“Motet Fail”
Tina Stefanou
18 Feb → 18 Apr 2026
Gallery
West Space presents a new commission by Tina Stefanou, continuing her methodology of expanded cinema, vocal orientations and live performance through an embodied 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. Here, Stefanou invites vocalists to inhabit Motet Fail with her and, through a series of live vocal actions, 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 artistic collaborators Romanie Harper and Aldo Bilotta, Stefanou transforms West Space into a site for reflection, encounter and concert. A 5,000-year-old game with origins in the ancient region currently known as 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.
Stepping into Motet Fail, you are offered Stefanou's Actions for Phono-Chronophobia, a singing lesson that could reorient fear of voice, or fear of time.
Motet Fail acts as a companion to You Can’t See Speed, commissioned by the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Where the first exhibition 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.
Programs
Artist talk, Sat 21 Feb, 2 → 3pm
A conversation with Tina Stefanou and Joanna Kitto, West Space Director.
Tina Stefanou: Motet Fail is a West Space Commission, supported by Creative Australia.
Thank you: Aldo Bilotta, Bethany J Fellows, Tom Goodman, Romanie Harper, Emmy Mavroidis, Conor Murray, Patricia Reed, Brigit Ryan, Lisa Salvo, George Stefanou, Kosta Stefanou, and the West Space team.
Tina Stefanou is an artist based in Wattle Glen, Victoria. With a background as a vocalist, she works undisciplined, with and across a diverse range of mediums, practices, approaches and labours: an embodied practice that she calls 'voice in the expanded field'. As a means to seek more inclusive ways of making and to frame tangled relationships, she engages in multispecies performance with a family of local others, friends not-yet-made, and poet(h)ic meetings of matter. Stefanou engages in sound, filmography, and research as social practice, exploring with and beyond all-too-human and more-than-human vocalities. She works with multiple communities over long periods of time and locations through para-ethnographic field work, vocal workshops, performance making, and filmic traces, exploring forms of poetic knowledge.
