“Performance: Wall choreography”
Archie Barry
3 Aug → 3 Aug 2024
Join artist Archie Barry for a once-off performance as part of their new work in Stranger than fiction.
Wall choreography brings language to the gallery through lyrical hand movements and live singing. With their hands adorned in fingernails fabricated from multicoloured pencils, Archie sings as they make marks, letters, words and shapes that push and pull the written word apart.
Wall choreography will unfold 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.
The work references the life and writing of an important, eccentric and troubling figure in the history of trans organising, Reed Erickson (1917-1992), and forms part of Archie's ongoing research around a trans ontology of disembodiment, perceptions and sensations of being out-of-body.
Archie Barry works with performance, video, sculpture and music. Their work is autobiographical, somatic and process-led. They create self-portraiture that troubles dominant notions of personhood as stable, legible and sequential. Their practice takes shape through a genealogy of personas, devised from their experiences of mortality, power and transgender embodiment. Their artworks are a way to connect with the dead people in their life, by practicing the gifts of singing and spatial thinking inherited from loved ones. In 2019, they co-wrote (with artist Spence Messih) 'Clear Expectations: Guidelines for institutions, galleries and curators working with trans, non-binary and gender diverse artists in Australia', which has been widely received as a best practice document in Australia and internationally.
Related
“Stranger than fiction”
Archie Barry, Teresa Busuttil, Nicholas Currie, Andrea Illés, Rosie Isaac, Basim Magdy, Rä di Martino, Sammaneh Pourshafighi and Joanna Kitto
29 June → 31 Aug 2024
“Artist talk”
Nicholas Currie
13 July → 13 July 2024
“sorry I was so hungry”
Andrea Illés
9 Aug → 24 Aug 2024
