Recent Events
This panel discussion for RMIT Pride Week explores how queer contemporary artists engage with representational practices. The event comprises a 45 minute panel discussion and 15 minutes of Q & A. Chaired by Drew Pettifer, panellists will include Alison Bennett, Casey Jenkins and Peter Waples-Crowe.
Location: Zoom (link will be attached to Eventbrite email). Please note this was previously a hybrid event, however, due to current Victorian government COVID restrictions, it will now be delivered fully online.
Image: Peter Waples-Crowe & Glynn Urquhart, Budjerri Dyillagamu: Peggeralin, single channel video, 1:56 mins, still image, 2019.
25.08.2021
Join CAST member Angela Clarke, her co-editors, the writers and publishers to help launch this important publication. Experience simple embodied practices, listen to writers share a taste of their work and participate in a discussion about the importance of how we humans need to cultivate the Art of Embodiment.
Published by the Dance Movement Therapy Association of Australasia (DTAA) with the Body-Mind Centering® Association (BMCA)
First in a new book series for DTAA. Print and digital editions available at www.dtaa.org.au
Contact Details admin@dtaa.org.au or info@dtaa.org.au
12.08.2021
Image credit:
1. Koorookee Meerreeng, Grandmother’s Country (sites, places, totems, water, Country), photo courtesy Vicki Couzens
2. Linda Knight and Alys Longley. 2020-2021. Chaosgraph: Performing Scales of Infection.
3. Detail from Marnie Badham and Tammy Wong Hulbert, 2018, Five Weeks in Spring: an emotional map of Lilydale, Force of Nature, Yarra Ranges Regional Museum.
04.08.2021
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Fiona Wong Lai Ching is a renowned and well-respected ceramic artist in Hong Kong. She was selected as the Artist of the Year (Visual Arts) in the Hong Kong Arts Development Awards 2017. She received a Starr Foundation award from the Asian Cultural Council in 2000 and was elected member of the International Academy of Ceramics in Geneva in 2007. She has been appointed Expert Advisor for Hong Kong Museums since 2014. Since 2004, Fiona has curated various research and social art projects such including “ My Soil My Land (2006)” a community project that involves 500 children using local clay. She was an invited artist of the 6th Echigo Tsumari Triennale in Japan (2015) and created site specific translucent porcelain works “Gogasha” in an abandoned house in the area on the issue of urban rural gap. In 2017 she was commissioned to curate the project “Hi! Houses Law UK Folk Museum” to create new perspectives on reading local history.
Fiona’s artworks have been widely exhibited both locally and internationally, and have been collected and treasured by numerous museums and private sectors, including “Blue Wings” by the British Museum in 2018. Fiona has participated in over 50 solo and group exhibitions as well as art projects of various kinds over the years. She has also been invited to the artist-in-residence programmes across the globe, setting foot in countries such as Australia, Germany, Japan, and the United States.
Fiona Wong: www.hkas.edu.hk/team/fiona-wong
Kris Coad: www.kriscoad.com
Image: Fiona Wong installing Gogasha, 2015. Image courtesy of the artist.
09.06.2021
How can creative, design and health practitioners respond to the enormous challenges of health within crises such as COVID-19 and the climate emergency? How can we work together and across our respective fields? And how can we use creative practices to better care for our planet and our health?
Join Dr Katherine Baraclough (Doctors for the Environment Australia), Professor Sarah Bekessy (ICONScience research group + biodiversity, RMIT University), Professor Vishaal Kishare (Director, Health Transformation Lab + Applied Innovation, RMIT University) and Associate Professor Dominic Redfern (School of Art, RMIT University) who work across creative arts, design, healthcare and climate activism. Hosted by Associate Professor Keely Macarow (School of Art, RMIT University), these speakers will discuss how these areas can converge in response to key creative, health and environmental concerns of our times.
Image: Dominic Redfern, calotis moorei, video still, 2015.
30.03.2021
Increasingly in the news we read about troubling imperial statues being challenged, defaced, recontextualised, toppled and removed. There is mounting evidence that memorials, as well as contemporary and public artworks, have become a significant locus for inciting debate and action on difficult histories of colonial violence and ongoing institutionalised racism.
In Australia, artists, historians and theorists routinely note the contradictions in public remembrances and monuments that tend to honour white lives over Indigenous ones, as well as observing active occlusions and suppressions of the violence of colonialism in public presentations of the past. Concurrently, many contemporary Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian artists have experimented with inventive visual forms and public modes of expression to contest dominant settler narratives and distorted histories. There are now a wealth of examples and strategies to draw on to consider how the Australian public’s view of colonial history and its legacies is confronted and transformed through creative counter-monument practice. The discourse and debates stimulated by such art practices are also critical occasions to appraise contemporary Indigenous settler relations in Australia.
This symposium offers unique insights into the process of creating artworks to difficult and violent colonial histories, from the failed and rejected artwork proposals, and the tense negotiations and compromises with commissioners, to the consideration of Indigenous approaches to memorialising, as well as the different purposes public memorials and artworks must serve to both educate and confront an ignorant settler public and produce spaces of remembrance and healing for Indigenous people. With case studies and critical presentations by a range of artists and researchers from the fields of history, public and contemporary art, critical race, museum and heritage studies, the symposium contributes to important debates regarding the public acknowledgement of difficult colonial histories and the decolonisation of dominant settler narratives, institutions and symbols.
Speakers include: Paola Balla, Lilly Brown, Maddee Clark, Dr Fiona Foley, Kate Golding, Dr Julie Gough, Genevieve Grieves, Dianne Jones, Dr Odette Kelada, Dr Clare Land, Neika Lehman, Carol Que, Dr Amy Spiers, Joel Sherwood Spring and Unbound Collective.
Genevieve Grieves and Dr Amy Spiers have developed this program in partnership with the Indigenous Settler Relations Collaboration (ISRC), University of Melbourne, Contemporary Art and Social Transformation (CAST), RMIT, and with assistance from the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body. ACCA is pleased to host this symposium as part of the 2020-22 research, publication and exhibition project Who’s Afraid of Public Space?
Image credit: Julie Gough MISSING or DEAD 2019, 185 printed posters first installed in The Queen’s Domain forest, Hobart, June 2019, during Dark Mofo. Ink on rag photographique paper, each 34 x 21.2 cm, designed in collaboration with Margaret Woodward.
17-19.03.2021
Tropical environments are under increasing pressure in contemporary society with the tropics losing over 11.9 million hectares of tree cover in 2019. This loss equates to a football pitch of primary rainforest felled every six seconds. Rainforests are biodiversity hotspots, with more species found within these niche environments than anywhere else on the planet. These remaining 'wild' spaces also capture and store gigatonnes of carbon, which is released as carbon dioxide during deforestation events.
In this AEGIS seminar we will hear from two Australian artists, Betty Sargeant & Debbie Symons, whose recent works explore rainforest environments. Joining them will be one of Australia's leading rainforest researchers, William Laurance.
Chair: Philip Samartzis
Invited speakers: William Laurance, Betty Sargeant & Debbie Symons
William Laurance is a Distinguished Research Professor and former Australian Laureate at James Cook University. He also holds the Prince Bernhard Chair in International Nature Conservation at Utrecht University, Netherlands. He is a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences. He is the director for TESS, and founded and directs ALERT - a science-outreach group that reaches 1-2 million readers weekly.
His many professional awards include the Society for Conservation Biology’s Distinguished Service Award and the Zoological Society of London’s Outstanding Conservation Achievement Prize. An environmental scientist whose work spans the tropical world, Laurance has written eight books and over 600 scientific and popular articles. He is a four-time winner of Australia’s Best Science Writing Award.
Dr Betty Sargeant is a multi-award-winning, internationally recognised media artist. She is co-creative director and artist with the art-technology duo PluginHUMAN. Betty creates multi-sensory installations with a focus on disappearing the interface.
Betty has exhibited internationally (Asia, Europe, The United States, Australia). She was the Melbourne Knowledge Fellow (2016), was artist-in-residence at the Exertion Games Lab, RMIT University (2017-19); and was creator-in-residence at the Asia Culture Centre (South Korea, 2016-17). Betty’s PhD was ranked top three at the CHASS Prize (2015). Her CV is available on LinkedIn. She has academic publications and regularly speaks at public events. In 2019 Betty represented Australia in a federal government cultural delegation to India focusing on partnership building and future collaborations (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and Asialink 2019).
Betty has created media art installations for institutions such as the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (Taiwan, 2018), Questacon (the National Science and Technology Museum, Australia, 2018) and the Asia Culture Centre (South Korea, 2016 & 2017). To learn more about Betty's work visit https://pluginhuman.com/
Debbie Symons’ practice is multi-disciplinary and utilises a range of mediums (drawing, video and installation) to communicate central themes in her work: humanity’s complicated relationship with the natural environment, the dynamics of the global political economy and the effects of consumer culture. Symons completed her PhD at Monash University and is an Associate, College of Design and Social Context, School of Art, RMIT University.
Symons is currently an artist in residence at Bayside City Council’s Billilla Artist Studio Program and is exhibiting a new work titled Sing at Bayside Gallery this month. Sing comprises of 100 handwoven pendant nests containing mini speakers playing pre-recorded tropical bird species songs, evoking the delicate and intricate natural connections found in remaining ‘wild’ environments. Her works can be viewed at https://debbiesymons.com.au/
Art, Science and Tropical Environments is presented by AEGIS: Art + Ecologies Research Network and the Contemporary Art and Social Transformation (CAST) research group at the School of Art, RMIT University.
Image credit: Debbie Symons, Sing 2020-21
04.03.2021
Venerating Trees
An AEGIS seminar with Louise Fowler-Smith and Marco Amati
30 November, 5pm - 6:30pm
In late October, the Victorian government cut down an ancient Yellow Box tree to make way for a highway. Known to Australian Indigenous Djab Wurrung women as a sacred Directions Tree. Many wept as the tree was felled, and the media reported that police arrested around 50 people at the site. Read more.
This tree was near to a group of trees where First Nations women gave birth: the main Birthing Tree is believed to be 800 years old, and like other trees are respected by Australia’s Traditional Owners.
In homage to the sacred Directions Tree, in this AEGIS seminar we explore how two non-Traditional Australians have approached the life of trees.
Speakers:
Chair: Linda Williams
Louise Fowler-Smith (University of New South Wales, Sydney)
As an eco-artist Louise aims to promote new, experimental ways of perceiving the land in the 21st century. She believes that how we perceive and contemplate the land effects how we respond to the land. Her work investigates Anthropocene extinction, environmental justice and climate adaptation and rests at the intersection between the aesthetic approach to art and the ethical.
For the past 20 years her practice-led research has focused on the veneration of trees, a subject she was drawn to for the magnitude of their environmental significance and their universal, pan-religious symbolic importance. She has researched the significance of ‘the Tree’ historically, culturally, symbolically, politically, scientifically and how perceptual shifts through imaging and disseminating the images can activate change and contribute to creating new insights into environmental issues. Her work has been important to the culturalisation of nature in mobilising artworld discourses where the meaning-making of trees has been transacted through the interweaving of the interconnected threads of their intellectual, conceptual, scientific, aesthetic, social, & transcultural associations.
After traveling across India over a 10-year period she published articles on the practice of decorating the Tree as an act of veneration or worship, and how this practice protects trees from loggers.
Louise has exhibited and presented at conferences both nationally and internationally, including in America, Great Britain, Ireland, France, the Netherlands and Japan. In 2108 Louise held a solo exhibition with the Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle in France. Titled Portraits d’Arbres Remarquables Illuminés, the exhibition honours some of the Remarkable Trees of France, and includes nocturnal images taken in the Jardin des Plantes and the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris along with the Parc du Petit Trianon and the Arboretum de Versailles-Chèvreloup in Versailles. To view samples of Louise’s work please visit http://www.louisefowlersmith.com
Associate Professor Marco Amati (RMIT University, Melbourne)
A/Professor Marco Amati has degrees in environmental science and urban planning. He is passionate about trees, urban greenery and the history of cities; he enjoys imparting that enthusiasm to students in the Masters of Urban Planning and Environment and Bachelor of Urban and Regional Planning at RMIT. His research enquires into the ways that we can effectively map urban forests in Australia and writes about the history of those entanglements. Read more. He is currently writing a book to be published in 2021 called “The superorganism and the city – understanding urban planning from a biological perspective”.
Urban forests provide many benefits such as shading and storm water capture. Measuring these benefits can be difficult and expensive because tree canopies are complex and many trees are on private land. Marco will speak about how his urban greening projects develop new techniques for measuring the extent, size, density and other properties of the urban forest.
This seminar is presented by the AEGIS: Art + Ecologies research network in association with CAST.
Image credit: Louise Fowler-Smith
30.11.2020
19.11.2020
Economythologies: MoneyLab#X will begin to navigate the iridescence of money — its symbols, systems, artefacts and technologies — as its gives rise to worlds in transition. Conveners Denise Thwaites (UC) and Nancy Mauro-Flude (RMIT) responding to the constraints of COVID-19, have designed a multisite program that will be launched by small scale events at Ainslie+Gorman Arts Centre (Canberra, ACT) and Bett Gallery (Hobart, TAS) on 5-6 November 2020 (livestreamed online), alongside a rolling exhibition program leading into 2021-2.
Participants, performances, artworks and presentations include: Megan Kelleher (RMIT), Elise Klein (ANU), Matt Scobie (University Auckland), Laurie McDonald (Ngunnawal), Kamaljit K Sangha (CSU), Tim Hollo (ANU), Declan Kuch (WSU), Deborah Cleland (ANU), Pandu Sastrowardoyo (Blockchain Zoo) Daniel Bar (Bitfwd Community Ventures), Heather Horst and Glenn Finau (WSU/UTas), Elaine Jing Zhao (UNSW), Jack Parkin (WSU), Melinda Cooper (ANU), Justin Clemens (UniMelb), Ellie Rennie (RMIT), Ceri Hann (RMIT), Kate Rich (Feral Trade/Feral MBA), Stephen Healy (WSU), Julia Drouhin (Independent artist), Vanessa Bartlett (UoM), Gaby Widgers (LIMA), Emma Bett (Bett Gallery), Melissa Delaney (ANAT), Bill Hart (Independent Artist), Kit Wise (RMIT) Linda Dement (Independent Artist), Kate Geck (RMIT), Denisa Kera (Lythopia.io), Siddharta Perez (Independent Curator), Andreas Siagian (Life Patch), Audrey Samson (fraud.la) [and more...]
To register your interest to physically attend the satellite events in Canberra or Hobart and for updates and details contact via twitter @economythology or economythologies.network.
5-6.11.2020
Hyperthermia
A Cold Climate Symposium
Thursday 29 October, 6pm – 8pm AEDT
This symposium is presented by the Cold Climate Research Lab in association with the AEGIS research network and focuses on the eco-acoustic and social transformations occurring in cold climate ecologies. Invited speakers will present art works and field observations made in northern Hokkaido, and the Swiss and German Alps focusing on the effects of global warming and the systems and strategies they use to interrogate its consequences. Projects such as these provide compelling new experiences that advocate for the preservation of places seldom seen or heard, yet central to the health and wellbeing of our planet.
Chair: Philip Samartzis
Invited speakers: Alan Alpenfelt, Yoichi Kamimura, and Annika Lems
Alan Alpenfelt is a Swiss/British theatre, radio and music producer / artist living in Mendrisio, Switzerland. His recent project Binaural Views of Switzerland is an audio-visual observation of the changes caused by human activity in the Swiss Landscape since 1863, when the pioneering British photographer William England made his Grand Tour of Switzerland, creating stunning stereoscopic photographs of over 150 locations. Alan spent two months rediscovering 30 of these locations, documenting the changes in their aspects and atmospheres using binuaral sound recording and 3D photography. His work highlights the stark contrasts between past and present by immersing the visitor in the sights and sounds of each environment, then and now.
Yoichi Kamimura is a Japanese artist who explores the relationship between sound and vision, and through this process creates an experience in which hearing and seeing affect one another. He is interested in relationships between sound and scenery, as well as the various ways people perceive past, present, and future through the cultural and religious lenses of different parts of the world. Gathering and rearranging the sounds around us, he uses the act of listening to shake up our perceptions of time and place. Yoichi’s recent solo show Hyperthermia presented at the NTT Intercommunication Centre in Tokyo focused on the changing cold climate ecology of northern Hokkaido.
Annika Lems is a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, and heads the independent research group Alpine Histories of Global Change: Time, Self and the Other in the German-Speaking Alpine Region. In the project Annika examines the role of local, everyday engagements with history in social processes of inclusion and exclusion. The project extends her interest in placemaking practices to the field of history and has a close look at the links between lived temporality, place attachment and alienation. It plays into my long-standing scholarly interest in the question of how people experience and make sense of the tensions and paradoxes of globalisation in their everyday lives.
Hyperthermia is presented by the Cold Climate Research Lab, in association with AEGIS: Art + Ecologies Research Network, and CAST.
Image credit: Sea of Ice by Philip Samartzis
29.10.2020
Economic Disobedience and Avenging the Imaginary in the Age of the Never-Ending Culture Wars
28 October 2020, 12 noon - 1:30pm AEDT
Are we tired of talking about the obvious value of culture yet? If indeed, according to the Australian government, that art is useless and culture has absolutely no value, this coven of creatives are brought together to plot an imaginary revenge that involves feminist futuring, witching brews, holograms, assassin laundromat cells and economythologies. Shall we?
Please join Bek Conroy (AUS), Cassie Thorton (CA), Max Haiven (CA), Nancy Mauro-Flude (AUS) as they map a landscape beyond the culture wars.
Bek Conroy is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and researcher working across site, community engagement, and performative interventions through artist led activity. Her recent suite of works have focussed on the intersection of art and economy and have included going on dates with economists and accountants around the world, setting up an artisanal ironing service for cis white men in exchange for emotional labour, and leading an artist led pedagogy for unfucking economy called the “Marrickville School of Economics”. Her work has been presented in Australia by Performance Space (NSW), Campbelltown Arts Centre (NSW), Tin Sheds Gallery (NSW), Vitalstatistix (SA), HOTA (QLD), Urban Theatre Projects (NSW) RMIT (VIC), Monash University (VIC) among others. She has facilitated artist labs with Splendid Arts Lab (National), Artist Wants a Life (NT), Critical Path (NSW) and VitalStatistix (SA).
Cassie Thornton is an artist and activist from the US, currently living in Canada. She refers to herself as a feminist economist, a title that frames her work as that of a social scientist actively preparing for the economics of a future society that produces health and life without the tools that reproduce oppression— like money, police or prisons. She uses social practices including institutional critique, insurgent architecture, and “healing modalities” like hypnosis and yoga to find soft spots in the hard surfaces of capitalist life. She is currently the co-director of the Re-Imagining Value Action Lab in Thunder Bay, an art and social centre at Lakehead University in Ontario, Canada. She is also the steward of a mythoreal peer to peer health project called The Hologram until 2023 when it will become an autonomous decentralized practice.
Nancy Mauro-Flude is an artist and theorist. Administer of a home-brewed feminist web server, she leads the nascent Holistic Computing Network and practices experiential pedagogy in her role as coordinator Emerging Digital/Media Cultures, Bachelor of Design (Digital Media), College of Design and Social Context @RMIT University. Mauro-Flude’s research contributes to the interdisciplinary space of feminist science and technology studies, computer subculture and performance art. Her art practice of radically intervening in public space through aesthetic application of network infrastructure, playfully and critically experiments with signal transmission in order to draw upon contested knowledges and advance broader understandings of emergent technologies as they arise as key actors in our embodied life.
Max Haiven is Canada Research Chair in Culture, Media and Social Justice and co-director of the ReImagining Value Action Lab (RiVAL) at Lakehead University. His recent books include is Revenge Capitalism: The Ghosts of Empire, the Demons of Capital, and the Settling of Unpayable Debts and Art After Money, Money After Art: Creative Strategies Against Financialization.
Hosted by the CVIN Radical Thinkers Series and CAST, and supported by the Design and Cultural Practice Enabling Capability Platform and the Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools (ACUADS).
Image credit: Art Workers Coalition. Art Workers Won’t Kiss Ass, 1969
28.10.2020
Cultural Policy and Cultural Value: A Disconnect? Perspectives from Australia, the Netherlands and the UK
21 October 2020, 5pm - 6:30pm AEDT
In addition to devastating the arts sector, COVID-19 has made it abundantly clear that Australia’s cultural policy has been long neglected. In place of a cohesive policy framework that recognises the complex ways that culture creates value beyond that which is economic, a patchwork of policy has arisen. Given the policy void and lack of long-term vision at the federal level, short-termism from different levels of government has taken place. This has resulted in a piecemeal approach to policy making in the arts leaving Australia’s cultural sector ill-prepared for the ravages of COVID-19.
Join CAST and the Cultural Value Impact Network (CVIN) Radical Thinkers Series for a presentation featuring leading thinkers who will be reflecting on Australian and international experience in cultural policy and discussing articulations of cultural value and how cultural policy might be reimagined.
Panellists: Ben Eltham (AUS), Eleonora Belfiore (UK), and Arjo Klamer (Netherlands)
Ben Eltham is a Lecturer in Media and Communications at Monash University (Melbourne) in the School of Media, Film and Journalism. Ben’s primary research interest is on Australian cultural policy for which he is well known both as an academic and also through his popular media engagement. In addition to a number of peer reviewed journal articles and monographs, Ben writes as a journalist and essayist for New Matilda and regularly contributes to Crikey, Guardian Australia, Overland and Meanjin.
Eleonora Belfiore is Professor of Communication and Media Studies and Co-Director of the Centre for Research in Communication and Culture at Loughborough University in the UK. She the creator and editor of a curated blog The Cultural Value Initiative, which aims to bring together perspectives from academia, creative practice, arts management, policy-maker and media cultural commentary on questions of cultural value, arts and creative industries policy and cultural analysis.
Arjo Klamer is recently retired as a Professor at the Erasmus University. In cultural economics he is responsible for developing the value-based approach as a challenge to more orthodox ways of recognising cultural value. He has authored several books on this approach including Doing the Right Thing. In his retirement Arjo remains active in research and is currently writing another book and also developing a course on humane economics for Free University.
The Radical Thinkers Series is hosted by the CVIN and CAST, and supported by the Design and Cultural Practice Enabling Capability Platform, the Association for Cultural Economics International (ACEI) and the Australian Council of University Art and Design Schools (ACUADS).
21.10.2020
CAST OUT LOUD
MAPS OPEN TALK 2020: Space for Us
WITH JACOB TOLO
THURSDAY 24 SEPTEMBER
1.30PM- 3PM
As curator of the Gertrude Street Projection Festival 2021, Jacob will present and discuss his curatorial work around making space for other voices.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Jacob is a Samoan born Designer raised and educated in Auckland, New Zealand. With a background in Graphic Design from Auckland University of Technology and Postgrad in Multimedia Design from Swinburne University (Melbourne, Aus.), his current obsession is with the digital space and the intersections between art and design.
Jacob is also a co-founder and former board member of the Blak Dot Gallery (Brunswick, Vic). Over this time Jacob worked to curate and promote the works of Pacific Artists and First Peoples artists in Australia and internationally.
With many years of experience in Art Direction, studio management and design for various studios in Melbourne, ranging from advertising, publishing, motion graphics and product design and development. Jacob is currently a Senior Designer at Museums Victoria in the Exhibition and Interpretation Department.
24.09.2020
MAPS Open Talk 2020: The power that we have...Listen up!
THURSDAY 20 AUGUST
1.30PM - 3PM
'The power that we have… Listen Up!' features Gina Bundle, Genevieve Grieves, and Paola Balla. In this short film series, three strong Aboriginal women reflect on and discuss their experiences of community consultation and collaboration with non-Indigenous settler educators and organisations. With extensive experience in the arts community and research practice, each woman recounts their lived experience of ‘so called’ Aboriginal consultation and collaboration and how things can go wrong. Filmed as a series of beautiful portraits with a personal flavour, these women offer generous advice on how we can engage in decolonising practices better as we come to terms with Australia’s colonial past.
This 90 minute session will be facilitated by Vicki Couzens, Jody Haines and Marnie Badham. Films created by artist, Jody Haines.
These films have been developed as part of project led by Vicki Couzens with Marnie Badham and Jody Haines: “Revisiting the Possum Skin Cloaks: Community Stories and Social Impact” funded by RMIT’s Strategic Capability Development Fund and supported by CAST research group and the School of Art.//
20.08.2020
THURSDAY 6 AUGUST
1PM – 2PM
Rimi Khan presents her research examining how the making of ‘ethical fashion’ responds to the spatial imaginaries and networks of racialised and gendered labour that define the global fashion industry. It focuses on a Bangladeshi brand, Aranya, to consider the forms of transnational sociality and community-building it produces through its design collaborations. The mobility of Aranya’s creatives working in intercultural contexts challenges reductive visions of the global and local. It highlights different scales of creativity and solidarity that offer a way to reorient creative economy literature towards inclusivity and sustainability. These findings also help to move away from Western, individualised definitions of creativity, to an understanding of creative work that is reciprocal and relational.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Dr Rimi Khan is a Lecturer in the School of Communication and Design at RMIT University Vietnam. Her research is broadly concerned with creativity, citizenship and cultural economy. Her most recent work examines creative labour and ethical fashion economies in Asia. Her book, Art in Community: The Provisional Citizen (2015, Palgrave), examines the institutional, aesthetic, and economic agendas that make communities creative, cohesive and productive.\
06.08.2020
MONDAY 22 JUNE - THURSDAY 25 JUNE
1PM – 4PM
To kick-start consultation for our major revision of the Code of Practice, NAVA and research partners from RMIT School of Arts are hosting a week of one-hour conversations from Monday 22 to Thursday 25 June, at 1pm and 3pm.
Let’s start with some broad, big-picture questions to inform the development of key discussion papers that will guide deeper work through focus groups, interviews and further research over the coming months.
We invite Artist and Organisational Members, colleagues and stakeholders to contribute your experience and insight to these discussions. In the case of Organisational Members, you may like to share this invitation with different members of your teams based on their areas of expertise.
The Code of Practice for the Professional Australian Visual Arts, Craft & Design Sector sets the national best practice standards for the sector, providing a set of practical and ethical guidelines for the conduct of business between art, craft and design practitioners and galleries, agents, dealers, retailers, buyers, sponsors and partners, commissioners, employers and the managers of residencies, workshops, competitions, prizes and awards, and more. For more details about its revision, see Revising the Code of Practice: A collaborative plan: nava.net.au/code-of-practice/revising-code-practice-collaborative-plan/
Image: Illustration by Emily Johnson.
22.06.2020 - 25.06.2020
Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey are leading Australian artists who create unexpected situations for listening. Their work is driven by a curiosity and questioning about sound in human culture and seeks to evolve and engage with new processes and audiences, through public and participative interventions. Their practice intertwines local, national and international relationships. They have an award winning long term collaborative practice. In 2017 their practice was awarded the national Australia Council Award for Emerging and Experimental Artforms.
Their work has been presented and commissioned widely internationally including Setouchi Trienalle, Japan: Theater Der Welt, Germany: Brighton Festival UK: Sonica Festival Glasgow: Asian Arts Theater, Gwangju: Incheon Art Platform, Seoul: Sydney Festival Australia: Melbourne Festival Australia: AsiaTopa, Melbourne: Perth Festival Australia: MONA FOMA Australia: Kennedy Center, Washington USA, ANTI Festival Finland amongst many others. Their current areas of interest are the sound of existential risk, the audio agents of artificial intelligence in public space, and long form socially engaged public art interventions. Their practice is documented HERE.
Image: Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey 2018 Pivot installation image
29.04.2020
March 2020 takes Garland magazine to southern India where it looks at the role of objects in forging bonds of love. Indian culture is replete with rituals for binding beings together, including the extravagant wedding celebrations and the ties made to connect brother and sister. Garland explores the increasing diversity of this love, including feelings for nature.
This symposium contains two themes. The first is about creative exchange between Australia and India. Artists, designers and craftspersons will offer advice about how to make the most of this connection. The second is about the way objects can help bind us together in love.
After the symposium, Garland launches the exhibition Objects of Love at Craft Victoria.
Presented as part of Melbourne Design Week 2020.
14.03.2020
Exploring the gallery as a laboratory for/of creative practice, Posthuman PUBLICS invites artists to engage in an interdisciplinary laboratory for the month of February to coincide with Rosi Braidotti’s inaugural visit to RMIT University, being hosted by DERC and CAST.
For the month of February 2020 Project Space will become an interdisciplinary laboratory - a space of enquiry. The laboratory process will invite a range of practitioners to join us where we will explore the notion of Posthumanism - through discussions, workshops and exhibitions of work in progress.
See RMIT:ART:INTERSECT webpage here for more information.
KEY EVENTS
Inhabiting Posthuman Climates: Ecologies of Change
Rosi Braidotti
Ceri Hann, Dis/Play
Heather Hesterman, Cultivate
Rebecca Najdowski, Ambient Pressure
Dominic Redfern, Bugplane
Jordan Lacey, Undercurrent
The Algae Society Bio Art Design Lab, Submerged
Byron Dean, POLYCENTRE
Polly Stanton & Byron Dean, Emergent Fields
Cath Clover, Guyup-Guyup: Scores for Eight Songbirds Cycle 2
Anna Hickey-Moody, Climate Change Faith
Phil Samartzis, Wetlands
Laboratory participants represent independent artists, academics and researchers across RMIT University including the School of Art, School of Architecture and Urban Design, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies and the School of Media and Communications.
WORKSPACE
Molly Braddon (CAST) and Fiona Hillary (CAST/MAPS) will use the gallery as a collaborative workspace throughout the exhibition. Anyone is welcome to join them in using the gallery as a workspace throughout the month of February.
LABORATORY(S)
Laboratory facilitators:
Associate Prof Linda Williams (School of Art & AEGIS)
Dr Grace McQuilten
Assoc Dean Landscape Architecture Katrina Simon (School of Architecture and Urban Design)
Professor Sarah Bekessy (School of Global, Urban and Social Studies)
Professor Ingrid Richardson (School of Media and Communications)
Laboratory provocateurs/contributors:
Dr Ceri Hann (School of Art), Senior Conservation Ranger Andrew Webster (Hobsons Bay City Council)
Professor Aidyn Mouradov (School of Science), Manager Community Education and Capacity Building, Mary Catus-Wood (Melbourne Water)
Dr Ceri Hann (School of Art)
Dr Angela Clarke (Design and Social Context).
READING GROUP(S)
Affect Reading Group/Posthuman Reading Group: A convergence of interdisciplinary artists and researchers engaging in affect and posthuman ideas.
Reading as Protest facilitated by Dr Kelly Hussey-Smith: Bring a book and a friend! We encourage you to read it in public as a resistance to the constant busyness of work and life.
04.02.2020 - 28.02.2020
Heather Hesterman 2019 Green LAB Shepparton Art Museum
Film shorts featuring three strong Aboriginal women discussing their experiences of consultation and collaboration with non-Indigenous settlers
Please join us for the premiere of The power that we have… Listen Up! featuring Gina Bundle, Genevieve Grieves, and Paola Balla. In this short film series, three strong Aboriginal women reflect on and discuss their experiences of community consultation and collaboration with non-Indigenous settler educators and organisations. With extensive experience in the arts community and research practice, each woman recounts their lived experience of ‘so called’ Aboriginal consultation and collaboration and how things can go wrong. Filmed as a series of beautiful portraits with a personal flavour, these women offer generous advice on how we can engage in decolonising practices better as we come to terms with Australia’s colonial past.
This 90 minute session will include facilitated discussion between the films.
These films have been developed as part of project led by Vicki Couzens with Marnie Badham and Jody Haines: “Revisiting the Possum Skin Cloaks: Community Stories and Social Impact” funded by RMIT’s Strategic Capability Development Fund and supported by CAST research group and the School of Art.
Films created by artist, Jody Haines.
Image: Genevieve Grieves, Paola Balla, and Gina Bundle (pictured here), Jody Haines (filmmaker), with Vicki Couzens and Marnie Badham, Film short still, Jody Haines
10.02.2020
Celebrating the completion of Robbie Rowlands’ major sculptural commission Crossing the Floor, the inaugural Town Hall Broadmeadows Gallery exhibition Subsurface draws on supportive works developed over the two-year creation period.
Prior to its closure for redevelopment, Rowlands, in conjunction with CAST, undertook a residency in the Town Hall. His investigations captured unique qualities of the building’s architectural features, textures and history, paying specific attention to the floor as a surface that has supported the community over time.
Encompassing photo documentation, film and sound - including the old supper room sound system - the exhibition brings together this rich research revealing layered histories that inspired the final sculptural work, now permanently on display in the main foyer.
The gallery launch also features a series of photographic works that capture the original town hall by renowned photographer John Gollings and a documentary by Singing Bowl Media.
Crossing The Floor is developed with Blackartprojects as part of the Town Hall Broadmeadows project, with Kerstin Thompson Architects and Hume City Council.
20.11.2019
Symposium on Development of Arts Education 2019
Expanded Field: Redefining Arts Education in Hong Kong
With keynote presentation from CAST member & Arts + Eduction theme leader Professor Kit Wise.
15.11.2019 - 16.11.2019
Queer(y)ing Creative Practice Reading Group: Alison Bennett
QCP is an informal collective of artist academics, students, alumni and affiliates with an interest in queer creative practices. The QCP reading group is a place to come together once a month to discuss queer theory and current research.
Presented by Dr. Alison Bennett, this sessions reading is:
EXCERPTS: Preface and 'Introduction: 'New' Genders and Sculpture in the 1960s', in Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender (Yale University Press, 2015). PAGES xi-xvii, 1-5, 26-41.
Download it here.
About Alison Bennett:
My broader practice is situated in ‘expanded photography’ where the boundaries have shifted in the transition to digital media and become diffused into ubiquitous computing. Recent projects have tested the creative and discursive potentials of augmented reality, photogrammetry, 3D scanning, and virtual reality as encompassed by the medium and practice of photography. As a neuroqueer new-media artist, my work has explored the performance and technology of gender identity and considered the convergence of biological and digital skin as virtual prosthesis. My work has been featured on ABC TV Australian Story, the New York Times, Mashable, The Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, Motherboard, The Creators Project, KillScreen, ABC TV News, and The Guardian ‘best Australian photographs of 2015’. I am a founding member of the QueerTech.io artist collective, a member of the Gertrude Street Projection Festival Advisory Committee, have served on a number of development panels for the Midsumma Festival. I work as a lecturer in photography at RMIT School of Art where I am program co-manager of the bachelor of arts (photography).
11.11.19
CAST OUT LOUD: Practice as Research at the ACUADS Conference, ARC Masterclass, National Series – Linkage Focus
This is the second of two advanced one day masterclasses are aimed at Australian practice-led researchers with an interest in applying for ARC funding. It will suit those who:
We will be covering:
Due to our small numbers, we are also able to tailor each session to the knowledge of the group and the focus of the grant category, while providing a general overview.
Professor Denise Meredyth will facilitate a development process aimed at understanding the key elements of ARC funding, such as understanding your audience; developing your project; and writing your application. Each participant will then draft or revise key elements of an ARC application in an environment of mutual exchange. Designed to build on the immediate knowledge of the masterclass, this will ensure each researcher walks away with a first draft of an application for future development.
The Practice as Research workshops sit within the framework of our newly established, cross-university Practice as Research Network and is undertaken in partnership with Monash University, the University of Melbourne and with grant support from ACUADS.
30.10.19
Ways of Shifting: Cultural and Linguistic Diversity in the Arts
Presented as part of the CAST OUT LOUD program.
Image: Rhett D'Costa, Becoming Differently (In Hyphenated at the Substation), Installation and Photography, photo by Shane Hulbert
23.10.19
DöBra: Designing a Good Death in Sweden
Carol Tishelman and Max Kleijberg, from Karolinska Institutet Division of Innovative Care, will discuss a program of end of life research.
A partnership with the Health Transformation Lab and School of Art Creative Care.
Presented as part of the CAST OUT LOUD program.
21.10.2019
CAST OUT LOUD: MAPS Open Talk featuring artists Peter Waples-Crowe and Megan Evans
Artists Peter Waples-Crowe and Megan Evans discuss the focus of their work and the nature of their collaboration.
09.10.2019
CAST OUT LOUD: Practice as Research Network - ARC Foundations Masterclass
This is the first of two masterclasses aimed at Australian practice-led researchers with an interest in knowing more about ARC funding. It will suit those who are familiar with applying for Australia Council or state government funding and who would like to know more about how the ARC application process works. It is designed for those who:
The masterclass involves:
Run by Professor Denise Meredyth, Research Whisperer Jonathan O'Donnell, and CAST Coordinator Rose Lang, the session will share the benefits of their collective expertise.
The Practice as Research workshops sit within the framework of our newly established, cross-university Practice as Research Network and is undertaken in partnership with Monash University, the University of Melbourne and with grant support from ACUADS.
02.10.2019
STEAM Horizons 2.0: Simultaneous Teacher Symposium
The Arts + Education research theme recently contributed to a Professional Development symposium with the Department of Education in Tasmania.
18.09.2019
Melbourne Fringe Presents SKIN by Alison Bennett
In a new work by artist Alison Bennett, SKIN takes the form of a large-scale photographic artwork that wraps the skin of tattooed neuro-diverse LGBTQIA+ people around the digital facade of Fed Square. Bennett says "I have always wanted to wrap a building in tattooed skin. I am excited by the opportunity to make work that addresses the unique affordances of the Digital Facade and the specific context of Federation Square."
All of the subjects in this work identify as 'neuroqueer. This is an identity term that has been adopted to describe the intersection of queerness and neurodiversity. Neurodiversity encompasses a range of atypical neurological experiences such as ADHD, clinical anxiety, and dyslexia. The term neuroqueer is most strongly associated with autism. "Through images of tattoo markings on the surface of the skin, I wanted the consider the common neuroqueer experience of entangled embodiment - the sense of the body merging with the environment. Projecting images of the surface of the skin onto a building is one expression of this entanglement."
Some of the points of departure for this project include the question posed by Donna Haraway in her 1991 Cyborg Manifesto: “Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin?”. Bennett is also interested in the work of Pallasmaa 'The Eyes of the Skin (1996) that articulates embodied non-ocularcentric experiences of architecture (a.k.a., ways of experiencing space other than through vision).
More info here Melbourne Fringe Festival: https://melbournefringe.com.au/event/skin/
Alison Bennett online at https://alisonbennett.net
#MelbFringe #FedSquare
12.09.2019 - 29.09.2019
CAST OUT LOUD: The Image and Public Histories with NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati
NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati lives in Kathmandu, Nepal and works at the intersections of visual storytelling, research, pedagogy, and collective action. In 2007, she co-founded photo.circle; a platform that facilitates learning, exhibition making, and publishing opportunities for Nepali photographers that is working in increasingly trans-disciplinary ways. In 2011, she co-founded Nepal Picture Library; a digital archiving initiative that works towards diversifying Nepali social and cultural history, by centering the histories of women, Dalit, Madhesi, Indigenous and queer people. NayanTara is also the co-founder and Festival Director of Photo Kathmandu, an international festival that takes place in Kathmandu every two years. At present, NayanTara is co-facilitating a year-long seminar series called Imperfect Solidarities which inquires into the intricate and imperfect workings of solidarity building and collective action within the feminist and other movements in Nepal. Among other projects, she is also working towards the fourth edition of Photo Kathmandu which is due to take place in December 2020.
NayanTara’s visit is supported by the Social Practice concentration of CAST and the DCP ECP.
11.09.2019
CAST OUT LOUD: Cracks in the gates - aesthetics, craft and community
This panel discussion explores hierarchies of value in the art world, paying particular attention to classifications made between “fine art” and “craft” practices, including the prevalence of 'aesthetic policing'. Panelists will consider how class, race and gender are articulated through this distinction and are further complicated by community and cultural practices which challenge the conventions of the mainstream art world. Such practices have historically been sidelined by contemporary art exhibitionary practices and discourses. Working towards change for social equity, panelists ask how might a greater appreciation of the aesthetic and cultural dimensions of craft practices transform our understanding of contemporary art today? Speakers: Varuni Kanagasundaram, Kirsten Lyttle, Tammy Wong-Hulbert, Vicki Couzens. MC: Professor Anna Hickey-Moody
The catalyst for this discussion was the earlier CAST OUT LOUD event Cultural Rights in Victoria - are we there yet?, held in partnership with HRAFF and Multicultural Arts Victoria. This session is part of RMIT' School of Art's Craft Initiative.
Image: Varuni Kanagasundaram, Belonging (detail), 2012
Porcelain paper clay, fabric, thread, slip, stain, h11 x w75 x d25cm
Photo: Jeremy Dillon
10.09.2019
CAST OUT LOUD: Hands + Mouth: Boundaries of the Body
Join us for this experimental and participatory event to explore the boundaries of the body at the end of life (touch, embodiment, gestures and more) through roving conversations as we consider end of life scenarios.
So, hand to mouth and then to wax, speaking, eating and gesticulating. Haptic activities and refreshments provided.
Presented by Rebecca Hilton (Uni. Arts Stockholm), Keely Macarow (School of Art), Gretchen Coombs (School of Media & Comm.), Kit Wise, (School of Art), Soumitri Varadarajan (School of Design) and Fleur Summers (School of Art).
A Creative Care event for End of Life: Co-designing space and place, an interdisciplinary project in partnership with Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, the University of Arts Stockholm and the Karolinska Institutet (Stockholm).
This intra university and cancer centre project combines creative arts, participatory design, ethnographic and health methods to explore the possibilities, experience and challenges of spaces within the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre.
Supported by the RMIT Capability Development Fund, DCP ECP, CAST and the School of Art.
Image: Fleur Summers, Wax Works II, 2019
20.08.2019
CAST OUT LOUD: MAPS Open Talk Working on Country
Working on Country
Parbin-ata Carolyn Briggs
Parbin-ata Carolyn Briggs AM is a Boon Wurrung senior elder and chairperson and founder of the Boon Wurrung Foundation.
A descendant of the First Peoples of Melbourne, the Yaluk-ut Weelam clan of the Boon Wurrung, she is the great-granddaughter of Louisa Briggs, a Boon Wurrung woman born near Melbourne in the 1830’s.
Carolyn’s cultural knowledge and experience has been recognised by communities throughout Australia.
Carolyn is passionately committed to sharing the values and heritage of Melbourne’s First Peoples – the Boon Wurrung – and believes that a sense of a shared history of Melbourne is important in uniting the whole community.
She is also the author of “Journey Cycles of the Boon Wurrung: Stories with Boonwurrung Language”.
Coming up in the Working on Country series:
31.07.2019
Italian theorist and curator Leandro Pisano, and Australian sound artist Philip Samartzis collaborate to present The Manifesto of Rural Futurism, a lecture supported by series of recordings exploring the sounds of remote southern Italian communities. The Manifesto provides a critical perspective in which multiple points of view converge to afford new and striking ways to rethink 'rurality'.
Leandro Pisano is interested in intersections between art, sound and technoculture. He is founder and director of Interferenze new arts festival and works on projects dealing with sound art and ecology of rural and marginal territories. Among the sonic art exhibitions he has curated, are “Otros sonidos, otros paisajes” (MACRO Museum - Rome, Italy, 2017) and “Alteridades de lo invisible” (Festival Tsonami - Valparaíso, Chile, 2018). He holds a PhD in Cultural and Post-Colonial Studies from University of Naples “L’Orientale” and he is presently Honorary Research Fellow at University of Urbino “Carlo Bo”.
CAST OUT LOUD: Para-Site-Seeing: Art & Multi-Scalar Mobilities
Visiting UK academic Dr Jen Southern will discuss how changes from the microscopic to global scales can be meaningfully imagined and encountered. The GPS devices we currently work with operate on scales that range from the planetary (satellites at 20,200 -km above the earth) to the sub-atomic (in extremely accurate atomic clocks that are used by GPS devices). GPS navigation ranges from globe-spanning international flights to the detailed local mapping of individual animals in the wild, offering and necessitating an imaginative engagement with scale. Artworks engaging with mobilities have mapped and made visible a range of movements, from satellites and long Antarctic voyages to familiar local journeys and microbial mobilities. On these different scales, they enable us to encounter the entanglement of distance, proximity, and scale, and to connect globalization with our human presence in the world. Referencing the work of anthropologist Anna Tsing, this seminar will address the argument that art practices are taking up the challenge of observing change and precarity, and creating spaces in which collective imagination of different futures can be cultivated through relational and performative artworks.
This CAST OUT LOUD event is part of the Practice as Research program.
17.07.2019
CAST OUT LOUD: Show like a Bauhausler!
It’s the centennial year of the Bauhaus and it’s haunting our museums. Can we imagine a street-wise Bauhaus complete with lanterns, masks and fancy dress as described by our very own Bauhäusler Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack?
There was a kite festival, when we marched in procession through Weimar to the top of the hill, with hundreds of school children. There were lantern festivals when lanterns made in the workshops were carried through the streets at night. There were dances nearly every Saturday, when we wore fantastic masks and costumes prepared by the theatre group.
You are invited to participate in a workshop and parade as part of the Bauhaus Now! exhibition at Buxton Contemporary. Join up to 50 students from RMIT, VCA, and Griffith University for a lantern-making workshop scheduled for the week 17th-21st June. This will include presentations by artists - Mark Shorter, Claire Lamb, Justene Williams and Mikala Dwyer - and architectural historian Phillip Goad. You will spend the week each making a lantern you’ll carry in the parade from one art school to another. Beginning at RMIT Gallery and proceeding down Swanston street to Buxton Contemporary, the lanterns will be ceremonially installed as part of the Bauhaus Now! exhibition.
Workshop: 17-21 June, 2019. Building 50, Orr Street, Carlton
Parade: 12 July, 2019 (subject to change in case of rain)
Exhibition: 25 July onwards, Buxton Gallery, Southbank
17.06.2019
CAST OUT LOUD: MAPSopentalk: Six Moments in Kingston (SMIK)
Join MAPS Alumni Marcia Ferguson in conversation with Six Moments in Kingston curators David Cross & Cameron Bishop, and participating artist RMIT Senior Lecturer, Dr Laresa Kosloff.
Six Moments in Kingston (SMIK) is a multidisciplinary public art project led by six contemporary artists and over 200 local participants. Six extraordinary local stories drawn from the period 1976-1981 form the genesis of six installations, each set in the site where the story originally occurred. The project is experienced via a public art bus tour around the Kingston, with on-board broadcasts and stop-offs to interact with each artwork on site. Artists Field Theory, Laresa Kosloff, Shane McGrath, Spiros Panigirakis, Steve Rhall, Tal Fitzpatrick draw from multiple arts disciplines including performance, video, animation, sculpture, music, textile art and craftivism.
RMIT alumni, Dr Laresa Kosloff is Senior Lecturer and SMIK artist. Marcia Ferguson, Master of Arts: Art in Public Space graduate in 2018, was shortlisted for the Vice Chancellor’s List for Academic Excellence and is currently producing SMIK in her role as Cultural Producer and Partnerships Coordinator for the City of Kingston.
7:00-8:00pm
Join RMIT's student led Public Art Collective for a conversation about key issues related to the SMIK talk.
22.05.2019
17/05/2019 10:45 am
Diversity in professional workplaces is at the forefront of discussion in the creative industries, but how often does this rhetoric result in real action?
Join us for this thought-provoking forum led by panel speakers from different sectors of the arts about how we can move beyond discourse to achieve change.
Initiated by Multicultural Arts Victoria and the Human Rights Arts and Film Fesitval (HRAFF) and supported by Contemporary Art and Social Transformation (CAST) at RMIT School of Art, this forum will explore the topics of power, employment and representation.
CAST OUT LOUD: Rupture, vibration and residue - contemporary sound art theory and practice
Sound artists interface with sonic environments to provoke changes in the minutiae of everyday life – social, political, aesthetic – as a means to disassemble/reassemble those relations and flows that inform our habitual connections with the world. Three international sound artists – Lisa Hall, Philip Samartzis and Polly Stanton – are invited to RMIT’s Black Box to discuss their sonic practices across urban and wilderness environments, and in relation to human perception. Embodiment, technology, listening and intervention form key approaches of each artist’s interactions with environments and everyday human activity. These practices will be discussed in relationship to immersive audio-visual artworks created by each of the three artists, presented in the Black Box’s state of the art audio-visual system. With discussion guided by Jordan Lacey, audience-participants will have the opportunity to be involved in an open conversation about what a sound art practice is, when realised in the political, social and cultural context of the city.
Lisa Hall is a sound artist exploring urban environments using audio interventions and performative actions, and is affiliated with Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice (CRiSAP) at University of the Arts London. Currently on sabbatical, Lisa is travelling, listening to urban spaces across the globe and developing new practice based research works.
Phil Samartzis a sound artist, scholar and curator with a specific interest in the social and environmental conditions informing remote wilderness regions and their communities. Philip is the co-founder and artistic director of the Bogong Centre for Sound Culture and teaches courses in sound art and spatial practice in the School of Art.
Polly Stanton is a moving image artist and sound practitioner who’s mode of working is expansive and site based, with her practice intersecting across a number of disciplines from film production, sound design, field research, performance, writing and publication. Polly is a lecturer in the Master of Media program at RMIT University.
Jordan Lacey is an urban sound installation artist and author operating at the interface of the sonic arts and urban design. He is author of Sonic Rupture, which offers an affect-based approach to the design of urban soundscapes, and is recent recipient of a DECRA fellowship entitled, Translating Ambiance.
15.05.2019
CAST OUT LOUD: Queer(y)ing Creative Practice – let’s talk about ‘representation’
Representation is frequently offered as the solution to problems of diversity, inclusion and belonging. But does it work? What are the limits of representation rhetoric?
The Gender Spectrum Collection: Stock Photos Beyond the Binary is a remarkable case in point. Commissioned by Broadly, the collection features photographs by artist Zachary Drucker.
Artists, academics and interested ‘others’ are invited to join us for a chat about queer(y)ing creative practice.
09.05.2019
CAST OUT LOUD: Eben Kirksey 'CRISPR Futures - I Don’t Want to Walk, I Want to Fly'
When Jiankui He produced the first "edited" babies by modifying their DNA with CRISPRCas9, I was in Hong Kong at the epicenter of the scandal. When mainstream media outlets like CNN, the BBC, and The Associated Press piled on with declarations that Dr. He’s experiment was “monstrous,” it was unclear if they were suggesting that the two babies were monsters or if the scientist was himself.
This talk will reframe the mainstream debate about CRISPR, by engaging with disabled scholars and artists who are interrogating timely ethical and aesthetic questions. CRISPR could homogenize the human species, or it could be used to enrich our biological and social diversity.
Eben Kirksey is an American anthropologist who specializes on science and justice. He is currently an Associate Professor at Deakin University. Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study is hosting Kirksey in the 2019-2020 academic year, where he is conducting research on gene editing, the innovation economy, and social inequality. As the lead curator of the Multispecies Salon, he has made artistic interventions in Australia, Europe, and the United States. http://www.multispecies-salon.org/
17.04.2019
Image: Eben Kirksey, The Frog Pregnancy Test, 2010-12
CAST OUT LOUD: Ancient Now Workshop
We are seeing in our region an increasing interest in the ancient past. In China, this is closely related to the values that bind a nation together. In the West, it can respond to the cultural vacuum left by neoliberalism. And in the South, it often has a strong de-colonising agenda for first peoples. These links to the ancient world pose a challenge. How do globally-connected liberal urbanites relate to the rituals and knowledge of the past? In this workshop 12 artists will present on their work followed discussion with a wider audience. This is a chance to participate in a broader discussion about these contemporary concerns and to explore how they inform the methodologies of different kinds of artists. The project is also part of an online exhibition for Garland magazine, which has an international readership and links with major events in our region. The June issue of Garland will feature stories from China and elsewhere that connect ancient and modern worlds.
Coordinators, Tammy Hulbert and Kevin Murray.
29.03.2019
Image: Chen Qiulin, ‘The Garden No. 3’, 2007, C-type print, 100 x 82 cm. Image courtesy the artist and A Thousand Plateaus Art Space, Chengdu
CAST OUT LOUD: Practice as Research Network ARC Masterclass at RMIT
This CAST OUT LOUD ARC Masterclass was aimed at practice-led researchers with an interest in applying for ARC funding and who were keen to build strategies, skills and knowledge in the field. Designed for researchers needing further guidance about how to negotiate the complexities of the visual arts and category 1 funding applications, it examined:
Run by Professor Denise Meredyth, and RMIT's Senior Advisor in Research Development Jonathan O'Donnell, the session shared the benefits of their deep expertise. Denise has been an Executive Director for the ARC Humanities and Creative Arts (HCA) panel, as well as holding senior positions at art and design faculties at RMIT and University of South Australia. She has been the CI on 12 ARC grants and understands the requirements of practice-led researchers and the university environment they sit within. Jonathan O'Donnell has honed the skills of thousands of researchers seeking support for creative research of all kinds. His big-picture approach and collaborative style usefully de-mystify this sphere of research endeavour. This project was supported by the Design and Creative Practice stream of the Enabling Capability Platform.
In 2019 ACUADS have funded an Australia-wide masterclass as part of the 2019 ACUADS conference with a digital resource publication.
30.11.2018
CAST OUT LOUD - A Conversation: Making Art in the Asia-Pacific
Artists Sofi Basseghi, Lisa Hilli, Ryoko Kose, Phuong Ngo and visiting Asia Pacific Triennial artists Ly Hoang Ly from Vietnam and Lyno Vuth from Cambodia got together for a dynamic conversation about making art in the Asia-Pacific region. The discussion explored the challenges emerging through the changing identities of the Asia-Pacific region and the strategies artists use in working with the politics of gender, identity and the complex histories of colonisation/decolonisation in the region.
This event was presented CAST’s Mobility and Migration Research Team in partnership with RMIT Design and Creative Practice Enabling Capability Platform, SPEAKER and Multicultural Arts Victoria.
Ly Hoang Ly and Lyno Vuth appear in collaboration with The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT9) and Centre of Visual Art, VCA, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne.
28.11.2018
Image: Ryoko Kose, Just Keep Going, Sanctuary, 2018
CAST OUT LOUD: NAVA & CAST RMIT
Public Art Roundtable 2, Inaugural Partnership Event
You are invited to contribute to a major revision of NAVA's Code of Practice(Public Art). The roundtable meeting is the second event in an exciting research partnership between the National Association of Visual Arts (NAVA) and Contemporary Art and Social Transformation (CAST) in the School of Art, RMIT University. Our first event was held in Sydney on 7 November https://visualarts.net.au/news-opinion/2018/industry-roundtable-expresses-urgent-need-national-standards-public-art-commissioning/
The Code of Practice is a key reference in the working lives of Australian visual arts professionals and sets benchmarks for best ethical, legal and financial practice. Establishing fees, industry standards and detailed guidelines, the Code plays a significant role in the transparency and professionalisation of the visual arts, but relies on regular revision and updates to stay relevant.
Attendees will discuss recurring issues for commissioning art in public space; the benefits of sector-wide best practice guidelines; obstacles to implementation; and recommendations for change. An introduction to some of the concerns of the field are considered in the following article: Towards national standards for art in the public space.
Light refreshments will be served. Bookings are essential and places are limited.
We are proud to acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nations, the traditional owners and custodians of the land on which RMIT sits. We acknowledge and respect Elders, past, present and future.
CAST acknowledges the support of the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA), the national peak body protecting and promoting the professional interests of the Australian visual and media arts, craft and design sector.
26.11.2018
Image: Jennifer Turpin and Michaelie Crawford, S(w)ing, 2016, East Sydney Community Centre. Client: City of Sydney. Photographer: Tanja Bruckner
CAST OUT LOUD: Who's afraid of public space?
CAST OUT LOUD's Who's afraid of public space? asked hard questions about questions of safety, conflict and privatisation in the public domain and the role of art. Can art create sites of contestation in public space and what can we reasonably expect of art in addressing the problems of contemporary urban living? Artists Atong Atem, Vicki Couzens, Amy Spiers and Zan Griffith joined City of Melbourne Art Manager Kaye Glamuzina; Keely Macarow and Fiona Hillary from RMIT's Masters of Public Space program and CAST Leader Grace McQuilten, to think about how we can make public space better.
30.10.2018
CAST OUT LOUD - Embodiment and Creative Research
A practical workshop for HDR / Postgraduate students and interested others
Embodiment & Creative Research
In this workshop meet Live Particle founders Angela Clarke & Camilla Maling. Discover new pathways to your creativity and renegotiate your relationship to the known. Move, speak, make sound, use touch and pay close attention to visceral sensation. Explore the Mobius loop as a metaphor for the ‘inflection of mind into body and body into mind’ as suggested by Elizabeth Grosz. Apply this experience to the creative processes in your research.
All welcome - no experience necessary
Wear clothes for moving
For more details contact: angela.clarke@rmit.edu.au
21.09.2018
CAST OUT LOUD - Queer(y)ing Creative Practice: Making Kin
QCP is an informal collective of RMIT artist academics, students, and interested affiliates with an interest in queer creative practices. We propose to come together about once a month to consider and reflect on interesting topics.
Beyond the mainstreaming of issues such as marriage equality, queer cultural practices investigate the arbitrary construction of cultural paradigms, driven by an intersectional approach to social justice and embodied lived experience. Queer cultural practices go #beyondyes to generate reparative actions by gently holding together alliances of practice, ideology, politics and experience.
For our first gathering, we will be reflecting on the theme of MAKING KIN! We will screen Donna Haraway : Story telling for earthly survival, a gorgeous 2016 documentary film by Fabrizio Terranova about the mother of posthumanism and cyborg goddess, the great Donna Haraway Distinguished Professor Emerita at UCLA History of Consciousness program
https://vimeo.com/189163326
Come for the film at 3pm and/or join us for a glass of wine and discussion 4:30-5:30pm.
The Queer(y)ing Creative Practice is presented by CAST and coordinated by Dr Alison Bennett, RMIT School of Art alison.bennett@rmit.edu.au
Sign up for notifications about QCP HERE
Link the ArtSchoolPortal post https://artschoolportal.com/2018/08/qcpg/
06.09.2018
CAST OUT LOUD: Re-imagining cityscapes and mindscapes: perspectives from Italy and Australia
When urban public space is able to harness imagination, good things happen. This CAST OUT LOUD seminar brought together Journal of Public Space editor Luisa Bravo with RMIT Adjunct Professor Maggie McCormick to explore trajectories of Italian and Australian public art research projects. In this discussion, feelings, dreams and personal experiences were allowed to create a new kind of urbanity made up of small and spontaneous episodes of emotional exchange. The seminar was followed by the launch of the June 2018 edition of the Journal of Public Space (Vol. 3, No. 1), which includes contributions from Maggie McCormick and Grace Leone. Seminar participants were: Grace McQuilten (MC), Maggie McCormick and Luisa Bravo with an introduction by Daniel Palmer. The Journal of Public Space was launched by Luisa Bravo and Professor Julian Goddard.
19.06.2018
Grace Leone, Gantry Section D, 2016-17, RMIT Swanston Street, Melbourne. Photographer: Nura Sheidae
CAST OUT LOUD: Art, Labor and Working Life
We are told that work is on the brink of becoming immaterial. The information age, the knowledge economy, the third industrial revolution conspire in this. But for every job in a rich economy involving computer work, desk time and intellectual effort, a worker elsewhere is labouring for minimal pay just to survive. CAST OUT LOUD: Art, Labor and Working Life drew together a panel of artists and arts workers to discuss the nature of art work, its precarity, paradoxes and complicities. SPEAKERS: Bindi Cole Chocka, Nicholas Walton-Healey, Bianca Vallentine MODERATOR Shanti Sumartojo.
This event accompanied the exhibition THE WORK OF ART: AN EXHIBITION OF ART, LABOUR AND WORKING LIFE, Tuesday 1 - Friday 11 May, 2018, curated by Grace McQuilten and Shanti Sumartoj. Artists: Bindi Cole Chocka, Nicholas Walton-Healey, Bianca Vallentine, Ceri Hann, Kirsten Lyttle, Bek Conroy, Sarah Parkes, Andy Murphy and Suzan Dlouhy at the Mission to Seafarers, 717 Flinders St, Docklands, Melbourne.
01.05.2018
CAST OUT LOUD - Decoding: art and the ARC - Public Forum
In association with the College of Design and Social Context at RMIT, CAST staged a public forum to discuss the relationship between the Australian Research Council's funding guidelines and practice-based visual art. ARC Executive Director of the Humanities and Creative Arts, Professor Joanne Tompkins joined a panel of artist-academics - Professor Paul Gough, Distinguished Professor Larissa Hjorth, Professor Jon Cattapan, Dr Grace McQuilten, Daniel von Sturmer and others - to discuss strategy, tips and insights with Q & A. The very positive response we had to this project led to funding support for the formation of a Practice-led Research Network with members from multiple universities.
16.04.2018
Focused around the issues emerging from the HYPHENATED exhibition at Substation (22 March- 21 April, 2018) this symposium asks questions about how Asian inter-cultural identity informs contemporary art practices and how the participating artists converse with these issues. Artists Rushdi Anwar, Sofi Basseghi, Andy Butler, Rhett D’Costa, Tammy Wong Hulbert, Nikki Lam, Eugenia Lim, Phuong Ngo, Vipoo Srivilasa and Hoang Tran Nguyen come together to discuss what a 'hyphenated' sense of a cultural self means for each artist's work, and the way concepts of cultural identity are used - and potentially mis-used - in social, cultural and political discourse. While colonial constructs of Australian-ness have too often been used to instill fear and misunderstanding with our regional neighbours, it is increasingly recognised that the new world, intercultural identities so many of us share, are one of Australia's greatest pools of creativity and strength. Hear the artists speak and join the discussion, with drinks and snacks to close.
This event is produced in association with Multicultural Arts Victoria.
28.03.2018
Nikki Lam, Still...what is left, 2017, HD video.
CAST OUT LOUD Art, Science, Social Engagement
A symposium exploring our current fascination with art, science and social engagement. Can the power of these very different kinds of curiosity be harnessed to make a better world? For renowned scientist and novelist C.P. Snow, the split between science and the humanities prevented the cleverest people having the most important insights. Is this still so? With a keynote address from Scienceworks Director Dr Nurin Veis, CAST OUT LOUD: Art, Science, Social Engagement will look at how artists research science, and perhaps more importantly, why. Peta Clancy, Jiann Hughes and Cameron Robbins will discuss their practice and its relationship to the tenets and methodologies of science. A panel will explore the implications of this kind of interdisciplinary practice for a world that desperately needs new kinds of creativity and innovation.
01.11.2017
RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nations on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University. RMIT University respectfully acknowledges their Ancestors and Elders, past and present. RMIT also acknowledges the Traditional Custodians and their Ancestors of the lands and waters across Australia where we conduct our business.
cast@rmit.edu.au
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