Tina Stefanou, Exhausted Vocalities 1986-ongoing Third Performance and Vinyl Launch

Join us for a third performance of Exhausted Vocalities 1986-ongoing by Tina Stefanou, on the final weekend of the exhibition You Can’t See Speed. As part of the event there will also be live music interventions launching Tina Stefanou’s new publication for You Can’t See Speed, a limited edition vinyl record. To conclude the program there will be a celebration with refreshments.

Exhausted Vocalities is a vocal action in which the artist uses her voice as a resonant engine—extended through petrol-infused economies, and off-road singing in the form of inherited peasant tongues. She sits beneath a grief ramp, an aspirational instrument crafted from hand-grown crystal and metal, inspired by her collaborator Matthew Cassar’s journey of riding dirt bikes blind, including his ambition to achieve the world’s highest jump. This parallels the artist’s own aspirations as she moves through the many modes of becoming a professional artist in her first major solo exhibition.

Through the intimacy of voice, improvisation, and its material extensions, the space transforms into a site for new vocalities and class relations, where exhaustion, aspiration, and notions of visibility coalesce.

Exhausted Vocalities arrives from Tina Stefanou’s background as a vocalist, and practice as an improvising vocalist, performing across new music, contemporary classical, and experimental music contexts. Tina Stefanou uses voice as form and medium in all her works, singing solo and with others for over twenty years.

Tina Stefanou: You Can’t See Speed is a limited-edition vinyl accompanying the artist’s major solo exhibition at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Attending to the interconnected and multisensory experience of film beyond vision, You Can’t See Speed features vocal resonances and spoken descriptions written and recorded in collaboration with participants from Stefanou’s film works, alongside music composed by the artist. A cacophony of lived experience, oral storytelling, and vocality.

The B-side centres a collaboration with blind motorbike mechanic and rider Matthew Cassar and composer Joseph Franklin. Anchored in ideals of trust and experimentation, the work traces Cassar’s journey through high-performance dirt bike riding as a surrealist voyage of adrenaline and self-actualisation. In his own voice, Cassar reflects on the layered worlds—both on screen and within—where ‘image meets experience’. Cinema becomes sensorium, as singing, thrumming, electronically mediated dirt bikes, outer-suburban field recordings, exhausted vocalities, hymns, trumpets, harmonics and grain converge in a rush of sonic and embodied image-making.

Image: Tina Stefanou, Exhausted Vocalities 1986-ongoing, performance two, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne 2025. Photograph: Sarah Walker

Artist and Performer: Tina Stefanou
Dramaturgy: Anna Nalpantidis