Fluid Bodies
21 January - 4 February 2023
Libby Harward, Danni Zuvela & Dominique Chen
Libby HARWARD, Danni ZUVELA & Dominique CHEN / Fomentation / © Libby Harward, Danni Zuvela & Dominique Chen
Fluid Bodies, bodily fluids, wild juices in flux and flow. In this work-in-progress, cultural and feminist fermentations lie across each other, intersecting and intermingling, finding flow and remembering relations. (The movement needs to move). In this digesting space, the more-than-human generously speaks for the artists, to notions of labour, de-service, connection, containment/leakage, and nourishing systems of circulation. Fluid Bodies is an invitation to participate in messy, muddy and microbial exchange.
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OPENING
Friday 20 January 2023, 6-8pm, JWAC Gallery, 420 Brunswick St, Fortitude Valley.
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JWAC Gallery
Cnr Brunswick and Berwick Streets
420 Brunswick Street
Fortitude Valley Q 4006
(map here)
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Libby Harward’s arts practice spans over 20 years, initially as a community, street and graffiti artist. During the past 8 years her focus has been on developing a conceptual arts practice, resulting in regular invitations to exhibit works nationally. As a Ngugi woman whose Ancestral lands and waters are Mulgumpin (Moreton Island) in the Quandamooka (Moreton Bay Area), her process is one of simultaneously listening, calling out to, knowing and understanding Country. Major recent works include the ALREADY OCCUPIED series on Yugambeh Country (Gold Coast), and DABIL BUNG (Broken Water) with First Nations along the Bidgee and Barka (Murray-Darling River system). She is now creating new relational works on Jinibara country place on the Bonyi- Bunya. These works engage a continual process of re-calling – re-hearing – re-mapping – re-contextualising – to de-colonise cultural landscapes, utilising low and high-tech media with elements of sound, image, installation and performance, to engage directly with politically charged ideas of national and international significance. Libby has co-founded Munnimbah-Dja culture space in 2021 with her partner Bj Djini-Djini Murphy Jinibara culture man. Libby is predominantly interested in creating a black space in Maleny where Aboriginal people can come together to discuss, organise, collaborate, showcase and practise art and culture on our own terms.
Danni Zuvela is an artist, curator and community organiser based on Kombumerri country on the Gold Coast. Through research, critical writing, residencies, exhibitions, public programs and publications, Danni engages with artists and non-artists in the production of relationships and the exchange of knowledge. Danni’s work often involves questions of sound and listening, their social and material implications, and she has a particular interest in listening to, and with, non-human others. Through various curatorial platforms since 2004, she has curated many programs within, across and between the worlds of contemporary art, performance, moving image and experimental music. In the 2018 research project WHY LISTEN TO PLANTS, Danni curated and performed in a series of talks, walks, food, music and kayak performances in Berlin, Gold Coast, Daylesford, and exhibitions at DesignHub gallery, Melbourne, and at Nordnorsk Kunstnersenter, Svolvaer. In 2019 she curated WHY LISTEN TO ANIMALS, a project comprising an artist camp and critical publication based around the spawning of the Giant Cuttlefish in Waiala, South Australia. In 2020, she co-founded Gold Coast Pride Festival with Vince Siciliani. In 2021, she curated WATER RITES, a South Australian project exploring the subjectivity of water as a non-human actor across critical ecosystems. Danni has collaborated curatorially with Libby Harward on numerous curatorial projects including for Tarnanthi Festival of Aboriginal and Torrest Strait Islander Art (Adelaide); Liquid Architecture, Designhub and Next Wave (Melbourne); Bleach Festival, The Walls and Seaweed Society (Gold Coast); and in outdoor locations including creeks, beaches, an estuary, a convent, and the Tropical Display Dome at Mt Coot-tha Botanic Gardens. Danni’s artistic practice centres non-human others in acts of collective listening. Her experimental sound project ROGUE SYNTAX, with artists Nathan Gray (Berlin) and Makiko Yamamoto (Melbourne) uses experimental linguistics to ask questions about the ethics of amplification and the politics of polyphony in speaking with, but especially for more-than-human others. Her artworks ORCHID HOUSE (2020, Bleach Festival); BELATONE and WRITTEN ON THE RAIN (2022, Big City Lights Festival) and ORCHID HOUSE PARTY (2022, Elevator ARI, Lismore) have featured light, sound, mist and the critically endangered Phaius australis, the Southern Swamp Orchid.
Dominique Chen is a Gamilaroi yinnar and interdisciplinary, arts-based researcher living on Jinibara Country in South East Queensland. She currently lectures at Griffith University (Queensland College of Art) within the Contemporary Australian Indigenous Art program, having worked for almost a decade in the not-for-profit arts and community sector, facilitating arts and social enterprise initiatives in remote communities. Dominique is mother, daughter, sister, aunty, artist, writer, curator and avid gardener, and is passionate about the role of creative practice in making positive contributions to community, culture and Country. She is currently undertaking doctoral study at the University of Technology Sydney, exploring the intersections between relational art, activism and urban Aboriginal food growing.
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This project has been assisted by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland. |