“Stranger than fiction Symposium”
Archie Barry, Teresa Busuttil, Brian Fuata, Helen Grogan, Andrea Illés, Rosie Isaac, Joanna Kitto, Basim Magdy and Joshua Pether
24 Aug → 24 Aug 2024
Collingwood Yards
The Stranger than fiction Symposium explored the slippage between reality and fiction as a narrative tool through lively discussions, performance, food and film screenings.
Co-curated by Joanna Kitto and Helen Grogan, the day held a focus on the artists' experimental strategies and practices offering experiences and discussions around the artists' satirical, humorous, and sensual approaches.
Program
→ 11am: Uncle Colin Hunter Jnr: Welcome to Country
→ 11.30am: Rosie Isaac: Bathtub Analogy
→ 12pm: Panel 1: On storytelling and subversion: the use of absurdity to understand and accept reality with Basim Madgy, Teresa Busuttil, chaired by Joanna Kitto
→ 1pm: Lunch by SalamaTea House, a social enterprise serving Persian food and providing employment and training for refugees and people seeking asylum
→ 1.45pm: Brian Fuata: Performance in response to Stranger than fiction
→ 2pm: Panel 2: On critical connective practice: Strategies for engaging and staging artists’ lived experience with Archie Barry, Brian Fuata, Rosie Isaac, Joshua Pether, chaired by Helen Grogan
→ 3pm: Stranger than fiction: Screening session featuring Passage by Teresa Busuttil (2021), New Acid (2019) by Basim Magdy, and Afterall (A Space Mambo) by Rä di Martino (2019)
Throughout the day, Andrea Illés's durational performance sorry I was so hungry continues in the West Space Studio. Watch on personal devices, on a screen in the exhibition, or in person.
This event was supported by the City of Yarra. On Offsite, find reflections on the day through words and video by Debris Facility, Ahmed Coshnow and Helen Grogan. Photography by Machiko Abe and Janelle Low.
Archie Barry's artwork is autobiographical, somatic and process-led. Through performance, video, singing, sculpture and music composition their practice reaches towards often imperceptible forces including spirits, affects, thoughts and the vibrant echoes of trauma. Their artworks trouble dominant notions of selfhood as singular, stable, legible and sequential.
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.
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 works between choreography, documentation and critical embedded practice with/within institutions and collections. As an artist, her work engages both public museums and independent spaces, such as ACCA, AGNSW, NGV, Galerie Stadtpark, Rijksacademie, Samstag Museum of Art, Gertrude Contemprary, Knulp, and liquid Architecture. Her recent work on critical documentation cultures includes de Appel Archive (Amsterdam) and The Kitchen (New York City). As Open Practice Studio (OPS), Helen works with other artists and organisations to stage or steward time-based practices. She is Associate Advisor for Liquid Architecture and vice-chair of the DEI Committee for the International Association of Audiovisual Archives (IASA).
Andrea Illés is a Naarm/Melbourne based new media and 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 bliss she feels being perceived and, often working with states of overwhelm, Andrea is interested in the possibilities found when bodies fail.
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 is an arts worker focused on refining her inclusive, personable and receptive approach to the presentation of contemporary art. She is currently the Director of West Space. In 2014, Joanna co-founded fine print, an independent platform cultivating experimental and critical discourse online and in public spaces.
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.
