OUROBOROS: The End is the Beginning is the End Party

Curated by Justin Shoulder

27.11.2015, 7 - 10:30pm

As the year comes to an end the serpent awakens and begins to devour its tail. With sharp tongues, hot licks and fertile minds we gather to slay ~ an illustrious cast of humans mobilise intent to create/destroy. From ethers tragic & glamorous we are born again…

Biographies

ARTISTS /

ATONG ATEM

Atong Atem is a South Sudanese artist living in Melbourne. Her work explores migrant narratives, postcolonial practices in the diaspora and the exploration of identity through self-portraiture. She is committed to questioning and engaging with contemporary art, literature and academia through traditional, ancient and new media.

YUNG BRUJO

Yung Brujo is a Sydney based DJ/Producer of English and (Indigenous/Afro) Colombian origin. Resident DJ of both Melbourne’s Alterity Collective and Sydney’s Troppo Galactica he actively participates in the continual existence of QTPOC run spaces in Australia. His audio aesthetic is heavily rooted in Latino and queer influenced sounds spanning the continent of America and beyond, from tropical bass to deep house. He aims to a create an ever evolving transmutation of music though the merging of cultural origin and queer cultural upbringing.

CHUN YIN RAINBOW CHAN

Chun Yin Rainbow Chan is a Sydney-based musician whose work explores popular music tropes, nostalgia and Chinese identity. Her compositions often play with sampling, looping and unrelenting layers of signal degradation.

Shanzhai (山寨) refers to the counterfeiting of Western brands by Chinese companies. Originally denoting a “mountain stronghold” for bandits, shanzhai has recently adopted several punkish connotations including anti-authoritarianism, parody, grassroots ingenuity and user-driven innovation. While popular discourse on this phenomenon has focused on its emancipatory potential, some have argued that shanzhai culture is more complex. Narratives of shanzhai are appropriated to construct a collective imaginary of resistance and democracy, but the transitional nature of contemporary Chinese society means that these acts of rebellion are often subsumed in the logic of neoliberalism, complicated further by state-market alliance. Shanzhai is a cultural myth, as scholars Zhang and Fung succinctly put it, and “is sustained by a parasitic relationship to the mainstream and the powerful.” Exploring the interplay between branding and functionality, Chan's work is interested in the provocations around appropriation, commodity and cultural fantasy.

EUGENE CHOI

Eugene Choi is an artist whose work explores the nature of movement and habitual memory within the body and object. Choi's practice travels between controlled and uncontrolled states, improvising with the 'non-expert' body in unfamiliar circumstances. Equilibrium is found within her sculptural structures and installations, which constitute her videos and performances.

RAKINI DEVI

Rakini is a choreographer, dancer and performance artist who incorporates her knowledge of Indian Classical Dance, and her visual arts practice to create highly stylized performance installations. Her work focuses on female iconography to address themes of age, misogynist violence, and racial and cultural stereotypes. For Ouroboros Rakini Devi will incorporate two of her highly iconographic personas, The Widow, and Kali Madonna. In fusing imagery of the Hindu Goddess of death, Kali, the Mexican Virgin Guadalupe, and the Black Virgin/Madonna, she represents the female as living mythology, embracing both the political and the spiritual, unfolding in a ritualised performance installation.

REGRETTE ETCETERA

Regrette Etcetera is a Sydney-based performer, activist, writer, costumier, DJ, & whore, with a very marketable set of identity descriptors. Described as “Kathy acker’s X-Files or Alfred Jarry as a Cockette”, Regrette’s syncretic, content-heavy and context-specific work throws everything from military theory to feminist cryptozoology to esoteric Trans-Marxism into a psychedelic scholarly blender, serving up some frequently unsettling interventions. After 15 years of non-disciplinary and resolutely underground critical cultural production in squats, nightclubs, and protests (with occasional Liberalist Art World & Gay-stream forays) across the world, and with myriad projects, blogs, magazines, and scandalous shows to her name, she still appears to believe.

ANGELA GOH

Angela Goh is an Australian dancer and choreographer presenting her experimental work in a range of different contexts. Her work explores dance and choreography as practices of speculation, approaching performance as an event which simultaneously produces reality and fantasy. ‘Uncanny Valley, Girl’ is a dance in which the female body and the machine unite to produce a new narrative for the fembot trope. Machine and body move one another, and move with each other, to work towards alternative forms and fantasies.

JACK MANNIX

'TERMINAL INFANT' IS A TEXT, PERFORMANCE & SOUND BASED MULTIMEDIA INSTALLATION BY 27 YEAR OLD NON-BINARY ARTIST, WRITER & MUSICIAN JACK MANNIX. USING LANGUAGE AS A TOOL FOR SIMULTANEOUS CREATION & DESTRUCTION/DECONSTRUCTION. DRAWING ON PERSONAL EXPERIENCE & MEMORIES REACHING BACK TO INFANCY, WITH AN UNCOMFORTABLE FOCUS ON TRAUMA, CONSENT, POWER & FEAR, THE ARTIST CREATES DISTORTED, MINIMAL TEXT-BASED IMAGES, AND LIVE VOCAL/SOUND COLLAGES, IN AN ATTEMPT TO REMEMBER & FORGET; TO FILL A BLACK HOLE. "THOSE NIGHTMARES THAT ARE ACTUALLY MEMORIES".

PANX SOLAJES

Panx is an independent filmmaker from Anibong, Tacloban City, Philippines. He finished his undergraduate in the University of the Philippines, Diliman. Freelance works in television and events, and workshops in creative writing introduced him to the world of storytelling. And in July 2014, he finished an MA in Documentary Film Directing under the Doc Nomads scholarship program of Erasmus Mundus, which allowed him to grow towards a creative path in documentary, experimental cinema, and video art. His films have been screened internationally, including a programmed screening in the Chicago International Film Festival 2014 and DocLisboa 2015. He is back in the Philippines, seeking to use his skills for the preservation and growth of his local culture amidst a socio-economic landscape geared towards globalisation and materialism.

DR. CON FABULATOR

In this, his first Sydney recital Dr. Con Fabulator explains that museums should not be stasis chambers whose purpose is to simply inhibit the physical decay of a subject or object. Museum’s, Con Fabulator expounds, are not quite to Art what the Morgue is to a corpse a sort of cold storage, they are he believes hot topics. Using images from the collection of the Museum of UnNatural History and words from his recently published encyclopaedia of gardening Eros and the Pansy, Fabulator reveals the narrative potential of historical works of art if and when they finally escape the gravitational pull of race, gender and religiosity. The Museum of UnNatural History is more concrete poetry than concrete and its inadequately famous collection, not much more than a series of reflections in a very, very disobedient mirror. Con Fabulates and has been described as a incubus on the febrile imagination of Gary Carsley and “as being more like a shadow that has slipped the leash of subservience than anyone you sat next to on the bus recently while wishing you had walked.”

JACKSON LASKI FYDIM STACY

Jackson Laski Fydim Stacy is a self-taught interdisciplinary artist whose practise primarily operates within installation and video. His work explores ideas of queer futurity, embodiment and participation.