“Stranger than fiction Symposium”
Archie Barry, Teresa Busuttil, Ahmed Coshnow, Brian Fuata, Helen Grogan, Andrea Illés, Rosie Isaac, Joanna Kitto, Basim Magdy and Joshua Pether
24 Aug → 24 Aug 2024

Archie Barry works with performance, video, sculpture and music. Their work is autobiographical, somatic and process-led. They create self-portraiture that troubles dominant notions of personhood as stable, legible and sequential. Their practice takes shape through a genealogy of personas, devised from their experiences of mortality, power and transgender embodiment. Their artworks are a way to connect with the dead people in their life, by practicing the gifts of singing and spatial thinking inherited from loved ones. In 2019, they co-wrote (with artist Spence Messih) 'Clear Expectations: Guidelines for institutions, galleries and curators working with trans, non-binary and gender diverse artists in Australia', which has been widely received as a best practice document in Australia and internationally.

Teresa Busuttil is an Australian artist of Maltese heritage working between Tarntanya/Adelaide and Malta. Her practice blends personal stories, family history, and fantasy through multidisciplinary forms of art, including sculpture, installation, and moving image. Drawing on a kitsch aesthetic and religious iconography, Teresa explores culture, grief and memory influenced by her connection to Malta and her experiences within the Maltese diaspora.

Ahmed Coshnow is a filmmaker who works with contemporary dance artists documenting their live performances by focusing on how it is observed as the audience. He has worked alongside choreographer Alexander Powers, over the years of their friendship, along other artists such as Gabriella Imrichova, Mara Galagher, Daniel R Marks.

Brian Fuata is a Samoan artist born in Aotearoa and based in Sydney, Australia. Broadly informed by lived experience and social discourse, together with tradition and customary knowledge, Brian Fuata’s work incorporates a diverse array of performance and communication modalities, including spoken word, concrete poetry, authentic movement (dance), correspondence, clowning, glossolalia (speaking-in-tongues), and sound art. In many works, he inhabits the role of trickster; engaging humour in his blurring of lines, between autobiography and fiction, audience and performer, art and the everyday. His prodigious and enigmatic output speaking, contemporaneously, of the body, place, self, and other.

Helen Grogan is an artist with qualifications in dance, philosophy, and visual art. Her experience in performance archives, exhibition archives and time-based art documentation includes work with Naarm/Melbourne based organisations Liquid Architecture, Performance Review, Gertrude Contemporary, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, and Arts House; and New York based organisations The Kitchen, Performance Space New York, and Movement Research. Helen is the founding director of Open Practice Studio, concerned with the process, production, and documentation of performance, dance, installation, live and sonic arts.

Andrea Illés is a performance artist whose auto portraits explore the relational chasm between self and other. Merging dance, text, sound, and video, her enquiry emerges from the agony and euphoria she feels in connection and being perceived. Often working with states of overwhelm, she’s interested in the possibilities that can be found in intense experience. Andrea is in residence in the West Space Studio, Feb → Aug 2024.

Rosie Isaac is a visual artist and writer in Naarm/Melbourne. Interested in art-making that imagines different material and social futures, Rosie's research-based practice focuses on language as it is experienced in the body while reading, in relationships, and via social institutions. Rosie has recently presented across the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Liquid Architecture, Next Wave, Gertrude Contemporary and Adelaide Contemporary Experimental.

Joanna Kitto has been Director of West Space since late 2022. Joanna's practice is focussed on refining an inclusive, personable and receptive approach to contemporary art presentation, with an interest in generating meaningful connections between art and audiences. She has held curatorial and leadership positions across university art museums, festivals, council and artist-led initiatives in Naarm/Melbourne and Tarntanya/Adelaide, and co-founded independent publishing platform fine print.

Basim Magdy is an artist from Assiut, Egypt, living in Basel, Switzerland whose work uses fictitious pasts and dystopic futures to critique the present. He has shown across M HKA Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp, Belgium; MAAT Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Lisbon; La Kunsthalle Mulhouse, France; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; MAXXI National Museum of the 21st Century Arts, Rome; Jeu de Paume, Paris; CAPC Museum of Contemporary Art, Bordeaux; Deutsche Bank KunstHalle, Berlin; South London Gallery, London; Art in General, New York; State of Concept, Athens; and University Galleries of Illinois State University, USA.

Joshua Pether is of Kalkadoon heritage living and working on Wurundjeri country in Naarm/Melbourne. He is an experimental performance artist, dancer and choreographer of movement, temporary ritual and imagined realties. His practice is influenced by his two cultural histories- indigeneity and disability and the hybridization of the two with particular interest in the aesthetics of the disabled body and also that of the colonized body. In 2024, Joshua joined the West Space Artist Committee. He currently holds the position of CEO of Arts Access Victoria as CEO.