Archie Barry, Teresa Busuttil, Ahmed Coshnow, Brian Fuata, Helen Grogan, Rosie Isaac, Joanna Kitto, Basim Magdy and Joshua Pether
“Stranger than fiction Symposium ”
Held as an accompaniment to the exhibition of the same name, the Stranger than fiction Symposium explored the slippage between reality and fiction as a narrative tool through lively discussions, performance, food and film screenings.
Curated by Helen Grogan and Joanna Kitto, this day-long event engaged the exhibition's ideas, methods, and ethics. Focusing on the artists' strategies and practices, we explored their satirical, humorous, and sensual approaches.
Here on West Space Offsite, residue of the program has accumulated in a responsive approach between artists and audiences. With this extended frame, the artists’ lived knowledge is a critical dimension of the work.
Archie Barry
Archie Barry brought language to the gallery through lyrical hand movements and singing, activating their work in Stranger than fiction.
Archie's performance unfolded across a pale yellow wall, in harmony with two humming voices emanating at the height of the artists' mouth, embedded within the gallery walls themselves. With their hands adorned in fingernails fabricated from multicoloured pencils, Archie sang as they made marks, letters, words and shapes that push and pull the written word apart.
The work references an important, eccentric and troubling figure in the history of trans organising, Reed Erickson (1917-1992), and forms part of the artist's ongoing research around a trans ontology of disembodiment, perceptions and sensations of being out-of-body.
Ahmed Coshow
Blurb here about Ahmed's responsive work (images place-holders for videos)

Rosie Isaac
Bathtub Analogy

On storytelling and subversion: the use of absurdity to understand and accept reality
Basim Madgy, Teresa Busuttil, Joanna Kitto

Brian Fuata
Performance in response to Stranger than fiction, the conversations and the audience

Panel 2
On critical connective practice: Strategies for engaging and staging artists’ lived experience
Archie Barry, Brian Fuata, Rosie Isaac, Joshua Pether, Helen Grogan

Andrea Illés
sorry I was so hungry
The Stranger than fiction evolutive program continues with sorry I was so hungry, a duration livestream performance by Andrea Illés' durational livestream performance, grappling with the Sisyphean task of image-making as true representation of the self.
The artist occupied her studio - directly above West Space - making images with her body, viewable both in-person and transcribed by screens, in the gallery, or on our computers or phones. The audience was asked to decide how to view Andrea's transcription.




The Stranger than fiction Symposium was held across various sites in Collingwood Yards on Saturday 24 August 2025. Captured on video by Ahmed Coshnow and supported by This event was generously supported by the City of Yarra through Yarra City Arts' Annual Grants Program.
















Archie Barry's artwork is autobiographical, somatic and process-led. Through performance, video, singing, sculpture and music composition their practice reaches towards often imperceptible forces including spirits, affects, thoughts and the vibrant echoes of trauma. Their artworks trouble dominant notions of selfhood as singular, stable, legible and sequential.
Teresa Busuttil is an Australian artist of Maltese heritage working between Tarntanya/Adelaide and Malta. Her practice blends personal stories, family history, and fantasy through multidisciplinary forms of art, including sculpture, installation, and moving image. Drawing on a kitsch aesthetic and religious iconography, Teresa explores culture, grief and memory influenced by her connection to Malta and her experiences within the Maltese diaspora.
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.
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.
Helen Grogan is an artist with qualifications in dance, philosophy, and visual art. Her experience in performance archives, exhibition archives and time-based art documentation includes work with Naarm/Melbourne based organisations Liquid Architecture, Performance Review, Gertrude Contemporary, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, and Arts House; and New York based organisations The Kitchen, Performance Space New York, and Movement Research. Helen is the founding director of Open Practice Studio, concerned with the process, production, and documentation of performance, dance, installation, live and sonic arts.
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.
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.
Basim Magdy is an artist from Assiut, Egypt, living in Basel, Switzerland whose work uses fictitious pasts and dystopic futures to critique the present. He has shown across M HKA Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp, Belgium; MAAT Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Lisbon; La Kunsthalle Mulhouse, France; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; MAXXI National Museum of the 21st Century Arts, Rome; Jeu de Paume, Paris; CAPC Museum of Contemporary Art, Bordeaux; Deutsche Bank KunstHalle, Berlin; South London Gallery, London; Art in General, New York; State of Concept, Athens; and University Galleries of Illinois State University, USA.
Joshua Pether is of Kalkadoon heritage living and working on Wurundjeri country in Naarm/Melbourne. He is an experimental performance artist, dancer and choreographer of movement, temporary ritual and imagined realties. His practice is influenced by his two cultural histories- indigeneity and disability and the hybridization of the two with particular interest in the aesthetics of the disabled body and also that of the colonized body. In 2024, Joshua joined the West Space Artist Committee. He currently holds the position of CEO of Arts Access Victoria as CEO.