How can we use archival gaps, absences and omissions - whether deliberate or unintentional - as a generative force for social and artistic change?

Anarchive: Digesting the World brings together talks, performances, screenings, food and music in a special event designed for a collective digesting of the ideas, themes, artworks and practices explored in Anarchive: Gut-feeling (ACE) and Anarchive: knowledge follows form (FUMA).

The talks feature speakers from the accompanying issue of Artlink, Experimental Art: Rattling the Archive who will invite dialogue and conversation about how new experimental practice can extend and ‘rattle’ ideas from the past.

Performances in conversation with the ideas, ethos and artworks of the Anarchive project will punctuate the day, offering audiences a mental palate-cleansing between each stage of the event.

Performances programmed throughout the day include: Jingwei Bu performing her newest work Sipping Piece; Oriana Julie offering interactive sculptural performance eat me (carcass); Tikari Rigney inviting people into their Cubicle Confessional; Tayer Stead hosting a series of touch tutorials; Aiden Hughes concluding his 30 day writing performance Untitled; while Helium Liu + Jazmine Deng improvising bodily responses to the exhibition.

Doris Poon from Videotage (Hong Kong) will give a talk contextualising this unique moving image archive, its founding in 1986, the media art scene in Hong Kong in the 1980s and 1990s, and offer a comparative perspective on archives, artists, and communal memory.

Doris will present a screening drawing from Videotage’s collection of experimental video works by various artists.

The day will conclude with dumplings and snacks made with Shenshen Zheng’s 酸菜 - suān cài - traditional North-eastern Chinese fermented cabbage, which features in her Anarchive installation, The Air Will Change, followed by a musical performance by Bedlam Rigney (cringetrender).

The Anarchive project invites lively conversation with a radical past. Across ACE and FUMA, twelve new artist commissions are presented, alongside works from South Australia’s extraordinary history as an epicentre of “post-object” art practice. A special edition of Artlink acts as an extended reader – bringing a critical eye to experimental art then and now.

About the Exhibition:
Anarchive: Gut-feeling explores how experimental art is experienced, remembered and reimagined.

Bringing together eleven new commissions alongside rarely-seen historic works, the exhibition revisits experimental art through a living archive – one that includes artists and practices that have often been overlooked or underrepresented – particularly those by women.

Across installation, performance (live and recorded), sound, and participatory events, the works challenge the idea of art as something to simply look at. Instead, they emphasise bodily knowledge, participation, digestion and encounter – inviting audiences to engage through feeling, intuition, and shared experience, where works are encountered, absorbed and processed through the body as much as through thought.

Rather than presenting fixed meanings or resolved objects, the exhibition centres experimentation as an ongoing process. Works evolve through testing ideas, collaboration and risk – where outcomes are not always certain, and meaning is shaped through experience.

Anarchive: Gut-feeling connects past and present approaches to experimental art, opening up new ways of understanding how art is made, experienced and evolves. The exhibition is part of the Experimental Art Anarchive project – a partnership between ACE, Artlink and FUMA inviting lively conversation with a radical past.

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Support:

This project is supported by Create SA.
Anarchive: Gut-feeling is presented in partnership with Adelaide Contemporary Experimental (ACE), Artlink, and Flinders University Museum of Art (FUMA).
This project is also supported by History Trust of South Australia and Griffith University.
Troy-Anthony Baylis is supported by City of Adelaide.
Ariella Napoli is supported by a City of PAE grant and Helpmann Academy.

Feature Image: Feminist art historian Lucy Lippard speaking in Adelaide in 1982. From the EAF slide library (held by ACE). Photographer unknown.

Contact the host of Anarchive: Digesting The World

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