“Draghima Dithyrambic”
Abhishek Hazra and Jacqui Shelton
30 May → 13 June 2018
Draghima Dithyrambic is a project by Abhishek Hazra and Jacqui Shelton exploring the traffic of ideas between the art world and academia with respect to questions around race, identity and the colonial legacy, and about the performance of intellectual/academic history in the art world.
This project builds upon Abhishek’s ongoing interest in colonial histories and the politics of knowledge. Riffing off the histories of various inhabited spaces including West Space, the old Commonwealth Bank building, the Victorian College of the Arts, the Victorian Barracks, the Temperance Hall, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, Draghima Dithyrambic attempts to trace new affinities between conflicted understandings of those spaces within the context of postcolonial discourse.
Consuming, borrowing, reordering and subverting the audience’s understanding of their contexts, Hazra’s work creates layers of fiction and alternative meaning as a way to enact institutional critique but also create a space for multiple knowledges and readings.
Public Program
Draghima Dithyrambic, Wed 6 June, 6pm
Artist talk with Abhishek Hazra and Kelly Fliedner.
Canto 1: the foot soldiers of re-presence, Thurs 7 June, 12.30pm
Durational performance, response and open workshop at The Stables, Victoria College of the Arts.
Canto 2: the compradors consume their amnesia, Fri 8 June, 2.30pm
Durational performance, response and open workshop at Temparence Hall.
Draghima Dithyrambic is supported by the Australian Government through the Australia Council.
Abhishek Hazra uses video, performance and text with an ironic fascination for theoretical debates around knowledge production and historiography. His recent series of lecture performances explore questions around affect, precarity and provincial cosmopolitanism.
Jacqui Shelton is an artist, researcher, and photographer in Naarm/Melbourne who holds a PhD from Monash University.