Torrent Blossom is an online exhibition centring emerging and established artists and writers whose practices challenge the colonial state of Australia.
From turbulent waves of social, cultural, political and environmental upheaval, it emerges, bathed, in the digital blue glow of our shared captivity and consciousness. Curated by Firstdraft and supported by the City of Sydney, Torrent Blossom brings together a selection of new and existing video artworks, presented in dialogue with newly commissioned critical and poetic texts.
Streaming from 19–26 August 2020, Torrent Blossom features Hannah Brontë, Megan Cope, Dean Cross, Amala Groom, S.J Norman and Rachel O’Reilly, with contributions by Susie Anderson, Jazz Money and Jenna Lee. All artworks containing dialogue are closed- or open-captioned and free to view here on the Firstdraft website.
Torrent Blossom
Online Exhibition
Curated by Firstdraft
Opening 19.08.20
Closing 26.08.20
A torrent – of water, of emotion, of abuse – is a sudden and uncontrollable stream. It also encompasses ‘torrenting’: the organised, often clandestine download and distribution of data – piracy and its loot. The tide-like and torrential force of this imagery is countered by the delicate and ephemeral beauty of the blossom: regenerative, fragile, fleeting.
Like the tributaries of a river, each artist reflects on different currents. S.J Norman and Rachel O’Reilly’s perspectives on industry offer poetry in lieu of destruction: in O’Reilly’s Drawing Rights (2018), her layered narration of the historical and philosophical machinations of extractive capitalism on stolen land simultaneously reveals its profane and erasing sweep; while the subterfuge of S.J Norman’s Duet (2013) gently disrupts a central archetype of the Australian pastoral psyche.
Megan Cope and Amala Groom interrogate and subvert Western rituals in search of meaning: in The Union (2019), Groom inhabits ‘the bride’ as a locus through which she reconciles and deepens her connection to the ontological oppositions of First Peoples experience; whereas Cope’s satirical sacrament – The Blaktism (2014) – reveals the insult and absurdity of assimilation.
Finally, Hannah Brontë and Dean Cross forge a path from a not-too-distant past to a near and hopeful future: in Cross’s new work Pauline (a portrait) (2020), a disembodied torrent of hate speech rises and recedes over found footage of a rising, raging river; while the all-Blak femme cast members of Brontë’s Still I Rise (2016) – a speculative imagining of Blak futurism and sovereignty – embody the proud and defiant swagger of the namesake manifesto in whose spirit they dance… and rise.
Alongside each work are newly commissioned texts by writers Susie Anderson and Jazz Money, whose critical and poetic perspectives expand on the new and existing contexts that shape and inform decolonial enquiry. Sentences and paragraphs are presented as visual bridges – spanning rivers of time, buttressing and collapsing forms, or spiralling like a jetty, like rhetoric. These are enveloped in a visual identity developed by Jenna Lee, who has featured the water lily (Nymphaea violacea) that grows in the billabongs of her native Larrakia country. Its habit for springing out of dark, murky waters seems apt – in our prism of captivity, it is an emblem of emergence.
Torrent Blossom invites us to look deeper through the digital silt. In the stream of things we lie dormant, not locked down. Reboot, refresh, and bloom.
