Anarchive: Intestine – Performance Workshop

How are we digesting the past? Had a gutful of the present? And how’s your appetite for the future? Performance art is always in a dialogue with the body, but in this workshop we’re going deep into the ways we hold - and process - the world and its stories through our bodies. 

ACE’s exhibition, Anarchive: Gut-feeling, explores the guts of the post-object art archive, raking over the entrails of experimental art practice as it has taken place in South Australia (and beyond). In this workshop, we’ll chew over ideas together, using our bodies to explore and manifest expressions of the rhythmic passage of time; living with hunger, thirst and cravings; the praxis of taste-making; and states of satiety vs gusto. Open to artists working with, or curious about, the possibilities of performance, this workshop is a safe space for creative investigation and communal conversation. 

You’re welcome to bring along performance ideas you’re still digesting for us to process with care and support, together as a group. The workshop offers optional opportunities for artists at any stage of their careers to develop performance ideas with the potential to present them at the major symposium event, Anarchive: Digesting the World, at ACE on Saturday 23 May.

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.

Image: Sasha Grbich, Oriana Julie, Jazmine Deng and Tayer activate from Kimberly Gray’s 1976 performance Sweater in 2025 as part of Push/Pull, ACE, 2025.