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RECENT WORK

Benevolent Asylum: just for fun
Lily Hibberd & WART
A Peformance Space WALK
Sat 26 Nov & 3 Dec 2011

In an excursion of Lavender Bay, Sydney, Lily Hibberd and WART made an allegorical tour of around seven sites around Luna Park. This WALK revealed how joy and sacrifice eclipse histories of madness and exile and underpin the contemporary workings of Australian institutions of confinement.

www.performancespace.com.au/2011/benevolent-asylum-just-for-fun/

ARTSPACE SCREENING & DISCUSSION
Wednesday 30 November from 6.30pm

At this event, Mieke Bal and Michelle Williams Gamaker's new feature film "A Long History of Madness" will be presented in association with the WALK performances, hosted by Artspace, Sydney. This will be followed by an informal discussion and drinks, with artists Lily Hibberd and WART, alongside film critic Adrian Martin.

This night aims to engage people with direct experience of institutional confinement, and those working or associated with arts, academic, and community and state mental health and corrections organisations. Drinks to follow screening. Over the evening, we intend to examine the history and interpretation of Australia's former and ongoing major institutions of confinement and how notions of madness might influence practices and representations of punitive confinement today.

Download Artspace event flier

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

Seeking a Meridian
Galerie de Roussan, Paris
September 2011

Above: Seeking a Meridian, 2011
Top and below:Crystalline Time, 2011


This work has been supported by Arts Victoria

Represented by Galerie de Roussan, Paris

Unseen Forces



Unseen forces presents the work of six Australian contemporary artists to question how over the last two hundred years human life has become increasingly ordered by instruments of force. Instead of using our bodies as powerful agents of being in the world we are letting go of physiological knowledge. This abandonment is a political act, even if an unintentional one. In the age of global information nothing of the earth is outside of what is owned and orchestrated by multinational corporations and governments. We see this in simple daily interactions with agencies like weather monitoring systems, which are naively thought to offer a public service. Only, like privately owned news groups, the stakeholders of time, pressure and money manufacture a false set of relations to the world.

The information age is rife with the unseen and we are content to know nothing of its procedures because it is comforting to be divested of the terrifying responsibility of knowing ourselves in the natural world. Like time, pressure and change, the forces beyond our control are too great to fathom. The six artists in this exhibition tackle the crisis of force, confronting in varying modes the assumptions that disembody our contemporary relation to physiological power. In bringing attention to the way we inhabit, intuit and change the world around us Denis Beaubois, Lauren Brincat, Laresa Kosloff, Alex Martinis Roe, Jacky Redgate, and Kiron Robinson offer a way to redress our loss of bodily authority.

In A complex collapse, 2010, Denis Beaubois demonstrates how unseen forces can be made apparent. This video work is “derived from over 400 hrs of recording the brewing of beer in different stages. In Beaubois’s words, “They explore and imagine the loss of control that comes from a gradual molecular change (that occurs within sealed fermenting bodies), and document the tension between what bubbles away under the surface and what remains unchanged on the exterior.”

Unseen Forces
Denis Beaubois, Lauren Brincat, Laresa Kosloff, Alex Martinis Roe, Jacky Redgate and Kiron Robinson
Curated by Lily Hibberd

Institute of Contemporary Art Newtown
191 Wilson Street, Newtown, NSW
4-21 November 2010

Download exhibition catalogue (3.5 MB)

More information below


Denis Beaubois, A complex collapse, line1, 2010

Border crossings (recent video and sound work)
Conical Inc
17–19 December 2009







First Love
GRANTPIRRIE, Sydney
25 June – 25 July 2009