Artists Tiyan Baker and M@ Cornell will spend two weeks in residence at Testing Grounds, adjacent to The Queen Victoria Market, as part of our All School EXCHANGE programming.

The artists will be co:labbing with shared interest in tropical Australia’s home within the Malay archipelago, our perpetually uncentered equator and multi-generational lived experience of produce growers and transporters, and of market culture between Rapid Creek Markets (Darwin) and Queen Victoria Markets (Melbourne).

All School EXCHANGE is about bringing artists together from across different states and territories to share practice and ideas. All School is Next Wave’s artist-led learning platform – all the good stuff that comes with prioritising the process over the product.

Tiyan Baker is an artist who works with installation, photography, video and sculpture. Her practice draws on historical research, language, digital processes and material play to trace unseen relationships between words, place and stories. Living far from native lands, in the midst of the (re)colonisation of Borneo, she explores all that can be mistranslated or lost, and what can manifest in its place. She was born and raised in Garramilla/Darwin and now lives and works in Muloobinba/Newcastle.

M@ leverages Sci-Fi world building to co-create choreography. The Mattmosphere composes award winning music for dance, installation and film. 馬特 regularly works from C-LAB (臺灣當代文化實驗場) interrogating choreography as a cultural technology. M@ recently co-created Fully Automated Human Touch with Merinda Davies. His writing has been published in international journals, magazines and wikis. He also a touring dancer, currently in Stunt Double by The Farm.

Throughout the residency, M@ will dance, building Sci-Fi choreographies and texts through his speculative-physical-futuring process. Nasim Patel will join M@ in the studio for dancing. Antony Hamilton will also join M@ in the studio with a focus on methods and case studies of choreographic construction.

Tiyan will continue her ongoing research into the links between Bidayǔh bamboo culture and its attendant linguistics, and will be joined in that effort by artist James Nguyen.

The residency will wind down with an open studio, as well as well as a Radical Hospitality event curated by M@ and Tiyan – held on Saturday 3 February.
(Please note, the open studio session is invite-only.)

This exchange builds on last year’s Market Market exchange up on Larrakia Country (Darwin), which saw five Next Wave artists head north for a creative exchange during Darwin Festival.

All of the details of the Market Market exchange and more will soon be available on the All School website, which is set to relaunch end of January.

Wet Season-ing is generously supported by City of Melbourne