Virginia Barratt & Em Konig: EXOSMOSIS
Thursday 16 June 2022, 4-7pm

Exosmosis is a new durational performance by South Australian artists Virginia Barratt & Em König. Exosmosis is centered around interaction between Barratt as performer and König’s responsive live soundscape. In this space, the artists explore the pivotal role annihilation has to play in transformation and growth in a work encompassing light, a wall of sound, sticky props, and the body.

Over three decades, trans-media artist Virginia Barratt (she/they) has been instrumental in developing critiques around gender politics and the digital realm, gaining recognition as a pioneer of the cyberfeminist movement in the early ‘90s as founding member of the collective VNS Matrix.

RSVP via Eventbrite

VERS: On Pleasures, Embodiment, Kinships, Fugitivity and Re/Organising
Satuday 18 June, 1pm—7pm

a live event that privileges queer ways of doing and being and centres creative practice and conversation. It takes place on Kaurna Yarta in Tarntanya/Adelaide across two venues—Samstag Museum of Art and ACE Open—and involves performances, readings and a rolling discussion held over the course of an afternoon.

Short for ‘versatility’, VERS asks: is ‘vers’ a demand placed on us, an exhausting mode required for meeting expectations of productivity? Or is it a modality that opens towards new capacities for surviving and growing pleasure in our work?

A group of ‘attendants’, including arts workers, artists and curators from across Australia, have been invited to come together to reflect on these questions and the title themes of pleasures, embodiment, kinships, fugitivity and re/organising. Audiences are invited to listen, contribute and come-and-go during the event, as attendants explore how their own practices touch, expand or refute the proposition.

VERS was developed by a curatorial panel consisting of Frances Barrett, Archie Barry, Maddee Clark, Léuli Eshrāghi, Jeff Khan and Melissa Ratliff, and emerges as a response to their collective discussions and deliberation on queer artistic and curatorial practices.

VERS will be audio recorded and made into a podcast after the event.

Saturday 18 June, 1–5pm: Readings, performances and conversations at Samstag Museum of Art
Saturday 18 June, 5–7pm: Performances and concluding drinks at ACE

Full program details will be available 8 June.

This event will be AUSLAN interpreted.

Commissioned by Monash University Museum of Art, Narrm/Melbourne, and presented onsite and in association with Samstag Museum of Art and ACE, Kaurna Yarta/Adelaide with the support of City of Adelaide.

Daniel Jaber: Rot
Friday 17 & Saturday 18 June, 10am – 5pm

In the second instalment of Daniel Jaber’s triptych of durational performances investigating degradation, decay and renewal, Rot is an image of a living body decomposing.

Over the course of two days, Jaber plays dead in a work that considers the absurdity of art, the precariousness of life, and our inevitable submission to death. While motionless, he contemplates the vulnerability of life, and contends with boredom and the passage of time.

Jaber’s work, when presented in a gallery occupies a burgeoning area of cross artform making – not dance in response to visual art nor simply dance presented in a gallery, but ephemeral experience at the nexus of the visual and the physical.

Rot takes place between 10am and 5pm, Friday 17 and Saturday 18 June. His final work Dirt will follow in October. As Jaber’s work evolves over the year, it is documented by a responsive series of texts by Malaysian-based writer Lee Weng Choy, to be published on the Samstag website in the second half of the year.

Created and performed by: Daniel Jaber
3D Animation & projection mapping by: Alexander Waite Mitchell
Digital Media Production & design by: Felicity Arts
Sound by: DJ TR! P

Mel O'Callaghan: Centre of the Centre
Friday 1 July—Friday 30 September

Centre of the Centre is a major new commission by Australian-born, Paris-based contemporary artist Mel O’Callaghan that traces the origins of life and its regenerative forces, iterated through video, performance and sculpture. The catalyst for this new body of work is one small mineral given to the artist by her grandfather, renowned mineralogist Albert Chapman. The mineral contains a small pocket of water, possibly millions of years old, which holds traces of the elemental forces responsible for all life on earth.

Though the immersive Centre of the Centre video artwork, audiences are plunged 4km below the surface in the Pacific Ocean to encounter lifeforms sustained in extreme environments. The alluring sculptural installation Respire, respire is made up of convex and concave sheets of glass, manipulated to push material boundaries. A performance that activates these sculptures will bring the unifying lifeforce of breath to the centre, capturing its powerful capabilities to create both calm and excitement through the depth and rapidity of inhalation and exhalation.

Mel O’Callaghan’s Centre of the Centre was curated and developed by Artspace and is touring nationally with Museums & Galleries of NSW. Centre of the Centre is co-commissioned by Le Confort Moderne, Poitiers; Artspace, Sydney; and The University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane. With Commissioning Partners Andrew Cameron AM & Cathy Cameron and Peter Wilson & James Emmett; and Lead Supporter, Kronenberg Mais Wright.

The development and presentation of Centre of the Centre is supported by the Fondation des Artistes; Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the US National Science Foundation.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.

Image: Mel O’Callaghan, Respire, Respire, 2019, breathwork performance with dielectric glass and harpist, 20 minutes. Le Confort Moderne, Poitiers, France, 2019. Photos: Clemens Habicht

Julie Blyfield: flowers of the sea
Friday 1 July—Friday 30 September

Julie Blyfield is a South Australian/Tarntanya based artist with a thirty-five year practice forging metals into botanical forms.

In this new body of larger scale copper objects Blyfied investigates the unique red sea weeds found along the coast of southern Australia. To develop the work Blyfield spent time in the State Herbarium of South Australia building her knowledge and understanding of this type of marine algae.

By researching, photographing, and sketching she gained an understanding of each of the specimens, which were the inspiration for the fifteen works. Shown as a sculptural installation in a darkened gallery space Blyfield’s work references 19th century specimen albums and highlights the fragility of our precious marine environment and the elements that threaten and sustain them.

Image: Julie Blyfield, flowers of the sea, 2022 detail, bi-metal-copper/sterling silver heat coloured, wax sealant. Courtesy the artist. Photography Grant Hancock.

SODA JERK: HELLO DANKNESS / Coming in 2022

Soda Jerk is a two-person art collective who make sample-based experimental films with a rogue documentary impulse. Formed in Sydney in 2002, they have been based across Brooklyn and Berlin since 2010. With a practice recognised for its innovate remixing of film and television history, their 2018 feature TERROR NULLIUS garnered acclaim for its incendiary unwriting of Australia’s national mythologies. In 2022, Samstag will present Soda Jerk’s follow-up film Hello Dankness, commissioned in partnership with the Adelaide Film Festival, alongside a survey of their 20 year art practice.

Their new feature Hello Dankness is a suburban political fable that bears witness to the psychotropic cultural spectacle of the period 2016 to 2021. Set in a quintessential American ‘burb, the film follows a group of neighbours through these years as consensus reality collapses into conspiracy and other political contagions. Informed by the encrypted memetics of contemporary internet culture, Soda Jerk’s new work also summons the cinematic genres of political satire, stoner film, zombie flick and Broadway musical. The film features a cast of characters including Tom Hanks, Macaulay Culkin, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Annette Bening, Bernie Sanders, talking hot dogs, MAGA zombies, Wayne & Garth, Ice Cube, and the Phantom of the Opera as Vladimir Putin.

Image: Soda Jerk, Hello Dankness (production still), 2022