Rosie Isaac, Brian Fuata, Ahmed Coshnow, Helen Grogan and Joanna Kitto
“Moments from the Stranger than fiction Symposium ”
In August 2024, West Space hosted the Stranger than fiction Symposium engaging with the ideas, methods, and ethics embodied by the artists of the exhibition. Co-curated by Helen Grogan and Joanna Kitto, the day held focus on their strategies and practices, offering an insight into satirical, humorous, and sensual approaches.
Across a series of pages on Offsite, residue of the performative elements accumulates through responsive dialogical approaches to documentation, moving between artists and audiences.
Both documenting and responding to the symposium, Ahmed Coshnow developed a filmic work that reflects the vibrancy, rhythm, and atmosphere of the day. He observes moments of exchange and attentiveness between artists, audiences, movement, and space.
The day began with a performance lecture by Rosie Isaac. Her work, as it often does, began with language. Bathtub Analogy tells the stories behind her installation works across the West Space window and ceiling, Tip Test and Total Dissolved Solids.
Elsewhere on Offsite, Metabolic Discard: On Rosie Issac’s Bathtub Analogy + Tip Test + Total Dissolved Solids written by Debris Facility and co-published with Conduction, a non-profit artist-run space in Footscray.
After spending time with Stranger than fiction, Brian Fuata performed in response to the works, the conversations taking place on the panels, the audience, and the social relations occurring between them. He forms a kind of connective tissue between words, thoughts, materials, research and the emotive energy of the works.
Fuata incorporates a diverse array of performance and communication modalities, including spoken word, concrete poetry, authentic movement (dance), correspondence, clowning, glossolalia (speaking-in-tongues), and sound art. He inhabits the role of trickster, engaging humour to blur lines between autobiography and fiction, audience and performer, art and the everyday.
The Stranger than fiction Symposium is generously supported by the City of Yarra.
Rosie Isaac is a visual artist and writer in Naarm/Melbourne. Interested in art-making that imagines different material and social futures, Rosie's research-based practice focuses on language as it is experienced in the body while reading, in relationships, and via social institutions. Rosie has recently presented across the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Liquid Architecture, Next Wave, Gertrude Contemporary and Adelaide Contemporary Experimental.
Brian Fuata is a Samoan artist born in Aotearoa and based in Sydney, Australia. Broadly informed by lived experience and social discourse, together with tradition and customary knowledge, Brian Fuata’s work incorporates a diverse array of performance and communication modalities, including spoken word, concrete poetry, authentic movement (dance), correspondence, clowning, glossolalia (speaking-in-tongues), and sound art. In many works, he inhabits the role of trickster; engaging humour in his blurring of lines, between autobiography and fiction, audience and performer, art and the everyday. His prodigious and enigmatic output speaking, contemporaneously, of the body, place, self, and other.
Ahmed Coshnow is a filmmaker who works with contemporary dance artists documenting their live performances by focusing on how it is observed as the audience. He has worked alongside choreographer Alexander Powers, over the years of their friendship, along other artists such as Gabriella Imrichova, Mara Galagher, Daniel R Marks.
Helen Grogan works between choreography, documentation and critical embedded practice with/within institutions and collections. As an artist, her work engages both public museums and independent spaces, such as ACCA, AGNSW, NGV, Galerie Stadtpark, Rijksacademie, Samstag Museum of Art, Gertrude Contemprary, Knulp, and liquid Architecture. Her recent work on critical documentation cultures includes de Appel Archive (Amsterdam) and The Kitchen (New York City). As Open Practice Studio (OPS), Helen works with other artists and organisations to stage or steward time-based practices. She is Associate Advisor for Liquid Architecture and vice-chair of the DEI Committee for the International Association of Audiovisual Archives (IASA).
Joanna Kitto is an arts worker focused on refining her inclusive, personable and receptive approach to the presentation of contemporary art. She is currently the Director of West Space. In 2014, Joanna co-founded fine print, an independent platform cultivating experimental and critical discourse online and in public spaces.
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