“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

Brian Fuata performs at the 'Stranger than fiction' Symposium, August 2024, co-curated by Helen Grogan and Joanna Kitto. Photography by Machiko Abe.

The Stranger than fiction Symposium explored the slippage between reality and fiction as a narrative tool through lively discussions, performance, food and film screenings.

Stranger than fiction artists were joined by guest artists and Symposium co-curators Helen Grogan and Joanna Kitto. With a focus on the artists' experimental strategies and practices, we experienced and discussed their 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)

→ 4pm: End

As the Symposium unfolded, Andrea Illés' performance continued in the West Space Studio for audiences to watch on their personal devices, on a screen in the exhibition, or in person.

This event was generously supported by the City of Yarra through Yarra City Arts' Annual Grants Program.

An individual stands on a stage behind a podium stand speaking into a microphone. There is a large projection screen behind them showcasing an artwork. There are two green couches on the stage that have a microphone resting on each of them.
Three people on stage sitting on a couch with a projected image behind them. Man on the left of the couch is speaking to a seated crowd using a microphone.
Three individuals sit on a green couch on a stage discussing with one another. A projection screen is visible behind them. A crowd of people are seated on white chairs listening.
Three individuals sit on a green couch on a stage discussing with one another. There is a jar of tall yellow flowers to the left of the couch. There is a large projector screen behind them. In the foreground of the photo there are individual crowd members watching the stage, one who's head is blocking a portion of the camera.
A guest holds a plate of Persian food, their face cut out of frame with the camera centred in on the plate. Another guest in the background is serving themselves another plate of Persian food.
A portrait photo depicts a man in a white shirt performing into the microphone. Around him are three individual crowd members who have their heads turned to watch as he does. There is a screen behind him with an image that reads "Stranger than Fiction", with a photo of an eye behind the text.
Two individuals perform into a microphone with a photo taken from the back view. We see one of the individual's closed eyes and expression as they perform. Some out of focus white chairs seating audience members can be seen in the background.
Two individuals are performing into a microphone in a large, white space with windows letting through light. There is a large crowd of onlookers seated on white chairs in the background filling up the room.
Five individuals sit cross-legged on a green couch on a stage, lit up by a spotlight. A projection screen can be seen behind them.
Five individuals are sitting on a green couch on a stage talking with one another. A projection screen is visible behind them. There is a crowd of people seated on white chairs listening.
A hand holds an iphone showing a livestream of a figure holding a microphone in pink light. She has long white nails and long curly dark hair.

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 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 being perceived. Often working with states of overwhelm, Andrea is interested in the possibilities found in intense experience. Andrea was an artist in residence in the West Space Studio from February to August 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 is focused on refining her inclusive, personable and receptive approach to the presentation of contemporary art. She has held curatorial and leadership positions across arts organisations in Naarm/Melbourne and Tarntanya/Adelaide. 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.

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