“Animal Capital, Animal Nation”
Tina Stefanou
14 Feb → 11 Apr 2026
Gallery

9-10 people wearing different coloured t-shirts gesturing outward with one hand toward the camera, gazing downward. They are standing on a pathway in a tropic green space surrounded by trees.
Tina Stefanou, 'Dance the War of Proximity' performance featuring young people as part of the '18th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Inner Sanctum', 2024, Art Gallery of South Australia. Photography by Andrew Kaineder and Wil Normyle

West Space is proud to present Animal Capital, Animal Nation by Tina Stefanou as part of our West Space Commission series.

The second chapter in a two-part exhibition across two major public art galleries in Naarm/Melbourne – at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) in 2025, and West Space in 2026 – Animal Capital, Animal Nation encompasses installation, live performance and music. Stefanou redefines how artists, contemporary art institutions and audiences perceive and participate with socially engaged art, visual culture, performance and access.

With a focus on relationality, knowledge sharing and impactful collaboration and innovation around questions of access, the artist is working with an array of collaborators with different art and non-art backgrounds and access needs, from rural and urban Australia.

Stefanou's recent time spent living in rural Western Australia amidst shifting political and environmental terrains has shaped the ways she chooses to engage and communicate within the arts. Her practice contemplates how neoliberal-humanism and social class dynamics infiltrate our day-to-day lives, sense of self, bodies, practices, and relations, affecting how we connect, communicate, and create liberation for one another and the planet. It holds the potential for other forms of sharing, making, and contributing to the cultural commons beyond the rat race.

"Tina Stefanou is an iconoclast—an artist who is tender yet uncompromising in her explorations of sound, community, collaboration, 'the rural' and settler-coloniality.
In a strong field, West Space's Artist Committee was impressed by Tina's proposal for her most rigorous yet convivial body of work so far" — West Space Board Member Eugenia Lim

Animal Capital, Animal Nation is a West Space Commission supported by Creative Australia and presented in partnership with the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA). You Can’t See Speed is showing at ACCA, 4 April → 9 June 2025.

A photographic portrait of Tina Stefanou.

Tina Stefanou is a Greek-Australian visual artist, performer, researcher, and filmmaker. 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 multi-species performance with a family of local others, friends not-yet-made, and poet(h)ic meetings of matter. Informed by diasporic and working-class experiences, Tina 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.