“Stranger than fiction Performance”
Archie Barry
3 Aug → 3 Aug 2024
Gallery
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.
Kenneth Suico captured the performance in video, offering a glimpse into the reverberating, emotive, aural experience shared with audiences in the gallery:
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.
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
“Stranger than fiction Performance”
Andrea Illés
9 Aug → 31 Aug 2024
