“Strangers and Intimacy”
Alice Hui-Sheng Chang, Brian Fuata, reader, Madeleine Hodge and Sarah Rodigari
28 Jan → 5 Feb 2005
I cannot introduce myself I am not here?
Strangers and Intimacy is a three part exchange project between Australia and Britain. The project addresses each artist, within their context, their location, and their personal intimacies.
Featuring Alice Hui-sheng Chang (Melbourne/Taiwan), Brian Fuata (Sydney), Elidh Macaskill (Glasgow), Lalage Harries (Glasgow/ Alberta), Madeleine Hodge (Melbourne), Robert Walton (Glasgow/London) and Sarah Rodigari (Melbourne).
Part 1 = Letters
The strangers meet via hand written letters, they reveal themselves, become intimate, share pasts, stories, memories and daily life.
Part 2 = Melbourne
They establish a working relationship upon meeting at West Space in Melbourne, they stand face to face, sort through all the material, share ideas and create performances.
Part 3 = Glasgow
The artists then travel together to Glasgow, the temperature drops, the poles shift and new intimacies form.
The project began in September 2004 when eight artists were assigned a pen pal living in a city on the other side of the world. On the first day of September they all wrote a four line letter of introduction to their foreign pen friend. Over the four months, between September and December they continued writing letters to each other each week.
“And now that we have begun this exchange, how am I different? Have the notions, transmitted through your letters, somehow changed me? Do I grow further away from myself with each line that I write, with each word that I read? Or do we grow closer?”
The artists gratefully acknowledge Arts Victoria’s support of Part 3 of the project in Glasgow, through the International Exchange Program.
Alice Hui-Sheng Chang is a Taiwanese video, sound and performance installation artist whose main area of practice is in temporal media. She is interested in searching through little moments in our every-day life, to express them with voice and body performance in a digital medium.
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.
reader is a collaborative performance group based in Glasgow comprising Elidh Macaskill, Lalage Harries and Robert Walton, dedicated to the production of new theatre, site specific works and associated projects in digital media, video and installation. They formed in 2001, with shared authorship through processes of collaboration at the heart of the group’s work.
Madeleine Hodge is a performance artist in Naarm/Melbourne. She is interested in the intersections between live art forms and documentary.
Sarah Rodigari is an artist whose practice addresses the social and political potential of art. Sarah's work is site responsive, employing, durational live action, improvisation, and dialogical methodologies to produce text-based performance and installations.