.
Bodies of Evidence exploits and subverts the traditional connection between feminist performance and the body to bring contemporary perspectives that include transgender and non-binary experiences. In dialogue with critically acclaimed works of historical significance, the program of performances will enrich our view on the work of artists using their body as primary material, and highlight trans-generational connections within a feminist context.
Barbara Campbell will present Cloche, a gestural work exploring the crawlspace of the artist’s own hair, which refers to the close-fitting cap of the 1920s and was first performed at the Rex Cramphorn Studio, University of Sydney in 1999.
In a bundle of stilted manerisms 2018, Embittered Swish (Mossy 333, Romy Fox, Mick Klepner Roe, Bobuq Sayed, Ainslie Templeton and Debris Facility) will respond to the Museum of Womanhood. Archie Barry’s Hypnic 2017 and Phrenic 2018 are works in which the barriers between dreaming and being, between what is real and what is abstract are gently dissolved. It explores the artists centring of the unease that a gender ambiguous existence might contain.
Linda Sproul will perform Changing nature, first presented as part of the conference Performing Sexualities at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, in 1994. While in Dear Diane 2018, Técha Noble pays tribute to Diane Torr, whose infamous Man for a day workshops explored the embodiment of masculinity, power and ownership.
WATCH THE HIGHLIGHTS:
Videography by James Wright
ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES
Archie Barry is an interdisciplinary Melbourne-based artist, who graduated from Masters of Contemporary Art at the Victorian College of the Arts in 2017. Their work has been presented in group exhibitions at the State Library, the Incinerator Gallery, Melbourne, 107 Projects and ALASKA Projects, Sydney as well as Studio Brunswick for solo exhibitions in 2016 and 2017. Barry’s practice centres around investigating embodiment as a highly politicised and complex phenomenon. Their working position considers our current post-identity-politics media landscape as continually rehashing binarised strings of reasoning, focusing largely on the Western two-gender system as a manifest example of a culturally ratified and deeply entrenched “either/or” mentality and power structure that forecloses a myriad of experiences in the realms of gender and sexuality. By curating ontological spaces between what is and what can be, Barry’s work aims towards envisaging alternate possibilities for ever-evolving architectures of personhood.
Barbara Campbell is a distinguished artist who has performed in Australia, East Asia, Europe and the USA; in museums, galleries, public buildings, photographs, on film, video, radio, and the internet; in silence and with words, still and moving, since 1982. The Department of Performance Studies at the University of Sydney produced a survey exhibition of her 1997–2001 performances with an accompanying anthology of essays by art historians and artists, Flesh Winnow (Power Publications: 2002). Cloche 1999 is one of six performances documented in the anthology. In 2004 she received an Australia Council Fellowship to produce an online durational performance work, 1001 nights cast in which she webcast a story live each night over the internet for 1001 consecutive nights from 2005 to 2008. The project is archived at 1001.net.au. Barbara was awarded her PhD in 2016 from the University of Sydney.
Embittered Swish (ES) is a performance art vehicle founded in 2016. ES’s earlier work was focused on reformulating Jean Genet’s 1943 novel Our Lady of the Flowers to speak to contemporary trans realities. ES is currently focused on trans futures, medical dreams and nightmares. ES proudly works across a fine art, theatre and club context. They have shown work at Performance Space (PACT), Transgenre, La Mama Courthouse, firstdraft gallery and Monstagras. ES will premiere their new work Estrogenesis at Next Wave festival 2018.
Técha Noble is a multidisciplinary artist based in Sydney and Berlin. Her extensive catalogue of shows and performances explore notions spanning the body, gender, character, landscape, and identity. Through her connection to the mainstream, Noble continuously and successfully incorporates popular and alternative culture into her practice – referencing theological and social philosophy in these works. Técha Noble was a founding member of The Kingpins – a Sydney queer performance collective. Crossovers can be seen in Noble’s own practice through her inclusion of drag, fashion and re-performance.
Linda Sproul is a distinguished artist based in Melbourne, with a strong focus on performance, audience-participation and site-specific installations. Using her subjectivity as a springboard to articulate the nuances of femininity within the context of unceded Kulin territory, her provocative performances work to interrupt social and historical representation of gender and cultural spaces. The performances are often constructed across the boundary-lines between victor and vanquished, virtue and vice, pleasure and pain, as a way of re-negotiating the spaces between the personal and the cultural. Identity within Sproul’s practice focuses on the centrality of white-middle class feminism, by un-doing cultural myths and stereotypes in social and historical representation.
