See what what’s happening at our home at Brunswick Mechanics, and right around the continent ↓
You’re invited to a free 2-hour workshop with Melbourne based artist Kay Abude at Mood Studios, where we’ll gather for an afternoon of food and conversation to discuss sustainability in art practice.
This event is part of Making it in Moreland by Arts Moreland, a free series of workshops, gatherings and talks presented by Next Wave in partnership with Moreland City Council
Desire is a form of possession, commanding the body from within. Do we resist its embrace, or allow it to compel us wherever it must? Drawing on film tropes of the monster queer, this electronic opera for one is a magical summoning – a longing for communion with the invisible, where the performer’s body moves, and is moved by sound.
Possession celebrates the high drama and craft of opera via a solo performer inhabited by forces beyond human control.
How do we see the world around us, when the dominant contemporary visual language is determined by colonial histories and capital?
In The Revolution Will Not Be Aestheticised artist Warraba Weatherall considers the way that scientific and cultural perspectives inform contemporary cultural knowledge systems and forms of representation. Researched through archival materials, Australian politics, and Indigenous knowledges, the exhibition encourages a deeper insight into the construction and transmission of Indigenous knowledge systems and its direct influence in shaping social, political and cultural futures. In assessing how cultural archetypes are maintained throughout society, Weatherall builds on an existing dialogue of contemporary cultural identity to consider what encourages a healthy cultural continuum.
Credit: Belinda Locke, ‘Everyday Acts of Disobedience’. Photo: Jack Dixon-Gunn
Credit: Studio Portrait of Aida Azin. Photo: Thomas McCammon
Image: Jenny Barnes. Courtesy of the artist.
Image: Lily Nie at Paperlily Studio. Courtesy of Emerging Writers’ Festival
Credit: The Purple Shall Govern (2022). Photo: Jody Haines.
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Credit: Silk screen printed textiles in the studio (2021). Photo: Kay Abude.
Image: Marcus Whale - Possession. Photo: Rena Zheng.
Image: Kathleen Gonzalez, Secretos de la Raiz (video still), 2022
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Image: New North Foreign, Intimate Concert 4. Courtesy of New North
Image: Radical Hospitality at Next Wave. Photo: Mae Hatrick (2022)
Image: Here We Have It by Amrita Hepi, 2021, VCA Dance, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne. Image by Gregory Lorenzutti.
Image: James McLean (photo credit James McLean)
Image: Jacqui Shelton ‘Department of Lost Notes’ Anne Moffat (2022)
Coil, Image: Lucy Parakhina (2022)
Image: Coil. Photo: Rosie Hasties (2022)
Image: install of Jacqui Shelton at Brunswick Mechanics. Courtesy of the artist.
Image: Chik Chika Photo: Nick Mckinlay
Image: Jacqui Shelton ‘Department of Lost Notes’ video- still 2022
Image: Leisuretime I. Photo: Aaron Claringbold and Rebecca Mccauley (2022)
Image: Magic Steven. Courtesy of the artists and Brunswick Music Festival.
Image: Maria Moles. Photo: Nick Mckinlay
Image: Brunswick Mechanics Institute. Photo: Anne Moffatt (2020)
Image: Coil. Photo:Diana Domonkos
Countercurrents: Department of Lost notes
Jacqui Shelton
Fri 4 Feb – Sat 6 Mar
Public Program Sat 6 Mar, 2pm | Register here
Closing Celebration Sat 6 Mar, 4pm
Brunswick Mechanics
Department of Lost Notes is a four-channel video that attempts to capture the impact of receiving large amounts of emotionally charged data (texts, poems, quotes, emails) from the perspective of a digital device. Department of Lost Notes operates from a speculative position that imagines a smart phone organising by the digital interactions that replace face-to-face during lockdowns and periods of isolation. Department of Lost Notes gathers multiple experiences of isolation through the intermediary of a phone, anonymising and collating diverse text submissions from the public that capture their digitised personal thoughts.
Presented as part of Countercurrents a new public art commissioning partnership between Next Wave and Moreland City Council. Countercurrents is intended to support both site-specific and community-based public art projects.
Want to contribute?
Next Wave and Jacqui Shelton invite you to participate in Department of Lost Notes: Working Group public program where participants will contribute text from their notes app towards a collective document of digital experience. The artist will guide groups through a process of editing and physical orientation, that will inscribe texts developed collaboratively as walks in the local vicinity of Brunswick Mechanics.
Department of Lost Notes Public Program
Sat 6 Mar, 2pm | Register here
This process will develop a series of multiple stories and texts that participants can share as a walk and recite to friends and family, as a record of collective experiences of distance and the varied differences within these text-based representations.
This work archives community submissions to construct a collective experience of isolation and distance. You are invited to contribute personal notes to be included in the work via this link.
Jacqui Shelton is an artist and writer born on Barada Barna land, central QLD, and based in Narrm, Melbourne. Her work uses text, performance, filmmaking and photography to explore the complications of performance and presence, and how voice, language, and image can collaborate or undermine one another. Jacqui is especially interested in how emotion and embodied experience can be made public and activated to reveal a complex politics of living-together, and the tensions this makes visible.
Jacqui Shelton, Department of Lost Notes (video still), 2022