“Motet Fail”
Tina Stefanou
14 Feb → 11 Apr 2026
Gallery
West Space presents a new commission by Tina Stefanou, an artist working across experimental film, performance, sound–music, sculpture, and relational practices.
Motet Fail continues Stefanou’s ongoing methodology of expanded cinema, vocal orientations and live performance, through a practice she refers to as voice in the expanded field.
Motet Fail emerges from Stefanou’s early memories of learning to sing ‘straight’, over a single flame, steadying her breath and vibrato to produce pure notes and to not blow out the candle. Her vibrato, an engine filled with performative habits, identity, and selfhood, became disciplined through classical and jazz technical idioms. Stefanou invites a series of vocalists to inhabit the gallery with her and, through a series of live vocal actions, they test the futile pursuit of perfection to the point of rupture.
The site of Motet Fail takes the backgammon table as a starting point. Working with set designer Romanie Harper, Stefanou transforms West Space into a site for reflection, encounter and concert. A 5,000-year-old game with origins in ancient Iran, backgammon emerged as a game of Empire, spreading across West Asia and Europe along routes of trade, cultural exchange and conquest. Historically, the rules of backgammon have been known to shift depending on one’s position in society. In art history, the game has appeared as a symbol of vice, gambling, skill, and chance. Within the hellish scene of The Garden of Earthly Delights (1510), Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch used it to signal moral decay and a descent toward damnation.
Motet Fail forms the second chapter to You Can’t See Speed commissioned by the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Where the first chapter explored cinema at its perceptual and sonic thresholds, Motet Fail emerges as its quieter subconscious, asking how we meet one another, and what we risk in the process.
Motet Fail is a West Space Commission, presented in partnership with the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art and supported by Creative Australia.
Tina Stefanou is an artist, performer, researcher, and film director based in Wattle Glen, Victoria. With a background as a vocalist, she works undisciplined, across diverse mediums, practices, approaches, and labours, in what she calls voice in the expanded field. Seeking more inclusive ways of making and framing tangled relationships, she engages in multi-species performance with a family of local others, friends not-yet-made, and poet(h)ic meetings of matter.