Until the Thaw
An evening of performances, readings and screenings at Fristdraft, Sunday 28 October 5-8pm. Featuring Holly Childs(NL/AU) and J. G. Biberkopf (NL/LT), Umber Majeed (US/PK), Enoch Mailangi, Autumn Royal (Narrm/Melb), Ivey Wawn (Syd) and Mark Mailer (Syd).
Holly Childs and J. G. Biberkopf
Hydrangea is a multiple act work by Holly Childs and J. G. Biberkopf about narratives and emergence. Employing a polyphonic, poetic voice and fluid characters the work explores binary systems, chaos and fractalization.
Holly Childs (Netherlands/Australia) is a writer and artist researching language, emotions and constraints in ecological and computational systems. A 2017 postgraduate researcher in The New Normal program at Strelka Institute, Moscow, and author of Danklands (Arcadia Missa, 2014-7) and No Limit (Hologram, 2014). Recent presentations of her work include: writing for Angela Goh’s Uncanny Valley Girl (2018); Patternist, a collaboratively developed sci-fi urban exploration augmented reality game demo featuring poetry-as-user-interface (2017); Have The Dusk Deepen, for Rogue Agents curated by Auto Italia, at Firstdraft, Sydney (2017), and published by SOd (2018); writer for Adam Linder’s choreographic service Some Proximity at Biennale of Sydney (2016); and Danklands [Swamped] for Liquid Architecture, NGV, Melbourne (2015). She was a runner up in The Lifted Brow’s Experimental Non-Fiction Prize (2017), a founding editor of both Worm Hole (2015-6) and Crazy in Love (2011-4), and an associate producer at Next Wave (2015-6).
J. G. Biberkopf is an artist from Lithuania, based in-between Amsterdam and Vilnius. He works within the fields of sound, documentary, conceptual art and performance. Biberkopf's practice assembles a collage stemming from sound studies and ecosophy; post-colonial, architectural and media theories.
Anti-architectural, with the interplay of design and power as works central concerns, his work encourages to unthink, and devise alternative genealogies of significant metaphysical and physical architectures; to reflect their interaction, narrativization, and influence on and within sociality.
J. G. Biberkopf is interested in creating autonomous ecologies that become independent of himself. In the previous work, he worked intensively with aural memes, exploring the semiotics of sound. Biberkopf has developed a sound practice, which at times has been called sculptural, theatrical and cinematic. Biberkopf has presented works and collaborations at Barbican Centre (UK), Berghain (DE), Contemporary Art Centre Vilnius (LT), Haus Der Kunst (DE), Head (CH), Mutek Montreal (CA), Pompidou (FR), Rupert (LT), Sonic Acts (NL), Studium Generale Rietveld (NL), The Kitchen (US), Unsound (PL), Venice Biennale (IT). He was also a member of the curatorial teams of the Newman Festival (2015), and of the Unthinkable Nomos research project and events series (2016), and is currently in the process of finishing a Masters degree in Fine and Arts and Design at Sandberg Institute.
Umber Majeed
Umber Majeed’s Atomi Daamaki Wali Mohabbat (The Atomically Explosive Love) is a three-chapter animation/ lecture performance that chronicles the history of nuclear power in Pakistan through state and familial archives. It intersects specific events, starting with the successful nuclear tests performed in the 1990s. The research dissects a military monument erected by the state, Chaghi Monument Hill, as a motif, location, and historical moment that is consistently reconstituted within religious and state logic, and in digital space. Using flora as a metaphor for embedded violence, the animation negotiates forms of hegemonic, historical retellings through a narration by a fictional, populist, contemporary Urdu poet. Read more about this work here.
Umber Majeed (b. New York, 1989) is a multidisciplinary visual artist based between New York, USA and Lahore, Pakistan. Her writing, performance, and animation work engage with familial archives to explore the specifics of Pakistani state and urban infrastructure through a feminist lens. Recent exhibitions include; 'Promises to Keep', apexart, New York (2017), 'WitnessKarachi Biennale', Karachi, Pakistan (2017), ‘Volumes- Queens International 2018’, Queens Museum, New York (2018), and ‘In the Name of Hypersurface of the Present’, Rubber Factory, New York (2018). Majeed is a recipient of numerous fellowships including the HWP Fellowship, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut, Lebanon (2017) and Refiguring Feminist Futures Web Residency, Akademie Schloss Solitude & ZKM, Germany (2018). She is a current Keyholder Artist in residence at Lower East Side Printshop, NY, USA and member of the Harem.Haram.Hamam Collective.
Autumn Royal
Autumn Royal is a poet, researcher and teacher based in Narrm/Melbourne. Her current research examines elegiac expression in contemporary poetry. Autumn is interviews editor for Cordite Poetry Review and author of the poetry collection She Woke & Rose. Autumn will be performing Liquidation / a spill of poetry:
Grief being the way
there are many ways to make a cut
& attachment is still here
not touching but forming
slip the way you say stitch
cut until three flowers float in water.
Ivey Wawn and Mark Mailler
Mark works with scavenging in virtual and physical spaces; assembling sculpture and image for presentation in a range formats. Ivey makes dance-based work for various contexts; drawing poetics from economic and microbial systems to develop choreography for the human scale.
Consejos de Farez is an ongoing excavation of the migration story of their great grandfather, who becomes a vehicle for their curiosity around the roles of fiction, geopolitics and movement in the production of histories.
Sunday 28.10.18, 5-8pm