A MATTER OF TIME

WORKSHOP | MERINDA DAVIES
10AM - 12PM | $15

What kind of relational structures do we need to thrive in our current and future shifting landscapes?

Join artist Merinda Davies in a process of world-building – listening with, writing with, moving with and thinking with; the environment inside and outside IN | ARI.

This workshop will invite intimate encounters with humans and other beings. Mapping our bodies and ecological entanglements with the site.

This workshop may include movement, writing, drawing, listening, smelling, touching. Everyone is invited, everything is optional, no experience in dance/writing/drawing etc is required.

EXHIBITING ARTIST | LIBBY HARWARD ACCOMPANIED BY JOSEPH BURGESS
12PM - 6PM

Segments from a LIVE stream video - Part of the Dabilbung Series 2023

A sound performance in response to using an archaeological sieve and a 44-gallon drum fitted with an “irrigation sound system”, amplifying instruments of occupation, classification, extraction, and greed. Hear the sound of having to sieve ourselves through the mechanisms of ongoing colonisation to prove our existence under the oppression of foreign law. Interjections made by the harsh metallic clanking of star pickets, banged together in the artist’s hands like contemporary clapsticks. Cyclical time is present within materials of occupation  reclaimed, in a performance of sovereignty and resistance. Honouring the continuity of cultural practices and memories and them as active elements in today’s and tomorrow’s world, reinforcing that these traditions and struggles are ongoing rather than relics of the past.

EXHIBITING ARTIST | KATIE HARRIS-MACLEOD
12PM - 6PM

Falling through space is a series of biomorphic artworks which delve into notions of bodily memory and metamorphosis. Repressed memories activate hallucinations in which MacLeod witnesses her body in motion, adrift, lost, floating and falling through time and space. She now transcribes these visions into tangible places of wonder, enchantment and strangeness.

EXHIBITING ARTIST | KELLIE O’DEMPSEY
VIDEOGRAPHER | JORGE SERRA
SOUND | MICK DICK
12PM - 6PM

Giving shape to the memory and experience of the liminal space between dying and death Bathroom Scene is a two-channel video installation set against the backdrop of faux woodgrain wallpaper. In tending to someone at the threshold of life, O’Dempsey became the caretaker not only of a fading presence but also of the objects, boxes and memories infused into the place of care. This work uses a specific location to navigate the fragile intersection of intimacy, exhaustion, and the quiet tedium that inhabits this temporal space—where the inevitability of mortality is confronted through the lens of a parent’s passing.

Using performance and video, Bathroom Scene transforms the act of care into a monotonous loop. Drawing on performance and video, O’Dempsey ritualises care and nurtures relationality to quietly honour women’s unseen labour and question the value of care in a society that values capital.

IN-CONVERSATION | AMANDA BENNETTS X ASH MUSK
1PM

Ingredients
- Two artists: one who breathes movement, one who constructs tension in stillness.
- Personal narratives of time, etched in body and medium.
- Absence and presence, existing as parallel gestures.
- Unrelenting labor: the grit of endless creation, bodies bent towards clocks. Notions of repair: can the body mend what time erodes? Practice as salve.
- A regional tint, the unmistakable flavor of home: soil beneath their feet, air that colors perception.
- Dreams of alternative futures: boredom as manifesto, wandering as intention.

IN-CONVERSATION | MICHAEL NORRIS x FIN WEGENER
1.50pm

In this conversation, two experimental sound artists Michael Norris and Finley Wegener discuss Time’s influence on their practices and duration’s mighty ability to warp perception. As two artists deeply concerned with environments, ecology, and the physical characteristics of vibration in matter and space, Norris and Wegener are well-positioned to spearhead this discussion into the temporal. The two will explore both compositional and performative applications of data sonification, psychoacoustics, and manipulations of timescales, highlighting techniques and learning experiences gained through their experimental practices. From how underground seismic vibrations can be accelerated into human-hearing range, to how static oscillations reveal sonic subtlety over time, duration and temporality gives rise to esoteric and surprising topics - this collaborative discussion is well suited to those interested in creative explorations of biology, mathematics and the immersive nature of the sonic experience.

PERFORMANCE | ASH MUSK
2.30pm

A woman co-exists within a forest of plastic columns, experimenting with gentle but persistent acts to transform her body and its relationship to the surroundings. Attempting to understand this unyeilding, plastic material gives way to unintended and unavoidable consequences.

Patience is required while existing within this precarious landscape.

present moment collapse is an express, solo version of its longer parent work (From Infancy, 2021) reimagined for the A Matter of Time Symposium and IN | ARI. The work forms part of ongoing research into the conflict between the natural and built environments we inhabit, and how our bodies are situated / complicit / ingrained within this complex relationship. Taking its original inspiration from ideas of terraforming - the transformation of hostile environments - the female performer attempts to prioritise softness, slowness and tenderness in order to mould, change, wrestle and alter her body to fit inside, around and within these unpredictable, uncompromising and instable objects. Her feminine form magnifies the phallic existence of these objects, the aliveness of her body in direct contrast to the material, outnumbered but persistent.

The work has its own pace, one which requires exceptional perseverance and confidence. The present moment veers and swerves, but is never permanent and always collapsing.

WRITTEN TEXT


Melanie Jame Wolf is a self taught artist living and working in Berlin since 2011. She works solo and with friends, making interdisciplinary pieces about power, flows of capital, and the phenomenon of 'show business': the liminal, the persuasive, the deceptive, the staged, the performed. Moving across choreography, performance, text, moving image, sculpture and installation, she makes work for theater, gallery and screen spaces. Her work is concerned with the problems and poetics of class, sensuality, gender, narratology, the radical vulnerability of the live moment, and the body as an unruly political riddle. These investigations are often expressed through a hyper-stylised pop aesthetic and play with language in subliminal and surprising ways. Her work explores the proposal that: all labour is performed - all work is repetition, all subjectivities are rehearsed, all power is enacted. This core conceptual pre-occupation intersects with her investment in humour as a strategy for deepening the critical potential of works of art. Melanie Jame's ongoing interest is in analyzing the idea of performance-as-labor in artistic, popular entertainment, and everyday contexts. This often manifests as an atomization of specific performance techniques – impersonation, rehearsal, slippery scenographies. This strategy is employed as a tool to critically analyze broader political and cultural currents. Performance here is understood as a technology of survival; as a strategy for fluidity of subjectivity.

GATHERING
3.30pm - 6pm

Attendees are invited to connect, respond, reflect, and contribute to the day.

Bar open.