Danica Knezevic ‘Dance With Me’ / Julie Vulcan ‘Redress #7 ad nauseum’, photograph by Tongyu Zhao

The Open Body

One Day Performance
18 March 2018
11 – 5pm

The Open Body is part of our one day program for the Inner West Open Studio Trail on Sunday 18th March, 2018.

The works being performed for this event address ideas of visibility and representation of the body and explores the role that the body plays in our experience of self and our relationship to others.

Curated by Tom Isaacs with support of an the Inner West Art & Culture Grant

Kate Brown

Kate Brown is a recent MFA graduate from SCA who is fascinated by how the human voice sits in the body, is produced, and projected out to be placed elsewhere.

Kate’s focus is in experimental practice where she aims to harness the body’s potential and capacity to produce sound across spaces and at times technology.

She has presented work at MAAS, Kudos Live 2017, The Now now, New Contemporaries 2017, Desire Lines 3.0, NEAF Perth, Gaffa Gallery, Firstdraft gallery, 107 Project Space. In 2016, Kate presented her MFA research at Glasgow University’s annual festival of music, sound, and performance, Sound Thought 2016.

Stella Chen

Stella Chen is a Taiwan born, Sydney based interdisciplinary artist. Her art practice explores the legacy of post-memory, intergenerational trauma and resilience. Chen adopts a practice-led research methodology with theoretical frameworks in postcolonialism, feminism and capitalism. The aesthetic of fragility, vulnerability and ephemerality forms her visual language.

Chen holds a MArt from UNSW Art & Design. She was the recipient for Waverley Art Prize 2016, Highly Commended for UNSW Kudos Award 2015; Chen has been exhibited internationally, including solos in Sydney and group exhibitions in HK, Ireland, and Melbourne. Chen’s work is held in private collection nationally and internationally.

Tom Isaacs

Tom Isaacs (b. Oxford, UK) is a Sydney-based performance artist, sculptor and curator. In 2008, he completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours) at Sydney College of the Arts (SCA), the University of Sydney. Tom is currently a candidate for a PhD at SCA researching the connection between ritual and body art.

Isaacs’ art practice draws from psychoanalytic theory, philosophy, ritual practices and the history of performance art in order to explore the human condition. He is interested in the idea that ritual, psychoanalysis and art making (particularly performance) are different methods for exploring our experience of subjectivity.

Robbie Karmel

Robbie Karmel is currently undertaking his PhD at UNSW A+D. His research and practice explores concepts of phenomenological embodiment, perception, tool use, and representation through expanded drawing practices.

Working with charcoal and graphite on paper or timber surfaces, Karmel maps out the body relying on the intermodal array of senses, challenging dominant opticentric modes of picture making.

Karmel has had solo exhibitions in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra and Perth and has undertaken residencies nationally and internationally.

Danica Knezevic

Danica I. J. Knezevic is a performance artist working across endurance performance, video, audiovisual installation and photography. Knezevic is a PhD candidate at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney.

In 2013 she completed a Master of Fine Arts at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney. She completed her Bachelor of Visual Arts and Design with Honours at Australian Catholic University, Strathfield.

Knezevic is currently a contemporary art, sessional lecturer at Australian Catholic University at Strathfield and University of Technology, Sydney.

Vivienne Linsley

Vivienne Linsley is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher, currently based in Sydney. Her art practice is hybrid, an ongoing experimental exploration that works across the fields of live performance, film, interactive technology, studies of the audience, spectatorship and sonification.

Recently awarded the Doctorate of philosophy (PhD) from Sydney College of the Arts, the University of Sydney, the core concerns of Linsley’s practice centralise around the question of what it is to be embodied. This refers to the state of being and becoming from moment to moment in the unstable continuum of flux we exist in – that which we grasp onto through our bodies, senses and perception.

Alex Talamo

Alex Tálamo is a performance artist whose work investigates outsider identities, including migrant and feminist perspectives and is responsive to her contemporary Australian context. She explores cultural constructs of national identity as a second-generation migrant and through a lens that intersects art, ritual and research. This research is autobiographical, incorporating family memory and mythologies of nationhood.

Her current performance research explores her relationship with postmemory: the trans-generational transfer of memory as a result of traumatic events. This work recalls and reenacts experiences of her father, who migrated to Australia in the wake of the 1976 coup in Argentina.

Malvina Tan

Malvina Tan is a Singaporean mixed media installation and performance artist, currently based in Sydney.  Often, her life experiences are the central focus of her work, exploring concepts of corporeality, memory and time.

She has a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Hons) in Interactive Media from Nanyang Technological University’s School of Art, Design and Media.

Malvina has exhibited and performed internationally since 2008; TranSport (Madrid-Singapore), Night Festival Singapore, FETTERFIELD Singapore, Making Space, Body As Woman (parallel event of Singapore Biennale 2013), Singapore Art Week, Something Human FRESHLY PACKED / ALWAYS CHECK THE LABEL (London), Affordable Art Fair Singapore, Future of Imagination 10, Crack Theatre Festival – This Is Not Art (Newcastle).

Julie Vulcan

Julie Vulcan is an independent Sydney-based artist, working across multiple forms with a focus on performance & installation, text & digital media and durational & site-responsive work. Transience and transference inform her interest in how we remember, record and pass on information through our bodies, actions, traces and constructed histories.

Julie has created solo and collaborative performance work since 1993. Her performance work has toured nationally and internationally, including Canada, USA, UK, Italy, NZ and Cambodia. Recent 2017 presentations include: DARKlight Metro Arts Brisbane; DARKbody Wired Open Day Cootamundra NSW; I Stand In MAI Montreal CANADA.

Yiorgos Zafiriou

Yiorgos Zafiriou is a visual artist working primarily in performance.  Intent to elicit an audience reaction by challenging established beliefs about who we are as human beings, and our role within society, Yiorgos’ work is often provocative.

Fascinated by the investigation of personal identity his work explores gender, sexuality, culture and politics, examined through a personal lens.  Performance is a medium where he deals with his own inner anxieties, exploring characteristics that define us all.  What happens when we question these preconceptions? What fades away and what remains?

Mariia Zhuchenko

Mariia Zhuchenko is a trans-disciplinary artist working with the mediums of installation, sculpture and performance. Heavily influenced by Arte Povera, Mariia is fascinated by the interconnections of various physical energies (electrical, magnetic and gravity), organic materials and complex textures.

In recent works she has explored materiality and agency of various found materials and the way they are perceived through the environment and ecology, whilst creating a deep and emotional relationship between space and body movements.

Mariia is born in Moscow, Russia (1995). She lives and works in Sydney, Australia.