On Setting Yourself on Fire

Linda Dement & Stephen Wright

Opening 07.06.18 6-8pm
Artist Talks 29.06.18 6-7pm

On Setting Yourself on Fire: A code driven installation invoking the spectral presences of self-immolated figures from recent incidents of extreme political protest.

Through invisible signals and transmissions, we offer an open channel to those now burnt and gone beyond, to speak to us from their current unearthly perspective.

Self-immolation is an act of acutely refusing unbearable conditions imposed on the governance of the soul. It is an act that absolutely rejects subjugation, on behalf of us all, in a terrifying spectacle of protest and transcendence.

We scan the airwaves and track the winds above Nauru searching for signals. We attune to their spectral frequencies to call down messages. Now that those who burned themselves to death are not in this world, what would they say to us?

Biography

Stephen Wright is the author of the novels A lantern, carried down a dark path (forthcoming from Tiny Owl) and A Second Life (forthcoming from Seizure). He has won the Eureka St Essay Prize, the Nature Conservancy Essay Prize, the Overland NUW Essay Prize (twice), the Scarlett Award and the Viva La Novella Prize and has written extensively for Overland literary journal. Stephen lives in the Widjabul country of northern NSW and works as the manager of an NGO that intervenes with men who use violence and abuse in the home, and as a psychotherapist working with women and men who have experienced violence in childhood.

Linda Dement is a Sydney based artist who has worked in arts computing since the late 1980s. Originally a photographer, her digital practice spans the programmed, performative, textual and virtual. Her work deals with issues of disturbance, commingling psycho-sexual corporeality and the digital and electronic, giving form to the difficult territory of the unbearable and conflicted with precision and control. Her work has been widely exhibited internationally and locally. She has been awarded a New Media Arts Fellowship by the Australia Council for the Arts. Her work is held in collections such as the Bibliotèque Nationale de France, ArtBank, Australian Video Art Archive, New York Filmmakers Co-op and the Daniel Langlois Foundation.