Constituency and Reciprocity: what we talk about when we talk about community-building
Details
2:30-4:30pm
Sunday, 22 November 2026
The Third Brim, 270 George Street, Fitzroy
(Free event. Light refreshments provided. Limited seating. RSVP recommended)
Guest Speakers:
Mark Feary (Gertrude Contemporary)
Channon Goodwin (Composite / All Conference / George Paton Gallery)
Annalee Koernig (Make It Up Club)
Kristi Monfries (Multicultural Arts Victoria)
Moderator:
Cristea Nian Zhao (The Third Brim / HAIR / Trocadero Projects)
What is community-building? How do relationships between artists, curators, organisers, collaborators and participants shape the ways we work collectively?
Constituency and Reciprocity brings together practitioners from diverse organisational backgrounds across visual arts, experimental sound, and independent publishing. The panel explores how relationships of collaboration, exchange and mutual support constitute collective practices, and how these relationships shape organisational structures, decisions and responsibilities.
Building on the idea of constituency, we approach ‘community’ in the lens of reciprocate relations. The discussion looks into how organisations and collective projects are influenced by relationships both within their immediate networks and across the broader arts ecology. What agency do different participants, collaborators and wider publics have in guiding organisational directions, and how are decisions and responsibilities negotiated across different modes of operating? It also examines whether established ways of working, funding structures, and professional networks start reproducing certain conventions, even within initiatives that seek to challenge them.
Constituency and Reciprocity: What We Talk About When We Talk About Community-Building is the first public program at The Third Brim, marking the soft launch of our new space in Fitzroy.
Guest Speakers
Mark Feary
Mark Feary is an Aotearoa New Zealand-born contemporary art curator based in Naarm Melbourne. He has served as Artistic Director at Gertrude Contemporary since 2016. In this role he has led the organisation's artistic program across the sites of Gertrude Contemporary and Gertrude Glasshouse as well as Gertrude's 2-year studio program. He has had oversight over 150 solo and group exhibitions over his tenure, led the organisation's 40 year artistic program, Past is Prologue: Four Decades of Gertrude (2025), and developed numerous curatorial projects including Polyphonic Reverb (2023); Being, Human Being: UFO Photography (2023); Hope Dies Last: Art at the End of Optimism (2019), presented at Gertrude Contemporary and at the Victorian College of the Arts as part of Melbourne International Arts Festival; Zzzzz: Sleep, Somnambulism, Madness (2018), presented at Gertrude Contemporary and the Murray Art Museum Albury; The End of Time. The Beginning of Time (2017); and Octopus 16: Antiques Roadshow (2016) among other projects. Feary participated in the inaugural Gwangju Biennale International Curator Course in South Korea in 2009; was invited to participate in the Focus program for international curatorial professionals organised by Institut français in 2012; undertook a curatorial residency at BankART in Yokohama in 2011; a three-month Asialink curatorial residency at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum in 2010; as well as earlier residencies with the Goethe Institut in Berlin in 2008, and PS1 Art Center in 2004. In 2011 he was selected through a peer assessed international open call process for curatorial proposals coordinated by apexart in New York City and presented the project A Postcard from Afar: North Korea from a Distance in early 2012, exploring modes of political propaganda within and outside of Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Many of Feary’s international curatorial projects have sought to contextualise the practices of Australasian artists, including Landscape Painting: Recent Video from Australia & New Zealand, One & J Gallery, Seoul in 2013; Video Arte Australia y Nueva Zelanda, Centro Cultural Matucana 100, Santiago in 2013; and South by Southeast: Australasian Video Art, Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography in 2011. Prior curatorial roles have been at the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney; Artspace, Sydney; Buxton International / Michael Buxton Collection, Naarm, Melbourne; Centre for Contemporary Photography, Naarm Melbourne; and West Space, Naarm Melbourne. He is a graduate of the Art Curatorship and Museum Management program at the University of Melbourne and has a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand.
Channon Goodwin
Channon Goodwin is an artist, arts worker and researcher whose practice centres on collective, collaborative and artist-run approaches to making and organising. Working across moving image, sound, publishing and organisation-building, he explores how artists create shared resources, sustain independent cultural spaces and support one another’s work. Channon is Director of George Paton Gallery at the University of Melbourne Student Union (UMSU), Founder and Director of Composite Moving Image Agency & Media Bank, and Convener of All Conference, a national network of artist-led arts organisations. He previously directed Bus Projects from 2012 to 2021 and edited Permanent Recession: A Handbook on Art, Labour and Circumstance (2019). His doctoral research at RMIT University examines artist-run organisation and the commons, bringing together his creative practice and longstanding involvement in independent arts communities.
Annalee Koernig
Annalee Koernig has curated for MIUC since 2006. She has worked as a producer on Heavy Machinery Records’ Flash Forward series and served as Chairperson of the Avant-Garde/Experimental category for the Music Victoria Awards from 2013 to 2022. She has guest-curated programs for a range of organisations, including Articulating Space, MIBEM, the Melbourne International Jazz Festival (Overground program) and Liquid Architecture. From 2003 to 2008, Annalee was co-director of the avant-noise/breakcore collective Black Lotus, which presented events across a diverse range of Melbourne/Naarm venues, spanning established performance spaces and site-specific outdoor locations. Her weekly experimental music series Stutter (2007–2012) became an important platform for adventurous sonic practice, contributing significantly to Melbourne’s reputation as a centre for experimental music. Annalee currently hosts Imitating a Nightingale, a weekly experimental music program on 3CR, and works as a Creative Producer for Snuff Puppets, alongside support roles with JOLT Sonic Arts.
Kristi Monfries
Kristi is an arts leader and cultural strategist with more than 20 years' experience shaping experimental and cross-cultural artistic practice. Kristi's career has been defined by long-term collaborations and a commitment to supporting grassroots initiatives, mentoring emerging artists and championing Global Majority and Diaspora voices. Having lived and worked in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, immersed in its early vibrant arts scene and deeply community-rooted creative culture, she brings a grounded, first-hand understanding of artistic practice outside Western frameworks. Those years shaped her thinking about what it means to build arts ecosystems that are genuinely self-determined, locally embedded and internationally connected. As a Javanese-Australian who spent her formative years living across Southeast Asia, Kristi developed an early and intimate familiarity with cultural multiplicity, navigating between languages, traditions, and ways of making. This lived experience sits at the heart of her work and continues to inform how she approaches collaboration, community and creative possibility. She is passionate about supporting and creating cultural diversity, nurturing self-determined artistic communities and expanding the narratives that define Australia's contemporary cultural landscape, bringing to that work not just professional expertise, but a life shaped by crossing borders, both geographic, personal and cultural.
Moderator
Cristea Nian Zhao
Cristea Nian Zhao is a Narrm-based curator, writer and arts worker. She is Program Curator at The Third Brim, co-founder and co-director of HAIR, and Exhibition Coordinator at Trocadero Projects. Her work spans curatorial research, exhibition-making and the development of independent arts programming, with a particular interest in how historical narratives and technological futures shape collective imaginaries.
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