Opening Drinks: Recent Episodes
verge
Welcome to ‘Opening Drinks’ with me Tesha Malott, director of Verge Gallery at the University of Sydney. ‘Opening Drinks’ is a podcast series that takes a cue from the event which admittedly brings a range of emotions for a practitioner… opening night. I welcome you to join me and inspiring culture producers to celebrate the immense and admirable effort put into a project by the producer and their support crew. Now that the doors are open we hope you can stick around for a beverage as It's time to relax and chat about the who, the how’s and the why’s behind an artistic project. Produced by Tesha Malott, edited by Gabriel An, designed by Min Wong and soundtrack by Rainbow Chan.
Shan Turner-Carroll speaks with Tesha Malott about his exhibition, Bodies on a Rock, shown at Verge in August 2022, his practice and his creative relationship with spiritual reader Nick Foxx.
Bodies On A Rock included moving images, sculptures and assemblages developed and made during an artist in residency program in the regional Icelandic town of Seyðisfjörður.
Amongst the mountains, black waterfalls and green skies, Turner-Carroll lived and worked with the experimental art community, LungA School. This experience informed the basis for Bodies on a Rock, that is the examination of nature, the body, and perception of existing colonial visions of land and the blueprints that lay within assumptions of reality.
In line with Turner-Caroll’s investigation of unearthing tacit knowledge, Bodies on a Rock questioned an inherited understanding and relationship to the non-human world, particularly through the lens of the body. As viewers navigated and self-edited their experience of the installation, their body became a site of perception and subjectivity–indeed, a landscape of its own.
In this episode Tesha Malott and Thea Anamara Perkins speak about her family, practice, and That which endures, Thea’s latest body of work shown at Verge in September 2022. Thea Anamara Perkins is an Arrundaand Kawkadoon artist whose practice incorporates portraiture and landscape to depict authentic representations of First Nations peoples and Country.
With a delicate hand, Thea answers heavy questions about what it means to be Indigenous in contemporary Australia, and how Aboriginal people can and should be portrayed.
That which endures illuminated lesser-shown moments of the assimilation period and the fight for Indigenous civil rights in the 60s. Alongside these figurative images, a large landscape painting, showing both the birth and resting place of Charles was displayed, connecting country to ancestry. The works featured Charles Perkins during his time as a student at the University of Sydney as well as other key historical moments of the Foundation for Aboriginal Affairs in Sydney and the Freedom Rides.
In conversation with Anna May Kirk and Tesha Malott
In this episode, Anna May Kirk and Tesha Malott speak about anecdotes and precarious weather systems told by precarious positioned objects in the gallery. Anna is an artist, curator, creative producer and based in Sydney. She is interested in the representational issue posed by the immaterial and spectral nature of Anthropogenic climate change. Through sculptural glass and sensory installations, Kirk engage the beholder’s body as a sensitive and porous instrument for encountering the magnitude of environmental change. In her research based practice Kirk entangles references vast times, intensities and scales of our transforming planetary condition often investigating past moments of climate change throughout earth’s history in order to speculate on the uncertain future.
Smith and Harmsen met at a Chantal Akerman film screening in 2016. Since this first meeting the two have shared an interest in the late director’s work and the relationship between moving image, painting, and the experience of time passing. The empty room feels bigger continues this discussion, drawing influence from Akerman’s characteristic long takes and the psychological interiority of her films.
Smith has painted several watercolours on linen after Akerman’s 1996 one and only romantic comedy, A Couch In New York, starring Juliette Binoche (b. Paris 1964) and William Hurt (b. Washington D.C. 1950 - Portland 2022). Beatrice, a dancer from Paris, swaps her colourful, cluttered, Belleville apartment for psychiatrist Henry’s vast, sparse, designer apartment on New York’s upper east side. Both find themselves immersed in the other’s life, the paintings show Henry lying on Beatrice’s attic bedroom reading letters from her myriad of lovers, while on the other side of the Atlantic, Beatrice psychoanalyses Henry’s patients.
Harmsen’s work takes influence from Akerman with a video installation that is part road movie and part room film (a description often given to Akerman’s oeuvre). Rests are moving silences, brings together footage from the last fifteen years of the artist's own archive. Long distances travels and intimate interior spaces are woven together in a narrative on the relationship between the fleeting moment and it's transferal into the filmed - an exploration in the digitisation of film and how it gives easy access to the illusion of the frozen frame of the celluloid strip and the heavy presence of passing time and mortality associated with the still image.
This episode of Opening Drinks investigates the themes in their recent exhibition Everything is ok :), looking at languages of resistance built around demonstrations of play and dialogue. An expression of agency is made through sound, material, actions and words.
Featuring their Summer 68 artwork series of iconic tent material, from pioneer Andre Jamet’s French brand; it draws from historic French political protests and detourned content. From this, Wilson and Collier use situationist play as a position that can be active and have the potential to divest from the labour of art work. This exhibition brings together infra-distances and the artists two voices to speak to the institution with criticality through care.
Episode 7 of Opening Drinks is a two part conversation in response to Kirtika Kain and Sajan Mani's recent exhibition, Earth 200 CE at Verge in March 2022. The first conversation is between Kirtika and Verge director Tesha Malott that examines Kirtika's curatorial and artistic choices behind her recent exhibition. The second part is a discussion between Kirtika and her collaborator and fellow Dalit artist, Sajan Mani, and Indian writer Anisha Palat.
Kirtika Kain is a Sydney based artist who investigates caste identity through a material-rich and alchemical art practice. Born into the Dalit caste (formerly known as Untouchable) within India, Kain utilises materials that relate to themes of valuation, corporeality, ritual and tools of Dalit livelihood. By transforming and reclaiming these humble materials into aesthetic objects of value, Kain attempts to shift the personal and collective stigma of caste.
Sajan Mani is an intersectional artist hailing from a family of rubber tappers in a remote village in the northern part of Keralam, South India. His work voices the issues of marginalized and oppressed peoples of India, via the “Black Dalit body” of the artist. Mani’s performance practice insists upon embodied presence, confronting pain, shame, fear, and power. His personal tryst with his body as a meeting point of history and present opens onto “body” as socio-political metaphor
Anisha Palat is a current PhD candidate in History of Art, University of Edinburgh. Anisha’s experience of studying and working in the art world has included visual art, art history and art business. Anisha wrote the accompany exhibition text for Kirtika and Sajan's exhibition Earth 200 CE.
In conversation with artist Dr Alison Bennett and interactive designer Dr Rewa Wright
This episode of opening drinks sees a thoughtful conversation around ‘posts’, the mechanisms of photography and vegetal thinking. Our speakers, interactive designer Dr Rewa Wright and neuroqueer new media artist Dr Alison Bennett also reflect on the interconnectivity between humans, the virtual and the material.
This podcast was produced alongside Alison Bennett’s exhibition, Vegeta//Digital. Exploring vegetal thinking, digital gardening and post-human neuroqueer phenomenology through the affordances of expanded photography, artist Alison Bennett considers native blossoms as celestial encounters.
Episode 6 of Opening Drinks features Kieran Butler, presenter of the project 80 years from now (Verge, January 2022). Kieran is joined by their colleague and very wonderful emerging artist, Amy Claire Mills. In the episode, Mills and Butler chat about love, DJ Sophie, personal histories, the Matrix and beach towels.
Kieran Butler is an emerging photographic artist who works across photography, installation, costume and set design, and performance. Currently their research looks at applying transgender studies as a methodology for examining non-binary models of contemporary photographic practice, gender identity, and where these two histories might speak to one another. Kieran is currently Sydney-based and lives and works on Gadigal Land.
Amy Claire Mills is also a Sydney-based emerging artist living and working on unceded Gadigal and Wangal land. Her art practice explores identity and self-preservation through immersive textile installations and performance, by which she becomes both the artist and subject. Her practice critiques and examines the politics surrounding the disabled body, disrupting the socially-constructed idea of disability. Using distinctive, colourful and bold mediums her work encourages the observer to challenge their own paradigms and internalised preconceived bias, with the intention of deconstructing ableism.
This podcast episode is an in conversation with Singapore based artist Wei Leng Tay, Olivier Krischer and Sydney based artist Yvette Hamilton who explore the expanded field of photography in contemporary art.
Working across mediums including photography, audio, installation and video, Wei Leng Tay’s practice focuses on how representation is used in image-making and how difference can be negotiated through perception/reception, and the materiality of photographs. She uses formal strategies in installation, in the relationships between the visual and audio, image and text, and bodily experiences in encounters to question ingrained modes of perception and representation. One of the ongoing topics in Wei Leng’s practice is displacement as a result of movement and migration, focusing on emotional and psychic uneasiness related to ideas of agency, home and belonging. The works begin with the personal, in the realm of the family, and then build to consider ways the personal interacts with society, the state, the geopolitical.
Tay has had numerous solo exhibitions including the 4-part Crossings at NUS Museum, Singapore (2018-2019) and The Other Shore at Australian National University CIW Gallery, Australia (2016). She has collaborated with institutions such as ARTER Space for Art, Istanbul, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Japan, NTU CCA Singapore and Objectifs Centre for Photography and Film, Singapore. Her works are in museum collections including those of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan, Hong Kong Heritage Museum and National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art.
This episode of Opening Drinks features the very wonderful weaver and contemporary artist, Paula do Prado in a conversation around her practice and her show at Verge, pallay yuyay- to gather, to remember. Paula and Tesha also share stories about their personal histories and their love of plants. (Paula brought a plant thesaurus to the recording session.... )
Paula do Prado is a visual artist living and working on Gadigal land (Warrang/Sydney). She was born on Charrúa land, Uruguay and migrated to Australia in 1986 with her parents at the age of 7. Through her practice she seeks to connect with her ancestral heritage and explore the intersections between her diverse lineages including Bantu (West African), Spanish, Portuguese and Indigenous South American heritage. do Prado utilises cloth, paper, crochet, coiling and beading to process and transform intergenerational experiences. As a woman of colour and a migrant living on stolen land, she is passionate about exploring making as an active form of resistance. Her alignment with her black heritage is intentional.
In 2018, Sophie was a finalist in the Churchie National Emerging Art Prize at Queensland University of Technology, and her works have been included in exhibitions internationally. She completed her BFA at the Australian National University School of Art and Design, and is currently completing a Master of Art Curating at the University of Sydney focusing on digital museum culture and internet based practice.
A characteristic of Sophie's art practice is to assign her projects with quotes from cultural icons and literature, modernising and recontextualising historical words, so they sit within a digital contemporary context and relate to her work. This tradition continued with her exhibition at Verge in January 2021 which was titled “Bolero-A Tail of tech support.” This episode explores these ideas plus a lively discussion around making works, tech failures and breaking the internet.
Produced by Tesha Malott, edited by Gabrielle An, designed by Min Wong, soundtrack by Rainbow Chan, image by Zan Wimberley.