ART ANYWHERE SYMPOSIUM

SCHEDULE

INTRODUCTION 9.30am | Simone Douglas and Sean Lowry

PANELS

*Indicates project was blind peer reviewed through Project Anywhere’s Global

Exhibition Program (all other presentations by invitation)

ECOLOGIES I

10.00am MATSUSHIMA BUNKO MUSEUM—Ryo Sato

10.15am BAHAY NAKPIL BAUTISTA HISTORICAL HOUSE—Ry

Haskings and Vincent Alessi

10.30am TECHNO PARK STUDIOS—Kim Donaldson

10.45am MUSEUMS, NETWORKS AND ACTIVE MEMORIES—Emily

Siddons

11.00am Panel Discussion| Chair—Simone Slee

BREAK 11.30—11.45am

POSITIONINGS

11.45am THE IMAGE IS NOT NOTHING (CONCRETE ARCHIVES)—

Yhonnie Scarce and Lisa Radford

12.00noon *FOLLOWING BURKE AND WILLS—MONUMENTAL (Jason

Waterhouse and Michael Needham)

12.15pm CUBBY—Shan Turner-Caroll

12.30pm IN MEMORY OF WATER: TOWARDS A POETRY OF THE

UNIMAGINED—Shoufay Derz

12.45pm Panel Discussion | Chair—Danny Butt

LUNCH 1.15—2.15pm
SYNTAXES

2.15pm KOSMOTECHICS (2019)—Nancy Mauro-Flude

2.30pm WHAT HAPPENS IF TOMMY LEE JONES DOESN’T WRITE

BACK?—Mark Shorter

2.45pm LEXICON OF A BODY—Archie Barry

3.00pm Panel Discussion | Chair—Cate Consandine

BREAK 3.30—3.45pm

ECOLOGIES II

3.45pm *THE MISSING ALBUM—Joanne Choueiri

4.00pm *THE GRID—Annie Morrad, Dr Ian McArthur + *SIGNIFIERS—

Aurora Del Rio, Lavinia Bottamedi, and Alvin McIntyre

4.15pm *NEW HYPOTHETICAL CONTINENTS—Benjamin Matthews

4.30pm DARPA / DECIDUOUS—Rowan McNaught

4.45pm Panel Discussion| Chair—Tessa Laird

LAUNCH OF 2019 PROJECT ANYWHERE GLOBAL EXHIBITION

PROGRAM 5.30—7pm
ABSTRACTS

Archie Barry
LEXICON OF A BODY
Language is an insufficient but necessary medium, it is a social protocol that serves
to both provide and delimit comprehension of material and metaphysical worlds. The
production of confusing language can be a critical response to the erasure that
legislative and bureaucratic systems of legibility have caused people and their
bodies. Practicing linguistic incoherence can be a playful form of enacting
sovereignty. Barry does this this by pushing language into corporeal experiences:
what does a hand want to sing? What words will allow a circular dance for a tongue
to touch lips, palate, throat, palate, lips, palate, throat? A crushed language system
or a lexicon of this body may be semantically incoherent, yet the meaninglessness or
confusion it conjures is a familiar human experience. Barry’s work aims to be
recognisable and cognitively dissonant simultaneously. Remapping language as an
embodied practice insists that identity should not be easily digestible and dissolves
the Cartesian body-mind split. Much of Barry’s practice involves live singing, a
medium that disappears in its moment of arriving and compounds the affective
intensity of semi-sensical syllables and noises.
Archie Barry is an interdisciplinary visual artist based in Melbourne, Australia. Their
work embeds language (spoken, sung or written) into gestures, serving to de-form
and re-form words as embodied experiences. Their work has been exhibited at
the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, The
State Library of Victoria, The Centre for Contemporary Photography, Neon Parc,
Artspace Sydney and ALASKA Projects among other spaces. In 2018 they
undertook a three-month residency at Phasmid Studio in Berlin supported by the
Fiona Myer Travelling Residency Award. Barry completed a Masters of
Contemporary Art at Victorian College of the Arts in 2017.

Joanne Choueiri
THE MISSING ALBUM
The Missing Album is an ongoing research project that attempts to gather an
archive of photographs of Lebanese people living / hidingin their houses during the
Beirut Civil War (1975-1990). The project serves as a continuation of the research
project I did not grow up in a war,which investigated memories through a series of
audio testimonials of Lebanese peoples’ houses during the war. The importance of
safety and survival within the domestic interior and its particular rooms (bathroom,
entrance hall, kitchen etc.) was showcased. The individual memories merge into a
collective memory questioning the state of the home and its interior during the war,
especially with the absence of an equipped bomb shelter. The Missing Albumisa tool
to shape up the collective memory and open up the discussion on whether any
photographic archive exists showcasing the states of these families within these
rooms.
Joanne Choueiri is an architect/interior architect/ and researcher from Lebanon. Her
trans-disciplinary training allowed her to work at the cross section between art,
architecture, and research. Her research focuses on possible speculative narratives
of space, interiors, and the city. With her work, she has participated in several
exhibitions in Milan, London, and Rotterdam. Before moving to Australia, Joanne
was a lecturer at the Lebanese American University of Beirut. Currently, she is a
PhD candidate and lecturer of architecture and interior design at Griffith University,
Australia.

Aurora Del Rio, Lavinia Bottamedi and Alvin McIntyre

SIGNIFIERS
New knowledge can be achieved by combining universal symbols within a work of
art, combined with the prior knowledge of the observer, so that new information, a
new perspective, is created within the observer. Signifiersis a video-based
project. The collaborative intention is to re-enact, or create rituals to offer, to
transform, to lose, to find. The artists borrow, appropriate, and invent rituals to
transform and transcend unspoken language of symbols and rituals into
knowledge. In rituals the signifier and signified find their place naturally, as if caught
in the exact moment before the intellect has a chance to intervene; therefore, the
fleeting epiphany may be brief. It is, nevertheless, enough for our purposes in
evoking knowledge from within. The impact of physical information, derived from
internal sensations, and reactions to what is observed in the artwork is what allows
knowledge to emerge prior to intellectual analysis. Knowledge is created in the
physical reaction to the primal gesture(s) enacted in the rituals, already known, to
some extent, but not readily recognised, remembered like the rapidly vanishing
details of a dream.
Aurora Del Rio is an Italian/Spanish artist based in Berlin who incorporates painting,
performance, writing, and sound into her practice. Her artistic research investigates
perception of reality, identity, oppression, and failure.
Lavinia Bottamedi is an Italian artist living in Berlin. Trained as actress and
performer in Trento, her interest shifts from a classic conception of theatre towards a
more experimental way of dealing with performativity, the body, and the voice.
Alvin McIntyre is a Canadian born artist who lives in the US. He has exhibited in
North American and Europe since 1996. McIntyre’s work has explored the
implications of mythologies that have permeated our social fabric.

Kim Donaldson
TECHNO PARK STUDIOS
In 2008, Kim Donaldson established Techno Park Studios (TPS) in Melbourne’s
industrial west. As studios, and an art gallery, it was an experiment in location and
site near an oil refinery and housed in a 1960s custom built kindergarten for a
migrant hostel. Operating from this site until 2015 it hosted many projects
experimenting with site, location and exhibition format. TPSexpanded in 2011, with
the development of the travelling Technopia Tours, which increased its scope by
testing sites beyond those traditionally used for exhibitions. This project was the
focus of Donaldson’s PhD “Technotopiary: Another formation of the curatorial.” By
late 2013 most of Donaldson’s projects were framed through the roaming Technopia
Tours. Looking back through the lens of history, Technopia Tours emerged as a
consequence of Techno Park Studios. It was the budget version of a travelling
exhibition that had the potential to go anywhere by utilising collaboration, artefacts
produced on site from available materials and artistic events staged beyond the
limits of established exhibition circuits. This presentation will focus on the conceptual
framework that initially appeared through Techno Park Studios and went on to
haunt Technopia Tours.
Kim Donaldson is a Senior Lecturer in the Masters of Contemporary Art, Victorian
College of the Arts, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, The University of Melbourne. Her
research interests focus on the potential for movement and change in the activities of
the ‘artist as curator’ which manifest as embodied art practices and exhibition
formats that contest established notions of space and time. These interests mutually
inform a conceptual art practice spanning over thirty years that has utilised aspects
of drawing, painting, moving image, photography, sound and performance.
Donaldson holds a PhD from The University of Melbourne (2016).

Ry Haskings and Vincent Alessi

BAHAY NAKPIL BAUTISTA HISTORICAL HOUSE: A SITE OF NATIONAL
NARRATIVES AND CONTEMPORARY INTERVENTIONS
This presentation will outline a curatorial project developed by Haskings and Alessi
which uses the Bahay Nakpil Bautista Historical House in Manila for an immersive
installation. The project has come out of a long-standing partnership between La
Trobe University and Ateneo de Manila University, and has involved artists and
exhibition exchanges, symposia, workshops and teaching programs. This curatorial
project builds on these other platforms with research outcomes to include an
exhibition, journal articles and artist book. The curatorial project uses a house as a
space in which artworks and objects come together to acknowledge the site’s
multiple contexts, history as a site of revolution, and the national narrative of the
Filipino Independence hero Jose Rizal. The work will oscillate between the look and
operation of a contemporary art installation and a historical display creating a tension
and ambiguity of the role and site of the Bahay Nakpil Bautista Historical House in
the Philippine’s national narrative. Driven by both archival research and the
documenting and experience of the site and Manila, the project will manifest as a
complex and layered installation together with a number of written texts. Finally, the
project will be accompanied by an artist book, which will include additional images,
documentation of the project and a number of scholarly essays which will explore the
history of the site and key issues raised by the project.
Ry Haskings lives in Melbourne and works in the Visual Arts Discipline at Latrobe
University. Much of Hasking’s art incorporates references to film, politics, social
issues, music, popular culture, modern and contemporary art and an examination of
abstract art forms. He was a member of DAMP collaborative art group from 2001-
2011 and a member of the Tcb Gallery collective since 2010. He has exhibited
extensively, researched and undertaken residencies both locally and internationally.
Vincent Alessi is a Senior Lecturer in Visual Arts at La Trobe University, Melbourne,
Australia. Prior to this he was the Curatorial Manager at the Ian Potter Museum of
Art, University of Melbourne and before that Artistic Director of LUMA | La Trobe
University Museum of Art. Alessi has curated exhibitions both nationally and
internationally and has written extensively on the work of many contemporary artists.
In 2010 Alessi completed a PhD focussing on Vincent van Gogh’s collection of
English popular prints, which will be published in 2019, and continues to work in this
area.

Ben Matthews
NEW HYPOTHETICAL CONTINENTS
Vermeulen and van den Akker (2015) describe a “utopian turn” in contemporary art,
where a “structure of feeling” that moves beyond the postmodern has emerged. This
ambivalent quality — evanescent, yet all about — evidenced during the 2010s has
given rise to collective aesthetic and intellectual movements that engage with the
impact of global flows of digitised capital and culture, and the expanded influence of
related industry such as high-tech manufacturing. Examples include “Vaporwave”
(music), “the New Aesthetic” (design) and “ruin porn” (photography), made coherent
by presenting consistently ambivalent responses to the effects of technology, and
relying on high-tech means of creation and mediation. These are emergent – not
intended or centrally governed – spontaneous creations of extended networks whose
participants respond to a broad set of themes and conditions via aesthetic means,
rather than the particular circumstances and politic that tended to define the art
movements of the 1900s. New Hypothetical Continents (NHCs) is a project that aims
to establish a growing, interactive archive of digital media that responds to the rise of
utopia in art, popular culture and public discourse, and contributions can be
intentional creations or found art in any media that comment at a remove or by
playfully adopting a utopian mode.
Ben Matthews is a consultant and Lecturer in Design at the University of
Newcastle, researching in the areas of digital practices and literacies, post-industrial
media work, media art, globalisation and networked collectives. He collaborates with
artists, and frequently appears as a guest lecturer. Ben’s areas of interest inspired
by a decade of experience in media work, and an academic background that cuts
across anthropology, digital media studies and literary studies. He is co-author of the
forthcoming Understanding Journalismn(Sage, 2018).

Nancy Mauro-Flude
KOSMOTECHICS (2019)
Kosmotechics (2019) is a performance where instead of being ‘spoken’, the
execution of the text that speaks itself. Through active poetry, other texts unfold
inside a new text in order to make it breathe and pulsate. That is, the act of
executing code in the command line, in order to parse through a text and make one
anew, is revealing of how polyvalent such practices can be, and how they lend
themselves. Embraces the form of active poetry, a code-based séance where a
wormhole is opened to summon the transcendental power of the computer shell.
Just as a human behind the text often rests in a hesitation of the textual output, the
timing in the performance of active poetry becomes a critical factor, the gaps and
pauses can be where human sentiment and meaning reside, and where they are
both established and uncovered. Kosmotechics(2019) is a proposition for the age of
the fourth industrial automation, as to how computers theatre machines might be
read through longing and situation, elation, chatter, retributionand serendipity.Every
mishap is there for the viewer. Every gesture is laid bare. This is where physicality
and the imagination come down to a line, the command line.
Nancy Mauro-Flude is a writer and an artist who specialises in artisanal and
visceral networked systems. She is interested in the demystification of technology,
and the ‘mystification’ that lies in and through the performance of the machinic
assemblage. Represented by Bett Gallery, Tasmania, Mauro-Flude has devised and
curated extensively within the field of experimental art forms. Founder of the feminist
server stack Despoina’s Critical Media Coven. She is a Lecturer (Digital Media) and
coordinates Post Digital Aesthetics at the School of Design, RMIT Melbourne.
sister0.tv

Rowan McNaught
DARPA / DECIDUOUS
Darpa is a small publishing initiative, internally referred to as a semi-private
counterfactual press. Darpa publishes two bodies of work on the Internet in a
continuous way: one (Deciduous) is like an encyclopaedia, the other (D rfc) like a
series of technical memoranda. these works are trying to constitute an illustrated
guide for:
1. a) an archive of Internet ex-histories;
2. b) a pathology of forgetting machines;
3. c) an imaginary garden with real networks in it;
4. d) an herbal codex of ex-sanguine causes;
5. e) an intersubjective encyclopaedia;
6. f) fragments for an “action désorganisé et plan du monde”;
7. g) an ark for hypercards;
8. h) a returned Promise for what is the opposite of an engineer?;
9. i) a t-shirt;
10. j) a how to for a grammar of ‘mixed-analogical reasoning’;
11. k) a zoology of the marked-bad sectors of a knowledge;
12. l) an overload of overloads, in lieu of a fury;
13. m) a series of memoranda towards technical specifications for imaginary or not-
working ways of living together; or
n)—what?—some flowers soon?
Rowan McNaught is an artist in Melbourne, current PhD candidate at VCA, and
former editor of West Space Journal.

MONUMENTAL (Jason Waterhouse and Michael Needham)

FOLLOWING BURKE AND WILLS (2019)
Revisiting the famous and tragic journey over the continent by the Victorian
Exploration Expedition (1860-61), Following Burke and Wills, by MONUMENTAL,
involves building a travelling monument, to be towed on a trailer from Melbourne to
the Gulf of Carpentaria as a tribute and a re-enacted folly of colonial heroism. The
aim of the project is to open dialogue, applying a humorous salve to the polarising
character of contested narratives amidst contemporary postcolonial sentiments. This
project seesMONUMENTALexpanding on their representation of cultural
memory/heritage, probing historical narratives and a uniquely Australian relationship
with public monuments. It acknowledges that attitudes to Australian colonial history
or its tropes have shifted significantly, as have current cultural values/perspectives,
both in terms of what is memorialised as well as the public means of doing so.
MONUMENTAL (since 2017) is a collaboration between Kyneton based sculptors
Jason Waterhouse and Michael Needham which takes aim at representations of
cultural memory through subversion, interrogation, mischief and general
interference. It is quite deliberately a blend of practices, where the ‘serious’ edge and
academic flavour of Needham’s work (looking broadly at death and representation),
is spliced with the playful, imaginative and anecdotal humour of Waterhouse’s
mutated commodities of the everyday. It is an acknowledgement of sculptural
collegiality in the craft of material manipulation. Yet, critically, it is a strategy for
probing creative ironies from within a wider cultural psyche, enabling both integration
and divergence as a pivotal approach to interdisciplinary practice.

Annie Morrad and Ian McArthur

THE GRID
The Grid explores sound and cities to forge a triangulated performative and
intermittently participatory digital space linking London, Sydney, Chongqing, and
New York through experimental composition and telematic improvisation using live
and recorded saxophones, field recordings, found sounds, electronics, and
processed guitar. The project’s construction of “city-ness” (Sassen, 2005) through
building structured assemblages of experimental sound and music involving the
artists, collaborators, and participants, underpins our ongoing testing of telematic
ecologies, improvisation, and collaborative composition as a means to generate
‘newness’ and new sonic spaces. The cities in The Gridare chosen for their specific
experiential, personal, and professional links to the participating practitioners. The
project addresses the lack of comprehensive understanding about the potential of
telematic digital spaces as performative and generative. This project interweaves
sounds that are sourced or inspired from the three cities, London, Sydney, and
Chongqing. The aim is to produce sound pieces that utilise diverse sounds from
different disciplines, including field recordings, noise, traditional music theory,
improvisation (Peters, 2011) (Bailey, 1992) (Toop, 2016), the digital, and electronic.
This approach is used to create soundscapes exploring ‘the city’ by two practitioners
living at opposite ends of the planet, producing work via a digital space.
Annie Morrad is a London-based artist and musician who plays saxophone,
produces ‘unheard music’ prints, makes music for films and develops live
improvisations with art and music practitioners. Ian McArthuris a Sydney-based
hybrid practitioner, working in the domains of interdisciplinary design, and sound art.
These two musicians work together in a telematic digital structure formed from open
source and proprietary software platforms.

Ryota Sato
MATSUSHIMA BUNKO MUSEUM
Matsushima Bunko Museum is located on a smallest inhabited island in Setouchi
sea called Matsushima where population is just two. Matsushima Bunko Museum is
an ongoing project between artists, architects, designers, musicians and local
community members. The goal of the museum is unknown, and it has little to offer.
No formal exhibitions. No art collections. No curators nor even a director. The only
thing the museum offers is an invitation. An invitation to build programs, platforms
and the museum itself. By actively engaging in the development of the museum,
Matsushima Bunko Museum hopes to provide education through participation, not by
offering lessons. The museum’s current projects include working with a geologist,
historian and local residents to study the history and geology of this island. Working
with a potter to experiment with clay found on the island and artists to make
salt. Artist in residence program could happen if artists wish to stay. Matsushima
Bunko Museum it is an ongoing collaboration between the institution and the
participants.
Ryota Sato (b. Okayama, Japan) is an artist currently based in Japan. His practice
spans digital media, video installation, painting, photography, and sculpture. His
work explores the relationship between human bodies, landscapes, information
media, slippage of nature-culture and the circulation of imagery particularly in
relation to image capturing devices. He will be joining Matsushima Bunko Museum in
2019, working as a collaborator and a liaison between the museum and participants.

Yhonnie Scarce and Lisa Radford

THE IMAGE IS NOT NOTHING (CONCRETE ARCHIVES)
The Image is not nothing (Concrete Archives) has so far involved fieldwork trips to
significant sites of memorialisation, genocide and nuclear colonisation. Scarce and
Radford have proposed to conduct three specific field trips to sites of significance to
experience the memorialisation and physicality of loss as built into brutalist
monuments commemorating genocide and/or nuclear destruction. For this
presentation, Scarce and Radford will reflect on the project to date following visits to
Wounded Knee, Chernobyl, Tbilisi, Yerevan, Okuma and Hiroshima. Sitting in
context with Brooke Andrew’s RR Memorial but extending the conversation beyond
the borders of Australia, Scarce and Radford look to both creating, referencing and
intervening in archives that examine a relationship to the physicality of loss
experienced in Brutalist and Soviet Architecture, Genocide Museums and
Memorials. The Image is not nothing (Concrete Archives) asks what kind of
memorial could make present the often overlooked or disregarded acts of genocide
that have occurred in Australia since colonisation. Through the shared experience of
two women, one Aboriginal and the other non-aboriginal, Scarce and Radford are
travelling to and through intense and emotional sites of significance, with the hope of
building an understanding and language for describing the experience of these sites
and histories. This presentation will form one of the beginnings.
This project has been made possible by Creative Victoria – Creators Fund.
Yhonnie Scarce and Lisa Radford both use fieldwork and site visits as a means for
generating new work.
Yhonnie Scarcewas born in Woomera, South Australia, and belongs to the Kokatha
and Nukunu peoples. Scarce’s work references the on-going effects of colonisation
on Aboriginal people. She has visited Nuclear Testing sites such as Maralinga in
order to conceptualise and produce works that act as a memorial to the unspoken
displacement and genocide of Aboriginal people.
Similarly, Radford has visited locations such as Nauru and Yekaterinburg to work
with communities of people in order to produce texts and performances that attempt
to capture unspoken socio-political contexts.

Mark Shorter
WHAT HAPPENS IF TOMMY LEE JONES DOESN’T WRITE BACK?
Tommy Lee Jones used The Rio Grande as the backdrop for his film “The Three
Burials of Melquiades Estrada” (2005) to frame a brutal contestation between two
men: one forces the other to transport the corpse of a Mexican ranch hand back to
their hometown. In the American Western, rugged borderland terrains have become
mythic locations; frontiers where rivalling masculinities have been given a privileged
site to violently compete for supremacy. This presentation will consider how this
conflict has shaped our attitudes toward landscape and the environment in which we
live. Through the reading of a series of letters that have been penned to Tommy Lee
Jones this performance will consider how the iconic Western landscape has been
fashioned by white male directors to play out their fears and contain their fraught
masculinities.
Mark Shorter is an artist and academic based in Melbourne, Australia. Significant
exhibitions and performances include: “Song for Von Guerard,” The National,
Carriageworks Sydney 2019; “Hello Stranger,” Campbelltown Art Centre, Sydney
2018; “6m of Plinth,” Artspace, Sydney 2016; “Mapping La Mancha,” The Physics
Room, New Zealand 2015; “The Groker,” Plato’s Cave, EIDEA House 2015, New
York. From 2010 to 2012 he was the host of “The Renny Kodgers Quiz Hour” on
Sydney radio station FBi 94.5FM. He is Head of Sculpture at the Victoria College of
Arts at the Faculty of Fine Art and Music, the University of Melbourne.

Shoufay Derz
IN MEMORY OF WATER: TOWARDS A POETRY OF THE UNIMAGINED
Shoufay Derz is interested in both the limits and possibilities of language and the
ambiguities faced when attempting to visually articulate the edges of the unknown.
Deeply engaged with poetry her projects attempt to link the silences in language with
holes in the landscape to contemplate the disappearance of history and also the
uncertainties of the landscape of the future. Derz will focus on two projects that
address the transformative possibilities, impossibilities and risks of storytelling. First,
“In memory of water: 無Mu” is an installation that speculates on possibility of
memorialisingthe loss of imagination. And second, the experimental
pedologicalproject“Ritual for the Death of the Reef” performed at The UQ – Heron
Island Research Station in collaboration with architect Amaia Sanchez [Grandeza
Studio] and UTS Masters of Architecture students. The presentation will propose a
future reimagining of the ‘ritual’ with an assembly of peers across creative fields to
speculate on some of the following questions: Will the GBR die? If so, is there a
chance for an afterlife? What role can ritual and imagination play in the fate of the
biosphere? The elegiac artworks are intended simultaneously as a lament on the
transience of life, and as a celebration of its mystery.
Shoufay Derzis an Australian artist and educator of German and Taiwanese
heritages. She works across a range of media including Photography, video and
installation. Solo exhibitions include ‘In Memory of water’ at Manly Art Gallery and
Museum (2018) and ‘The wish’ at Bathurst Regional Art Gallery (2016). Group
shows include the Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art at AGSA. Current
interdisplinary collaborations include the Australian Pavilion for XXII the Triennale di
Milano“Broken Nature”commissioned by UTS, and “The Manly Dam Project” with
MAGAM and NSW Water Research Laboratory. Derz is PhD candidate at the
University of Sydney and holds an MFA by research at UNSW. She is represented
by Artereal Gallery Sydney.

Emily Siddons
MUSEUMS, NETWORKS AND ACTIVE MEMORIES
New and emerging approaches to the production and dissemination of cultural
content are testing the definitional limits of what constitutes a museum. As platforms
shift and morph with rapid fluidity, new models of museums are emerging that
attempt to bridge the digital and physical divide and engage with all spaces in
between. This presentation will explore expanded examples of museums that are
uprooted from fixed physical space, from museums based on ideas rather than
collections, to digital-born museums, to walking museums. Teasing out tensions
between the preservation of memories to action-based experiences, as well as the
interplay between the tangible and intangible, this presentation will explore the
potential of cultural production in a democratic digital space, and new approaches to
the participation with and dissemination of art and ideas.
Emily Siddons is a Producer of Exhibitions at Museums Victoria, where she leads
the creative development and production of major exhibitions and experiences
across the museum’s three sites. Her recent exhibitions include Museum Inside
Out, Mandela: My Life and Revolutions: Records and Rebels. She is also an
Associate Curator for Liquid Architecture and has held previous positions at The
National Gallery of Victoria, The Australian Centre for the Moving Image and Next
Wave Festival. She specialises in curating and producing diverse exhibitions and
experiences that integrate the latest forms of emerging technologies and is currently
undertaking a PhD at The University of Melbourne’s Victorian College of the Arts,
exploring new ways of engagement and the definitional limits of what constitutes a
museum.

Shan Turner-Carroll
THE CUBBY CAVE
The location of this structure, which is called The Cubby Cave, is pivotal to the
work. It was built on Shan’s family land in rural NSW Australia. He has lived on this
land from the age of two to the present day. The Cubby Cavewas built in the canopy
of a fallen tree which his farther cut down for firewood two winters before. The
canopy of this tree landed in the middle of where a grass patch where a pathway had
been made by the comings and goings of wild animals. Shan decided this was the
perfect location for The Cubby Cave. Construction began in February 2014, and over
the following year many friends and family would visit to be part of the project. For
Shan, the original intention was simply to spend time with his father and to reconnect
with his cousin. Shan became interested Rites Of Passage and ways in which an
artistic practice can be transformative. It subsequently formed the residue of this time
of family reconnection, land and self.
Shan Turner-Carroll (b. AUS 1987) is an Australian artist of Burmese
descent. Shan’s practice responds to both site and situation specificity and
integrates mediums including photography, sculpture, performance and film. The
subjects his works have related to include both human and non-human nature,
alternative forms of social exchange and interactions between art, artist and viewer.
His practice questions current modes of living and explores alternative
methodologies and modes of education. A deep philosophy within his work is
thinking through doing. Shan uses the ritual of art making and its transformative
agency to question how art can find meaning outside of the institution of the gallery.