Half an hour’s drive northwest of Adelaide’s CBD, flanked by the Birkenhead Bridge on one side and the recently refurbished Hart’s Mill precinct on the other, is the heritage-listed Waterside Workers Hall in Port Adelaide. Since 1984 the Hall has been home to the contemporary arts organisation Vitalstatistix and its expansive, markedly queer and feminist programs of interdisciplinary performances and developments. It’s often joked, sadly not without foundation, that Port Adelaide is too far for metropolitan-minded Adelaideans to travel. It’s also true that the weather can be bitter as the area’s many alleyways channel the icy Port River winds, especially during the middle months of the year.
And yet Vitals, as it’s usually referred to by locals, is a unique place, neither regional nor exactly urban, a site both for intensely private experimentation and the generous laying bare of artistic process. All the while it feels socially embedded, part of the fabric of the community, in a way that few arts organisations do. When I think of the company I picture happily shivering through the three public days of its annual national hothouse Adhocracy, traditionally held over the June long weekend but lately shifted to early September. In a way, the image seems resonant in its stoicism; Vitals was defunded in the 2014–15 Federal Budgets, determinedly reshaping its 2017 program around an interim, one-year funding agreement struck with the State Government. Perhaps, too, there is something fitting in Adhocracy’s move to the first weekend of Spring, traditionally a time of rebirth and renewal.
In what are lean times for independent artists, Vitalstatistix continues to heavily invest in individual practice — not a funding priority in the 2014–15 Federal Budgets — on both project- and career-focused bases. Its program this year is a rich one: an expanded residency series, six new commissions through the Climate Century project and, in addition to Adhocracy, now in its eighth year, a multiplicity of exhibitions and work-in-progress showings through partnerships with around half a dozen organisations including the Tarnanthi Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art, which will co-present Brad Harkin’s exhibition of visual art and sound work, LOSS. GAIN. REVERB. DELAY. at Waterside in October and November.
Waterside Workers Federation Hall, home of Vitalstatistix
In the aftermath
I began by asking Webb how the loss of operational Australia Council funding — also the fate of four other South Australian arts organisations, Brink, Slingsby, the Contemporary Arts Centre of South Australia (CACSA) and the Australian Experimental Arts Foundation (AEAF), totalling $1.8 million in cuts — affected this year’s program. “The impact of the cut was twofold,” Webb says. “Obviously it had an immediate financial impact but it also has a long-term effect — just as impactful in some ways — around stability and planning and not knowing what resources are ahead. The interim funding agreement enabled us to have a full program this year and we had to think about how best to use those extra resources. And so the combination of that opportunity and the funding cuts, and that question of being able to plan forward, led us to decide that the best use of our resources in all of that context was to seed a whole lot of new projects and development. By the time we select the Adhocracy projects” — this year there will be between seven and nine, plus the residency project Second Hand Emotions — “and finalise the Climate Century program we’re looking at close to 30 projects under development, many of which we hope to present in our programs in future years.”
The art itself
She continues: “Our work has always been artist-focused but this year particularly so while still having substantial public engagement through all the different showings and labs and public talks. When you’re not spending your money on box office risk or all of the marketing you need to do when you’re presenting ticketed shows, you’re able to really just focus on the art itself. We’ve been saying it’s kind of like Adhocracy but expanded throughout the year, and we feel like that’s a unique offer that we’ve been making artists and audiences for some time — to come into the process of experimentation and see how art is made while at the same time artists are receiving feedback from peers as well as the general public.
“This year’s program feels a little bit ‘Festival of Ideas’ as well, because all of these projects we’re commissioning and presenting as works in progress are engaging with a whole lot of important themes and ideas and conversations. So we’re thinking about it as a public dialogue.” One vivid illustration of this is Climate Century, a five-year project begun in 2014 that invites artists to respond to the question of how we, and future generations, will come to understand the climate change tipping points we are currently living through. In development this year, in 2018 the project will culminate in the presentation of six commissioned works, including one regional work produced in partnership with Country Arts SA.
In the Incubator
This year, Vitals’ long-running program of two-week residencies, called Incubator, has been expanded from two projects to three, while a second stream has been added that will see two groups of artists in residence throughout the year. In May there were work-in-progress showings of regional SA theatre-maker and writer Rebecca Meston’s Drive, an intriguing choreographic response (with Adelaide choreographer Larissa McGowan) to a 2007 true crime case in which a female NASA astronaut attacked her partner’s younger lover. In residency this month are Melbourne performance makers Nicola Gunn and Tamara Saulwick who are developing Super Imposition, a fusion of performance, music composition, and video art that is also being supported by Melbourne’s Chamber Made Opera. Finally, in July, musician and composer Cat Hope (ex-Perth and now Melbourne-based) will present showings of an experimental opera, Speechless, produced by Perth’s Tura New Music and inspired by Gillian Triggs’ 2014 Human Rights Commission report on children in immigration detention.
Two additional year-long residencies present a different model of development, one that is not simply about making work. One will see “conversationalist” Emma Beech (SA) installed in the Shopfront Studio at the Waterside Hall where, as well as rethinking her own practice as a theatre-maker, she will act as a sort of ambassador for Vitalstatistix by engaging directly with the Port Adelaide community. The other, called Points in the Plane, will provide three emerging local multidisciplinary artists, Josie Ware, Ashton Malcolm and Meg Wilson, with a mentorship facilitated by Webb that will explore the nature of their collaboration, which began at Adhocracy in 2014.
Emma Webb, Climate Century 2015, photo Tony Kearney
A choice selection
And what criteria, I ask Webb, are employed by Vitals to select the artists the company chooses to work with? “One of the things that we try to do,” Webb explains, “is to work with both emerging and mid-career or established artists. We certainly work more with artists who are well into their career — I don’t feel we’re an emerging artist organisation per se — however, a good example is Adhocracy, where we always try to make sure we select projects by emerging as well as established artists because we find that combination is great for the dynamic kinds of conversations and processes that happen there. I would also say we are certainly interested in projects that have an engagement with the world and with I guess what you could say are progressive ideas. We’ve been doing a lot of work recently around climate change, and historically there’s a feminist and queer eye across a lot of how we think about the organisation and its programming. In the last little while we’ve also supported a lot of work that is to do with economics: the economics of art-making, ideas of resilience, the economic crisis, and so on.”
“We’ve also in recent years,” Webb tells me, “had quite a lot of engagement with dance, which is interesting because we’re not a dance organisation but have just found those kind of expanded dance practices to be really interesting at the moment. I love dance so I think that’s something that’s been noticeable about our program in the last couple of years. The other thing we look for is what the collaborative process within a group is like, who’s proposing to work with who, and why. Take, for instance, Nicola Gunn and Tamara Saulwick’s Incubator residency. We’ve worked with Nicola a lot and I’m a big fan of both those women’s work and this is their first collaborative project, which is exciting for us apart from anything else. So we definitely look for artists who are proposing something new.”
The cash
Webb elaborates: “All of our opportunities come with a cash contribution and artist fees attached as well as quite significant in-kind support, whether it’s through the physical residency at Vitals or working with our staff. I try to spend lots of time with the artists. Also small organisations like Vitals can offer a different kind of place to make work that puts you in a unique context and environment and politic. We feel like artists really appreciate the time and space they get in Port Adelaide and at Waterside. I think also one of the things we’re adept at is finding partnerships — I think pretty much anything we’re doing at the moment is in partnership with other organisations. It’s a really great way to maximise resources and give artists the biggest kinds of opportunities and platforms possible.”
Jo Lloyd, Speech Pattern, co-creator and photo Davis Rosetzky
At work with PADA
One key partnership is with PADA (Performance & Art Development Agency), founded by Webb and Steve Mayhew in 2015 as, in Webb’s words, “a small, city-based, project-based, curatorial project.” It grew out of discussions between the two around curatorial diversity in South Australia, and whether the time was right for a new contemporary arts organisation. They decided it was, and then everything changed — Brandis, the 2015 budget, and all the rest. In 2015 PADA presented its first public project, the exhibition Near and Far [read the RealTime review], at the Queen’s Theatre in Adelaide. “In 2014,” Webb explains, “there was nationally much more a feeling of confidence in the sense that there was going to be an opening up of opportunities, potentially through the Australia Council, but obviously all of that changed. We decided that for this year we would umbrella the projects we had commissioned during the cuts under our respective organisations, Vitals and, in Steve’s case, Country Arts SA. It seemed the smartest way to deal with resources and time if we were going to make sure those artists were able to be supported and carry their works through to the next stage of development.”
Work-in-progress showings of two of these works — Larissa McGowan’s Cher and Melbourne media artist David Rosetzky and choreographer Jo Lloyd’s Speech Pattern — were featured last month in Physical Forces, a program of dance works presented by PADA, Vitals and ACE Open, the new contemporary arts organisation merged from the remains of CACSA and the AEAF. Also under co-development with Vitals and PADA are Rebecca Conroy’s Iron Lady (NSW) and two works by artists with extensive experience in Europe, Daniel Jenatsch’s Enheduanna and Adelaide-born Chris Scherer’s Duncan. The latter was presented as part of the Art Gallery of South Australia’s Versus Rodin exhibition in April. Reflecting on the collaboration, Webb says, “Curator of Contemporary Art Leigh Robb was incredibly generous with Chris, and it’s started conversations between us around what performance art in a gallery looks like.”
Solidarity
Thinking about these kinds of work and Port Adelaide, with its post-industrial, gentrifying but for the moment still ragged air, does suddenly seem distant, half a world away from the Art Gallery’s crisp white walls. And yet it strikes me too that one of the few good things to have come out of the funding crisis has been a refreshed sense of industry solidarity, of people and organisations reaching out across artistic divides — perhaps not as wide as we had first thought — in ways that have not, or only fitfully, happened before. Just before I sat down with Webb I noted that a work developed at Adhocracy in 2015, Applespiel’s Jarrod Duffy is Not Dead (NSW), had gone on to a full presentation [read the RealTime review] at Brisbane’s Metro Arts in April. It must be pleasing, I suggest to Webb, when such projects bear fruit. “It’s incredibly satisfying,” she says, “to see these seeds blowing into all kinds of places.”
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Vitalstatistix: Incubator residency work-in-progress showings, Nicola Gunn and Tamara Saulwick, Super Imposition, Waterside, Port Adelaide, 30 June-1 July; Cat Hope, Speechless, Waterside, Port Adelaide, 28-29 July; Adhocracy, Waterside, Port Adelaide, 1-3 Sept; Vitalstatistix and PADA, Daniel Jenatsch, Enheduanna, Nexus Arts, Adelaide, 27-28 Oct; Rebecca Conroy, Iron Lady, venue TBC, 13-26 Nov; Vitalstatistix and Tarnanthi, Brad Harkin, LOSS. GAIN. REVERB. DELAY., Waterside, Port Adelaide, 18 Oct-5 Nov
Top image credit: Josephine Were, Meg Wilson, Ashton Malcolm, Points in the Plane, photo courtesy the artists and Vitalstatistix
“Artists can never be tourists,” declares Ashley Crawford in his catalogue essay for the compelling OzAsia 2016 exhibition Unworldly Encounters. Artists reflexively respond to their surroundings and develop not only new art but new ways of seeing the world as a result of immersive travel experiences in their own and each other’s countries.
Unworldly Encounters
Crawford accompanied a group of Chinese and Australian artists who undertook the first of three extended road trips through China and Australia in 2011. In Unworldly Encounters, four of those artists—Shi Jinsong, Cang Xin, Sam Leach and Tony Lloyd—show work inspired by the most recent trip which took them through southern China, Tibet, Arnhem Land and the Kimberley and culminated in a residency at Oratunga, north of the Flinders Ranges. This project, conceived and managed by AEAF director Steve Eland, has already produced several exhibitions in China and Australia. Unworldly Encounters is thus an ideal inclusion in the OzAsia Festival, whose ethos is cultural awareness-raising and artistic cross-fertilisation.
This exhibition looks as if it was conceived by a single mind rather than four separate artists, such is its coherence. Shi Jinsong’s extraordinary Other Shore forms a visual spine running through it. Winding across the entire length of the gallery floor is a blackened S-shaped trail of the ashes of animal bones and timber he collected from the Flinders Ranges and then burnt. Cang Xin’s Salvation is a series of ink-on-paper illustrations mounted in a line that runs from the floor up and along the gallery walls, starting from a series of calligraphic forms constructed from rows of seed-pods. Looking as if they have sprouted from the pods, the illustrations are of primitive life forms, the sequence’s form referencing Tibetan ‘spirit ladders,’ images drawn onto rock faces to allow spirits to climb to heaven. The seed pods are from Adnyamathanha country, Cang Xin’s work thus implicitly linking two significant cultural traditions with the origins of life.
Sam Leach’s Sky Burial is a platform bearing human bone fragments, referencing the Tibetan ritual practice of dismembering the deceased and feeding their remains to vultures instead of burying or cremating them. Tony Lloyd’s The Ocean Floor comprises hundreds of seashells suspended from the ceiling in a formation that outlines a mountain, suggesting how underwater mountains can be formed from shell deposits over millions of years.
Unworldly Encounters pays homage to the rites and traditions of Tibetans and Indigenous Australians and their territories, it speaks of geological time, human evolution and mortality, and it evidences four artists’ journeys of personal and artistic transformation that bridge cultures and generate a common spirituality.
Divine Interventions
By contrast, Damien Shen and Badiucao’s joint exhibition Divine Interventions looks critically at contemporary Chinese and Australian politics. Australian-born Shen, of Chinese and Aboriginal descent, produced a series of large-scale drawings entitled Team Gweilo. “Gweilo” is a derogatory Chinese term for Westerners and the drawings are of Australian politicians whom Shen considers have made racist, sexist or other inappropriate remarks. Badiucao (a pseudonym), a Chinese immigrant to Australia, has installed a series of election posters of Chinese President Xi Jinping, mockingly titled If You are the One, which he has over-painted, establishing a parallel with Shen’s portraits. On the floor is Badiucao’s Why Do They Buy Out Our Baby Formula, a series of images of dead babies outlined in white powder (formula) on black rubbish bin liners that refers to the deaths of Chinese babies fed tainted Chinese-manufactured formula and the consequent purchase of Australian formula by Chinese parents.
At the Divine Interventions opening night performance, Badiucao, wearing a mask resembling those imposed on inmates of the Don Dale Detention Centre and bound at the wrists, sits on a child-sized chair facing into a corner as if he is himself a child detainee. Hooded accomplices cut him free and he proceeds to paint “gweilo” calligraphically over Shen’s portraits in red paint, defacing them. As well as critiquing Chinese and Australian politics, the exhibition represents a cathartic personal journey for both artists, in which they reflect on their own identity within Australian society.
At an artists’ talk involving all six artists from these two exhibitions, Badiucao, who wears a mask at public events to hide his identity, raised the issue of the invasion of Tibet by China, and a vigorous debate ensued over the impact of Chinese politics on Chinese art, artists and the community generally. Shen indicated that the Divine Interventions exhibition shifted his artistic practice to a new level of political awareness and he and Badiucao gained valuable experience in working cooperatively.
Record Light
While Divine Interventions is confrontingly political, Hong Kong artist Kingsley Ng’s enchanting exhibition Record Light creates a magical visual and aural experience that makes its comments more subtly. Ng uses electronic technology to create a language of wondrous lighting effects, as in Moon.gate. On entering the darkened CACSA gallery, we first see what looks like dappled light entering through a window and illuminating the gallery floor. But there is no window and this poignant image is a projection, an illusion. A portable radio emits pre-recorded fragments of programs sourced from the ABC, SBS, Vision Christian Radio, Kaurna Warra Pintyanthi, Radio ENA and 5PBA. The flickering light on the floor appears synchronised with this rapid succession of topical news bulletins, documentaries and religious messages, as Moon.gate gently reflects on the complex and conflicting philosophies and beliefs evident through Australian media.
Ng’s Record: Light from 220 16’ 14” + 1140 08’ 48” comprises a music box through which viewers are invited to feed a paper tape like a piano roll that triggers not only sound but also light effects in a wall-sized projected image of the Hong Kong nightscape. The title’s coordinates identify the source of the effects as the Hong Kong Peak, and this transformation of sound into light using old and new technologies is as romantically evocative as the location.
Spring: Homage to Liang Quan comprises a low, cloth covered table holding an empty glass which appears to cast a shadow that moves across the table as if glass and table form a sundial and the day’s length is compressed into a few moments. Numerals then appear through the cloth: the latitude and longitude of an unknown location and time of day. On the adjacent wall, identified by coordinates, is a list of locations from which bottled water is sourced. The work speaks of the proliferation of imported bottled water and invites us to think about the commodification of this essential substance with which we might fill the empty glass. The light patterns simulate the light that might be seen at the locations listed on the wall, transporting our thoughts to those places. The cloth on the table turns out to be the paper used by Chinese calligraphers, so that the work symbolically substitutes artificial light for the calligrapher’s ink, while beneath the paper, a flat screen emits the illusions.
The central work in Ng’s poetic exhibition is his enthralling Galaxy Express, a row of screens showing images of train windows flashing by, as if the viewer is observing a moving train at night. A female narrator describes her train journey through time and space towards the centre of the galaxy, a surreal story in which passengers of the future travel back to the past in order to escape their no-longer habitable earthly environment. Again, Kingsley Ng demonstrates virtuosic use of light effects and sound, this time to comment on the impact of environmental degradation on the future of humanity.
These OzAsia exhibitions offer profound insights into contemporary life and politics, and the vital message that emerges is that we are one community inhabiting a tiny, disrupted planet and trying to speak to each other.
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Unworldly Encounters, Australian Experimental Art Foundation, 9 Sept-15 Oct; Divine Interventions, Nexus Arts, 8 Sept–11 Nov; Record Light, Contemporary Art Centre of SA, 10 Sept–16 Oct
Top image credit: Galaxy Express, Kingsley Ng, Record Light, Contemporary Art Centre of SA, image courtesy OzAsia 2016
