ALEX MARTINIS ROE: TO BECOME TWO
Friday 23 April – Friday 24 September 2021

Samstag scholar Alex Martinis Roe brings her expansive exhibition To Become Two to Samstag. Since 2014, Martinis Roe has been tracing feminist genealogies and the emergence of feminist political practices in Western Europe and Australia from the 1970s until today; from France to Italy and Spain, to Australia and the Netherlands. Across six film installations, Martinis Roe narrates histories specific to their locations, the communities and their stories selected for their interconnections and their distinctive practices, which developed the concept ‘sexual difference’ and the current field of ‘feminist new materialism,’ exploring this social history of ideas and the forms of political action that both come from and underpin it.

Adopting video as her aesthetic medium and utilising its capacity to play with the structure of time, Martinis Roe tells these histories using archival footage, contemporary documentation and oral history interviews. In July, Martinis Roe will offer a workshop that engages a younger generation with the tools and political practices that emerged from the historically important collectives she worked with, thinking through how they might be useful for us today.

Image: Alex MARTNIS ROE, A story from Circolo della rosa, film still of a photograph courtesy of the Milan Women’s Bookstore co-operative archive, 2014.

JAMES NGUYEN & VICTORIA PHAM: RE:SOUNDING
Friday 23 April — Friday 17 July 2021

Encompassing performance, installation and the possibilities of the digital realm, RE:SOUNDING explores one cultural object’s changing meanings over time and across cultures.

The sound of the Đông Sơn drum is pivotal to the Vietnamese sense of identity, resonating across two millennia of religion, war, exile and return. Vietnamese-Australian artists James Nguyen and Victoria Pham have created a multi-faceted project exploring the Đông Sơn drum from all angles: as a spiritual object, cultural icon, token of trade and instrument of warfare. In two exclusive streamed performances, master percussionists will tease out the nuances of this fascinating instrument and invite audiences to discover the diasporic stories of displacement and create their own songs from a library of digitised interactive sounds.

RE:SOUNDING activates the sonic cultural past of one community and reimagines it into the contemporary now, inviting visitors to participate in digital experiments and music creation.

Image: James Nguyen & Victoria Pham, RE:SOUNDING, 2020, still from moving image.

READING ROOM
23 April — 24 September 2021

Spend time in Samstag’s Reading Room. You will find books and other materials that have informed our current exhibitions, along with titles that build upon the ideas raised. Enjoy this informal place to sit and read the books, dive into the research behind the artworks, or just relax.

Samstag wishes to thank the University of South Australia's libraries, particularly the staff at the City West library, for gathering together the books for our Reading Room. Keep checking back in, new books will continue to appear.

Image: Alex Martinis Roe, To Become Two, 2013

MADISON BYCROFT: BIOPIC or CHARLES GENEVIÈVE LOUIS AUGUSTE ANDRÉ TIMOTHEE
Saturday 31 July — Friday 24 September 2021

Working between Marseille and Adelaide, Samstag scholar Madison Bycroft’s compelling practice produces fantastical, fully realised experiences of sculpture, film and performance. Expanding the act of translation to consider interpretation and representation, Bycroft is concerned with empathy – how can we convey the plurality of existences in a system fixated on definition? Theirs is work that is dense with references to the mythological, the philosophical and pop culture.

BIOPIC or Charles Geneviève Louis Auguste André Timothée is a film orbiting the life of eighteenth century French diplomat, spy, Freemason and soldier Chevalier D’eon. While situated within the genre of the biopic, the film’s structure embraces the idea that truths are contextual and contingent on perspective, politics, experience and the story-telling capacity of the narrator, by employing misrecognition, excription and disnarration as poetic devices. Touching on the edges yet never fully revealing the character of Chevalier D’eon, Bycroft’s work reflects the process and (im)possibility of representing the fullness of a life lived by its own direction.

Created through the South Australian Film Corporation and SALA Festival’s second Artist in Residence commission.

Image: Madison BYCROFT, BIOPIC or Charles Geneviève Louis Auguste André Timothée, still from moving image, 2021. Courtesy the artist.

SODA_JERK: HELLO DANKNESS
21 October — 17 December 2021

The world is undergoing seismic cultural transformation. How we understand ourselves and our relationship to others has been irrevocably rocked, and at the epicentre of this disturbance is the internet. How did a technology that gifted us LOL Cats become most closely associated with the rise of alt-right extremism, civic surveillance, the darknet, the death of democracy and the annihilation of fact-based journalism? Whatever happened to that brave new world of free data, shared culture, and radical new forms of activism? Hello Dankness is the two-person art collective Soda Jerk’s incisive critique of the social and political milieu of our times.

Merging documentary impulse with cinematic narrative—and constructed entirely with the artefacts of screen culture—, Hello Dankness takes the form of a cyberpunk thriller that runs riot through dystopian sci-fi, hacker documentaries, supernatural Hong Kong horror, French New Wave, 70s political thrillers, internet instructional VHS tapes, Japanese anime, Russian spy films, online microcultures, dank memes, and the blockbuster musicals of the 80s and 90s.

Commissioned in partnership with the Adelaide Film Festival, this highly anticipated work will be accompanied by a concise selection of Soda Jerk’s oeuvre spanning the past 17 years, and a publication with Perimeter Books.

Image: SODA_JERK, Hello Dankness, film still, 2020.