“Recompositions”
Vaibhav Abnave, Juliette Berkeley, Priyanka Chhabra, Merve Ertufan & Mochu, Merv Espina, Kathryn Gledhill-Tucker, Shareeka Helaluddin, Alana Hunt, Aarti Jadu & Claire de Carteret, Ronen Jafari, Machine Listening, Laura McLean, Rahee Punyashloka, Raqs Media Collective, Hayden Ryan, Joel Sherwood Spring, Aarti Sunder, Suvani Suri, Thomas Smith, Aasma Tulika and Book Show-I
13 Feb → 23 Feb 2025
Public Program

Vaibhav Abnave is an independent researcher and filmmaker. Through his films, he explores the intersection of theatre and cinema, documentary and fiction. His films Blur, 2008, and Monologue, 2013, have been shown at various international film festivals. Presently, he is Associate Professor (Film Direction) at the Film and Television Institute of India, Pune.

Juliette Berkeley does not like to cook, but is a serviceable sous-chef to her friends. Recently, Juliette has been discussing with her housemate whether or not to buy a rice-cooker. If you have an old one lying around, let her know.

Priyanka Chhabra lives and works out of Delhi, India, as an artist, film director and editor exploring notions of home, memory, landscape and relationships of people to places. She articulates her practice as an archaeology of silences, digging at sites characterised by trauma; physical and emotional. Since 2017 her work has focussed on reconciling memories and experiences of the Partition of Punjab (1947) through a trilogy of works - Rock Paper Scissors (2024), Iqraar-naama (The Agreement, 2022) and Pichla Varka (The Previous Page, 2019).

Merve Ertufan makes installations, videos, sound-arrangements, texts and objects. Her practice engages with what might be called the microphysics of the mind, observing inconsistencies, gaps and dead-ends in language and habit. Speech, written text and gestural detours of the body frequently combine to form game-like relationships, with compulsive paradoxes, stories, questions and riddles informing their play.

Based between Delhi and Berlin, Mochu works with video and text, arranged as installations, lectures and publications. Technoscientific fictions and subcultural formations feature prominently in his practice, often modulated with anxiety, futurity and weird selfhoods. Hosting cameos from art history, media theory and philosophy, recent projects have explored the nostalgic remains of cyberpunk, civilizational battles on the internet, corporate encounters with deep time, and other psychonautic drifts across landscape, madness and states of intoxication.

Merv Espina is an artist and curator in Las Piñas, Metro Manila. His artistic practice involves sound, exploring it as both space, form and material. He is a member of the Academy of the Arts of the World.

Kathryn Gledhill-Tucker is a Nyungar technologist, writer, and digital rights activist living on Whadjuk Noongar boodjar. Their work explores custodial approaches to data management, interrogating systems of surveillance, and using creative technology to explore coding as a liberatory practice.

Shareeka Helaluddin is an experimental artist, radio broadcaster, DJ and community facilitator interested in the sonic, written word and collective organising. Creating under the pseudonym akka, she fuses voice memos, found-sounds, echoic compositions, and influences of her mixed-multifaith lineage in the pursuit of divinity and connection.

Alana Hunt makes art and writes, finding ways for this material to move affectively through the public sphere and the social space between people. She has worked with journalists, filmmakers, human rights defenders and lawyers on award-winning bodies of work that unfold over many years, with gradual yet accumulating resonance in the places they take root, and beyond. Alana’s work is driven by lived experiences and honed through a forensic approach to research. It is shaped by relationships and often materialises through video, printed matter, photography, publishing, public events and illicit interventions.

From a background of group devotional singing and folk tradition, Aarti Jadu seeks to integrate participatory work into contemporary composition and interactive works of art. Claire de Carteret is a ceramicist exploring clay chemistry, technologies, and resonating sculptural form. They share an interest in how listening rather than hearing, cultivates intimacy, subjective interpretation and reflection.

Ronen Jafari is an artist with a focus on sustainability through culinary practices. Ronen began in the role of Administrator at West Space in 2023. He has a background in business and finance, and also works across Liquid Architecture and TBC Gallery. Ronen recently self-published a cookbook which aims to integrate plant-based cooking into a busy, low-budget share house kitchen.

Machine Listening is a platform for collaborative research and artistic experimentation, focused on the political and aesthetic dimensions of the computation of sound and speech. Established in 2020 by artist-researchers Sean Dockray, James Parker, and Joel Stern, the collective works across diverse media and modes of production.

Laura McLean is a curator and researcher based in Naarm/Melbourne. As Associate Curator at Liquid Architecture and Artistic Director at Blindside, she works with experimental practices and critical ideas engaging sound, listening, and media technologies across Australia and the Asia-Pacific.

Rahee Punyashloka is an artist, writer, researcher, and experimental filmmaker based out of Bhubaneswar and New Delhi. Working across disciplines, he seeks to illuminate the vastly un/underrepresented artistic history of the anti-caste struggle and the Dalit identity through interventions around lingering absences and speculative extrapolations within the archive.

Raqs Media Collective are artists, curators, and thinkers based in Dehli, India. Founded in 1992 by Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta, the collective’s collaborative practice meets at the crossroads of art, documentary filmmaking, new media and critical theory; operating on the cusp of theoretical explorations and metaphorical and aesthetic discourse. Raqs is a word in Persian, Arabic and Urdu used for ‘dance’, that means the state that whirling dervishes enter into when they whirl. The collective explain that Raqs could be an acronym for ‘rarely asked questions’.

Hayden Ryan is a Yuin First Nations sound scholar and spatial audio artist from the south east coast of New South Wales, currently in Naarm/Melbourne. His work centres Indigenous sonic and spatial practice, a concept that realises the inextricability of land, body sound and culture within Indigenous knowledge systems.

Joel Sherwood Spring Wiradjuri anti-disciplinary artist based in Sydney/Gadigal/Wangal lands. He works collaboratively on projects that examine ways of seeing Country through technology and desires for Indigeneity. Joel’s work confronts and channels both the desire for land and minerals at the core of our national identity and what today appear as 'progressive' identity formations. He explores the potential of Indigenous materialist readings of art and architecture towards repatriation, reparation, and return of land. He is learning how to employ art making, exhibition making, publishing, and pedagogy within what is recognised as black or Indigenous studies.

Aarti Sunder is an artist living and working in India. She works with moving image, writing, drawing and painting. Her interests lie within techno-politics, focusing on the study of infrastructure and society – from contemporary labour practices, fictional edges of protest, myth, and digital-terrestrial play to expanded platform politics.

Suvani Suri is an artist, writer and curator in New Delhi, India. Suvani works with sound, text, and intermedia assemblages that think through modes of listening and voicing. Her artistic, research, and curatorial inquiries plumb the gaps, cracks, and leaks found within the technological processes of production, mediation and perception of sound.

Thomas Smith is an Eora/Sydney based artist, musician, educator and researcher. His practice combines performance, video, electronic music, speculative fiction, websites, curatorial projects and critical writing. Thomas’ work is concerned with the social effects of computational systems, the politics of creative economies, emerging digital subjectivities and electronic music as a mode critical inquiry.

Aasma Tulika is an artist based in Delhi. Her practice engages with moments that disturb belief systems, and their intersection with technology and social relations. She works with unwritten codes, fictional events and peer networks that appear in the form of video installations, sound albums, performances and publications.

Book Show-I initiated by Priyesh Gothwal includes several artist books, sketchbooks, comics, zines, and other publications in a mobile, itinerant reading space, inviting new permutations with each encounter and evoking a keen interest in exploring the book as a form, medium and content. The books acquire their own spaces and, when placed together, create pockets that bring various narratives into that space. One of the impulses towards the show was to sustain the tactility of books, to have them as objects. Several bookstands, shelves, and platforms were built to explore these concepts. Book Show-I, Excerpts that makes its appearance on the bookshelf at West Space is a part of Book Show-I – compact and feasible enough to travel long distances while still holding the framework together.