Recompositions
Juliette Berkeley, Priyanka Chhabra, Merve Ertufan & Mochu, Merv Espina, Kathryn Gledhill-Tucker, Shareeka Helaluddin, Aarti Jadu & Claire de Carteret, Ronen Jafari, Laura McLean, Rahee Punyashloka, Hayden Ryan, Joel Sherwood Spring, Aarti Sunder, Suvani Suri, Thomas Smith and Aasma Tulika
13 Feb → 23 Feb 2025
Various

Recompositions convenes a series of discursive and performative events, accompanying the exhibition The place we do not know is the place we are looking for, presented across West Space (Perry Street Building) and Liquid Architecture (Johnston Street Building) in Collingwood Yards.

Amplifying the mode of the gathering, this pubic program assembles and attends to resonant practices that are inventing languages to hold ineffable dreams, desires, stories, and encounters, unfixed from the discretisation of time, bodies, and sensing.

Collaboratively organised by Liquid Architecture, West Space and Sarai-CSDS, the satellite events unfold at venues including West Space and CY Space in Collingwood Yards, George Paton Gallery, Composite, KINGS and beyond.

Thursday 13 February

6 → 8pm: Film Screening: Vaibhav Abnave, I am only Making a Report, 2023

Location: George Paton Gallery, University of Melbourne

Details: here

Tuesday 18 February

11 → 1pm: score for a subtle body: a workshop-performance by Shareeka Helaluddin

2.30 → 4pm: A Field (of) Recording: a discussion with Hayden Ryan, Aarti Jadu & Claire de Carteret around their work and approaches towards field recordings in relation to land, Country, memory, and materiality

Location: West Space
Tickets: here

6.30 → 8.30pm: Film Screenings: Priyanka Chhabra, Iqrarnaama (55 mins), and Raqs Media Collective, The bicyclist who fell into a time cone (25 mins)

Location: Composite, Brunswick Mechanic Institute
Details: here

Thursday 20 February

11 → 1pm: Workshop-reading of Rock Paper Scissors facilitated by Priyanka Chhabra

Location: West Space

Friday 21 February

11 → 1pm: Readings from Recompositions Book Sections with curators Suvani Suri & Laura McLean with exhibiting artists

3 → 4pm: Film Screening: Alana Hunt, Surveilling a Crime Scene, (21 min 58 sec) followed by discussion with Kathryn Gledhill-Tucker

5 → 6pm: Lecture-performance by Joel Sherwood Spring

6 → 7pm: For every name a forest: Merv Espina in conversation with Kulagu Tu Buvongan

Location: West Space & CY Space, Collingwood Yards
Tickets: here

Saturday 22 February

11.30am → 1pm: Artist Presentations: Aarti Sunder, Kathryn Gledhill-Tucker, and Rahee Punyashloka responding to the material of memory and memorialisation while working through the modes of writing, fictioning and listening

1pm: Lunch Break

2 → 3pm: The place we do not know is the place we are looking for exhibition walk through with curators Suvani Suri & Laura McLean

3.30 → 4.30pm: Pathos: Notes on a system, lecture-performance by Thomas Smith

5 → 6pm: Ion Drift: Postscripts on the move, lecture-performance by Merve Ertufan & Mochu

7 → 8pm: Bootleg Tongue mixtape, performance by Aasma Tulika

Location: CY Space & West Space, Collingwood Yards
Tickets: here

Sunday 23 February

12 → 6pm: Cookout Scenes featuring Ronen Jafari & Juliette Berkeley: I’m all out of spoons and Merv Espina: super dumpling potluck

Sound performances from Aasma Tulika, Reibang Chakma, Shareeka Helaluddin, Thomas Smith, and Suvani Suri

Location: KINGS Arist-Run
Details: here

Aasma Tulika, 'Mic Check', 2025, still from moving image.


The place we do not know is the place we are looking for and Recompositions are co-presented by West Space and Liquid Architecture (Naarm/Melbourne) with Sarai-CSDS (Delhi), and supported by the Centre for Australia-India Relations Maitri Cultural Partnerships Program.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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