Sacred Heart Real Tennis Court was an architecturally designed installation for public use, performance, projection and sound created by choreographer Atlanta Eke, architect Tim Birnie, composer Daniel Jenatsch and videographers Hana Miller and Jacob Perkins.
Constructed out of industrial scaffold and recycled shade cloth, the installation hosted live interventions, video and a sequence of striped back lighting effects to explore the relationship between art and sport, past and present.
Part of the outdoor, public art exhibition Interspecies and Other Others, Abbotsford Convent, Melbourne, 2022
Presented a lecture performance by Australian artist Diana Baker Smith (Barbara Cleveland), which referenced the work of dance artist Philippa Cullen (1950–75), while conjuring processes of speculation and fictionalisation to work through the politics of valuing and historicising performative and participatory art practices.
Presented in partnership with the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), as part of Channels Festival: International Biennial of Video Art, Melbourne, 7 September 2019
Presented a lecture performance by artist and activist Mike Parr, discussing the relationship between art and sociopolitical critique, with reference to his performance and video practice spanning five decades.
The lecture included a screening of Parr’s work Daydream Island, which was originally presented live at The Performance Space in 2013, as well as photographic documentation from Ned Kelly thinking of Manus Island (with apologies to Ben Vautier) and Give your fee to the refugees performed at Artspace in 2018 and 2019.
Presented in partnership with the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), as part of Channels Festival: International Biennial of Video Art, Melbourne, 7 September 2019
Commissioned a new performance by Jill Orr.
Through movement and costume, Laundry reflects on notions of personhood and place to examine the potential of human agency and its capacity to exceed repetitious patterns of behaviour.
Orr’s performative gestures articulated acts of fortitude, fragility and restraint throughout a cycle of thirty-minute performances anchored by a fifteen metre long costume that spilled out of the venue to connect interior and exterior spaces.
Presented as part of Temporal Proximities in the South Laundry at Abbotsford Convent, Melbourne, 1 – 3 March 2019
Presented a site-specific adaptation of this work by S.J. Norman, performed by Mykaela Saunders, Carly Sheppard and Naretha Williams
The River’s Children reflects on experiences of dispossession, displacement and servitude as well as personal and collective histories of violence and survival as they are entwined in the body, specifically in the bodies of Blak women. Repetitious acts of wringing, slapping and hanging interrupt a projected sequence of hand-written slides listing the names, dates and locations of every recorded massacre in Australian colonial history.
Presented as part of Temporal Proximities in the South Laundry, Abbotsford Convent, Melbourne, 1 – 3 March 2019
Executive Producer for this large-scale, participatory performance by Jess Oliveri and the Parachutes for Ladies collective.
Participants were invited to join a series of workshops that culminated in a spectacular parade of over two-hundred costumed characters traveling through the streets of Bloemfontein. The thirty-minute performance concluded with a community dance ritual and celebratory feast.
A number of the characters involved in the live event subsequently became subjects in a photographic series and storybook style publication.
Commissioned by SITUATE and presented at the Vrystaat Arts Festival, South Africa 2015
Commissioned and produced this participatory performance by Indian media artist and experimental performance director Amitesh Grover.
The performance connected participants in Delhi and Melbourne via an instruction-based gaming event exploring public and private behaviours.
Participants were invited to consider their physical, digital and social environment, and to explore the differences and similarities between their every-day cultural practices, through a series of interactive games and a process of collaborative city mapping.
Arts Centre Melbourne 2012
Co-curated this presentation of work by Italian composer Luigi Nono, presented within Tate Modern’s collection galleries.
Nono was one of the most important avant-garde composers of the early twentieth century and a contemporary of many of the key figures in the Arte Povera movement. For this presentation, a surround sound system was installed under the floorboards of Tate Modern’s Arte Povera collection display, amplifying voice recordings that had been cut up, sped up and in every way disrupted. This recorded material was intermittently accompanied by a live solo vocalist.
Curated in collaboration with musical director Richard Bernas, Tate Modern collection galleries, London 2009
Part of the curatorial committee who developed and presented this program involving a participatory installation, moving-image works and re-enacted performances.
At the centre of the program, was a re-creation of the seminal 1971 work by Robert Morris titled BodySpaceMotionThings. This large-scale installation involved audience members being able to climb, balance and suspend themselves on a variety of sculptural objects. The installation was augmented by three moving image works by the artist and an adjunct program of re-enacted performances by Paola Pivi and Jannis Kounellis.
Part of The Long Weekend Festival, Tate Modern Turbine Hall and outdoor locations, London 2009
Commissioned this new work by sound art collective Ultra-red, in conjunction with critical writing by cultural theorist Sadie Plant.
Drawing on the formal strategies of early conceptualism this site-specific installation and durational performance facilitated a discursive action that addressed issues of race and identity in contemporary Britain. Combining field recordings undertaken at sites of historical racial struggle with live commentary by recent immigrants, community leaders, legal advocates and sex workers, the encounter facilitated a creole of linguistic and sonic testimony.
Curated in collaboration with Nicolas Bourriaud as part of the Altermodern Triennial, Tate Britain, London 2008
Part of the curatorial committee who developed and presented this program of Fluxus performances from the 1960’s.
Four days of outlandish festivities included Twelve Piano Compositions for Nam June Paik and several events from The Flux Olypiad by George Maciunas, as well as three works by Alison Knowles including Make a Salad, Newspaper Music, and Shuffle.
The events were produced with advice and assistance from Larry Miller, Simon Anderson and Sara Seagull.
Part of The Long Weekend Festival, Tate Modern Turbine Hall, London 2008
Curated a performative, process-based installation by Fluxus artist and auto-destructive art protagonist Gustav Metzger.
Presented in conjunction with a display of Fluxus multiples from Tate’s archive, the project involved the artist pasting pages from The Daily Express newspaper across the gallery wall. Accumulating over four days of live action, the work evolved into a critical collage of contemporary society as documented by the right-wing populist press.
The project was originally conceived as part of the 1962 Fluxus event, Festival of Misfits. However, organisers of that event unceremoniously pulled the performance, as it happened to coincide with news of the Cuban missile crisis hitting the tabloids.
Tate Modern, London 2008
Commissioned a new work by Heath Bunting.
Bunting’s work adopts the behavioural tropes of a prankster, while examining disruption and agency within politically charged social constructs.
Examining notions of privacy and mobility within bureaucratic and consumer systems, The Status Project involved the artist producing a set of maps illustrating the hidden inter-connectedness of the databases and bots that relentlessly track our online behaviour to construct an impression of our identity and affiliations. The work was realised as a set of prints, a wallet of fictitious, yet legally authenticated identity documents and a psycho-geographic walk of the city.
Tate Britain, London 2008
Commissioned a series of radio art works by sound artist Chrstof Migone, accompanied by an historical overview of radio art practice by Helen Thorington.
Migone makes audio pieces from the body’s mistakes, foregrounding incidental matter and visceral debris. Foursome consisted of four thirty-minute episodes, in which the artist translated Samuel Beckett’s absurdist theatre piece Quad.
Four dancers were invited to describe Beckett’s work as they watched video documentation of it being staged, then again from memory, through movement and in a drawing. Recordings from these sessions were subsequently composed into four interweaving and discombobulated episodes.
Broadcast on Resonance FM, London 2007
Commissioned Japanese sound artist Ikue Mori to produce an original composition for a program of silent films by surrealist filmmaker Maya Derren.
The newly commissioned score was performed live in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall to augment a screening of Derren’s work. The result was a hauntingly dark and fragile sonic ambience that bound the individual films into a cohesive sequence.
The films were subsequently re-mastered with the new soundtrack to tour internationally.
Curated in collaboration with Stuart Comer as part of The Long Weekend Festival, Tate Modern Turbine Hall, London 2007
Co-curated an installation by Mathieu Briand, which functioned as a stage set for a curated program of sound art and turntable performances.
The installation was also open to community participants during a workshop for parents and their children, facilitated by Sonic Arts Network.
Curated in collaboration with Vanessa Desclaux as part of The Long Weekend Festival, Tate Modern Turbine Hall, London 2007
Curated this program of audio-visual performances by Japanese artists Ryoichi Kurokawa, Toshimaru Nakamura with Billy Roisz and Sachiko M with Benjamin Drew.
Presenting works that explore the use of feedback, decay, assemblage and kinetics, the program highlighted artists whose practices combine the use of analogue and electronic, self-built instruments for the real-time creation, improvisation and manipulation of sound and image.
Part of The Long Weekend Festival, Tate Modern Turbine Hall, London 2007
Curated this program of electronic audio-visual performances by Ryoji Ikeda, Carsten Nicolai and Robert Henke (aka Monolake).
During the second half of the last century, the pioneers of experimental music started looking for new musical forms based on an economy of elements. The three works presented in this program all illustrated the influence of early minimalism on contemporary electronic music, whilst demonstrating the use of software-based techniques for the simultaneous creation of sound and image.
Part of The Long Weekend Festival, Tate Modern Turbine Hall, London 2006
Part of the curatorial committee who developed and presented the inaugural Long Weekend Festival.
This program included a presentation of Musiccircus by John Cage, a performance of Sheer Frost Orchestra by Marina Rosenfeld, a large-scale participatory event titled, One Pound Turbot Market by Surasi Kursolowong, the re-creation of Trisha Brown’s 1975 performance, Man Walking Down the Side of a Building, and the re-enactment of a Spanish melodrama with original costumes by Joan Miro.
The Long Weekend subsequently ran as an annual festival from 2006 – 2009.
Tate Modern Turbine Hall and outdoor locations, London 2006
Produced and technically directed the performance of work by composers Alvin Lucier, John White and Stuart Marshall.
Presented in conjunction with the conceptual art exhibition Open Systems, the program featured audio works that made use of systems as a generative device within musical composition.
The program was accompanied by critical texts authored by Seth Kim Cohen and Ben Borthwick.
Tate Modern’s Auditorium, London 2005
Commissioned a series of short audio works by Christian Marclay, a pioneer of the experimental turntable movement, who operates at the intersection of art and music.
Believing that the categories distinguishing ‘serious’ music from its opposite are both arbitrary and arcane, the artist presented his collection of over 1200 Christmas records as a publicly accessible archive. Each evening, the display was activated with live performances by the artist and other notable London DJs. Short audio snippets were subsequently extracted from recordings of those live sets and distributed explicitly for sampling, re-use and remixing.
Performed live at Tate Modern and distributed via Tate Online 2004
Produced a program of live art presented in conjunction with the exhibition Con Art, which explored the relationship between contemporary art and magic.
The program involved a series of outlandish performances included unnerving predictions of the future, incompetent disappearing routines, a reverse strip tease, a set of very brutal card tricks and a Faustian gospel-magic act.
Artists: Forced Entertainment, Julian Maere, Ursula Martinez, Aura Satz and Tommy Angel.
The Lantern Theatre, Sheffield 2002
Co-curated this two-week festival of live art highlighted artists working across time-based, performative and durational forms.
The program included a keynote exhibition, film screenings, one-to-one performances, site-specific installations and an evening of audio-visual performances. Venues included Site Gallery, Showroom Cinema and the National Centre for Popular Music, as well as a number of off-site locations including a car park, public phone booth, film studio and railway station.
Artists: Roland Miller, Sophia New, Lone Twin, Roddy Hunter, Lisa Wesley, Jemima Stehli, Julien Maire, Mongrel, Project Dark and others.
Site Gallery and other venues, Sheffield 2001
Produced a performance lecture and film screening by artist and filmmaker Breda Beban.
Blurring the boundary between cinema and art, the event involved the artist telling a series of interweaving stories, which suspend the difference between an individual’s actual experience and officially recorded social history.
The lecture unfolded as an articulation of the utopian vision for Eastern Europe proliferating throughout the 1980s, intersected with the reality of every-day life in the city of Belgrade.
Site Gallery, Sheffield 2001
Commissioned this dual-site performance and installation by Keith Armstrong, working in collaboration with choreographer Lisa O’Neill, live artist Leisa Shelton and composer Guy Webster.
Examining the visible and invisible relationships that exist between people and their local and global environments, the artist worked in residence at Site Gallery for two weeks to develop this duel-site, installation and performance.
The artist’s collaborators performed live in Brisbane, with footage streamed in real-time across the internet to be projected within a scenographic installation in Sheffield.
Presented simultaneously at Site Gallery, Sheffield and Powerhouse Centre for Live Art, Brisbane 2001
Commissioned two durational performances by Lisa Watts.
Converting Site Gallery’s upstairs studio into a ‘mini-gym’, the artist performed two works that interrogated notions of endurance, whilst blurring the boundary between athletic fitness and art. The first performance was enacted before a blind-folded audience, who listened to the artist working out on a stepping machine while reading a prepared text. The second performance involved the artist doing endless squat thrusts with the added intervention of a prosthetic third leg. The evening came to a close after the artist, who had been in training for months, finally collapsed in an exhausted heap.
Co-commissioned by Site Gallery and the Pitchbend Festival, Sheffield 2001
Produced this performance by the live art duo Third Angel.
Live artists, Alex Kelley and Rachael Walton spent three months tracking down the thirty-four other children depicted in one of their old school photographs, to ask them what they’d been doing for the last twenty-four years. This process culminated in the presentation of a performance-lecture that combined their schoolmate’s stories, their own memories and a bunch of completely made-up stuff, in a hilarious exposé of bitter truths, reasonable conjecture and downright dirty lies.
Site Gallery, Sheffield 2000