“feedback | digital and hybrid practices”
Lilah Benetti, Rainer Ciar, Yanti Peng, Naveed Farro, Tina Stefanou and April Phillips
22 Sept → 30 Mar 2026
Development Program
Across August 2025 and March 2026, Parramatta Artists Studios and West Space brought together six artists from Melbourne and Sydney to participate in the inaugural feedback program.
feedback is a generative development platform facilitated through experimental intensives between early-career artists and artist mentors. This first edition focussed on hybrid and digital practices assembling artists who held a multidisciplinary practice between mixed-media, film, digital and sculpture.
Over two split labs across a seven-month engagement period artists Lilah Benetti (Vic), Rainer Ciar (NSW), Naveed Farro (Vic) and Yanti Peng (NSW) held an explorative dialogue with artist facilitators April Phillips (NSW) and Tina Stefanou (Vic).
The Sydney lab included playful practice sharing using beeswax models of past of future projects, introductory processes to digital practices thanks to Jordan East from Friends With Computers and conversations with a range of past and present PAS artists in residence. The week ended with a meandering walk through Taronga Zoo and a reading of the Zoo Index Reader in reflection of the relevance of zoos and how they shape our gaze towards nonhuman animals, and by extension, ourselves and one another.
In Melbourne, each artist shared a current project that has been in development throughout the period of participating in the program. This framed the activities of the following week which focussed primarily on acts of feedback, firstly through conversations with artist facilitators, then through a guided Creative Critters session thanks to Jessica Tanto and finally with an industry sharing session with a range of curators and artists visiting West Space and meeting with program artists Lilah, Rainer, Navid and Yanti. On the second last day everyone was gifted the opportunity to hold space for non-verbal feedback through a visit to Jocklebeary Farm. Guided by Tina Stefanou, each artist was paired with a therapy horse, spending hours observing, grooming and being in dialogue.
The activities and flow of this inaugural edition of feedback was just as experimental as the practices of each artist. The program was shaped by the opportunities that are abundant when digital and hybrid practices are drawn from the foundations of analogue languages or mediums of making. In this way, the ultimate outcome was holding space for the spirit of artistic thinking and the multiplicity of process and expression that exists when artists put their mind to a project.
feedback participants
Artist facilitators:
April Phillips (NSW)
Tina Stefanou (Vic)
Participating artists:
Lilah Benetti (Vic)
Rainer Ciar (NSW)
Naveed Farro (Vic)
Yanti Peng (NSW)
Program coordinators:
Nithya Nagarajan, Parramatta Artist Studios
Tahmina Maskinyar, West Space
Joanna Kitto, West Space
Special thanks to all of the artists who opened their studios and shared their practices throughout the program.
Lilah Benetti is a Naarm-based artist, director and writer whose practice centres Black intersectional storytelling, memory and embodied performance. Grounded in a deeply relational process, their work approaches the image as both fluid and porous, with close attention to sound, rhythm, and the histories a body carries into a room. Their work has been presented internationally across the UK, USA, Africa, Asia and Europe, including at Tate Britain, IFC Center NYC, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. They have developed work through festivals, residencies and commissions in Australia and internationally.
Rainer Ciar is an artist, illustrator, and graphic designer working across Dharug Country/Western Sydney. Research and play driven, his practice draws from a network of influences ranging from the tensions between binaries, anime, internet memories, queer abstraction, transness and hiding, isolation and the poetics of mud. Working with a myriad of 2D, 3D, and digital materials, Rainer focuses on tactility and care in order to combine and synthesise new work. Rainer holds a BFA (Hons) from UNSW, and is a co-director at Pari, Parramatta and an artist at Little Orange Studios, Campbelltown. Their work has been exhibited at Pari, Leo Kelly Blacktown Arts Centre, Campbelltown Arts Centre, AGNSW, Firstdraft, and Outer Space, Brisbane.
Yanti Peng, 彭妍缇 is a Hainan-born Dharug based interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture, film, photography, and 3D computer tools. She seeks to decode functions of power within the labyrinth of truth and consciousness, often through humour, absurdism and magical realism. She likens her interconnected practice to the body’s fascial system. Her exhibition history includes Firstdraft, Blindside Gallery, Cement Fondu and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. Currently a resident at Alfred Street Studios, she has received commissions from institutions including UNSW, Parramatta Artist Studios, Inner West Council, and PHIVE. Her animation premiered on NOWNESS Asia. She is working towards a West Space Window launching in September 2026. She is currently the Digital Production Lead at Runway Journal.
Naveed Farro is an artist-filmmaker based in Narrm (Melbourne). Farro’s practice spans sculpture, filmmaking, and photography. Drawing on his Iranian heritage, Farro combines digital technologies with traditional craftsmanship to navigate the challenges of accessing cultural knowledge across geopolitical borders. He works across a range of mediums to reframe histories that have been absent or obscured while examining the politics of reproduction. Farro has held solo exhibitions at MADA Gallery, 2025; Bus Projects, 2024; Kings Artist Run, 2024; the Immigration Museum, 2023; and A1 Bakery, 2020. He is part of the 2026 Expand Lab Moving Image Commission, with the resulting work to be presented at the Samstag Museum of Art. In 2025 Farro completed a Master of Fine Art at Monash University, where he currently teaches Film and Art.
Tina Stefanou is a visual artist and performer in Naarm (Melbourne). With a background as a vocalist, she works across mediums, approaches, species and labours in an embodied practice she refers to as 'voice in the expanded field'. As a means to seek more inclusive ways of making and to frame tangled relationships, Stefanou engages in multispecies performance with a family of local others, friends not-yet-made, and poet(h)ic meetings of matter. Stefanou works with sound, filmography, and research as social practice, often working with communities over long periods of time through para-ethnographic field work, vocal workshops, performance making, and filmic traces, exploring forms of poetic knowledge.
April Phillips is a Wiradjuri-Scottish woman of the Galari / Kalari peoples, living and working in regional Australia. Her art practice is cemented in futurism and media arts; as lead artist / director working across moving images, illustration, 3D assets, AR research, and photogrammetry. In 2022 April was awarded the Women in Digital award for excellence, advocacy, innovation and social impact, in recognition of her work in digital arts. Her practice extends to analogue materials and processes including drawing, printmaking, ceramics and glass. She works within collaborative environments to realise ambitious projects, leading teams to do big things. As a founding member of the Friends with Computers collective, April works to playfully engage digital technologies as tools for her art making, with a focus on futurism, human intelligence and ethical methodologies. April is currently Artistic Director + CEO at Canberra Contemporary.