Join us for the official launch of Tina Stefanou’s digital publication in association with her major solo exhibition You Can’t See Speed.

Designer Lloyd Mst will take us on a tour of the website, we will then hear readings from selected writers including Azza Zein, Fayen d’Evie, Tara Heffernan and Tessa Laird, followed by a conversation about how each writer encountered Stefanou’s work and ideas through their texts.

Speaker Biographies:

Azza Zein is an interdisciplinary artist and writer living in Narrm/Melbourne. Her artistic research focuses on materialising the fluid relationships between body/object, land, and labour. She is particularly interested in revaluing the decorative act and examining migrant materials through the lens of modernity’s iconoclastic aesthetics and the violence of displacement. Her essays often explore how artworks comment onthe dematerialisation of the economy and the invisibility of labour. Her writing has been published in journals like Art + Australia, Kohl Journal, and un Extended, and she has contributed an essay to the Care Ethics and Art Anthology (Routledge). As a sessional academic, she has taught studio art and theory at several universities, including the American University of Beirut, La Trobe University and the Victorian College of the Arts.

Elyse Goldfinch is a curator, writer and editor based in Naarm/Melbourne. With a career focus on advocacy, collaboration, exchange and support for artists, she he has worked in several non-profit and independent spaces, collaborating with multidisciplinary artists to develop ambitious, experimental and ground-breaking projects. Elyse is CEO at Next Wave, and was previously Curator at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art where her curatorial projects include Tina Stefanou: You Can’t See Speed, 2025; Tennant Creek Brio: Juparnta Ngattu Minjinypa Iconocrisis, 2024; From the other side, 2023-24; and Lucy Guerin: NEWRETRO, 2023.

Fayen d'Evie is an artist, publisher, and academic, born in Malaysia, raised in Aotearoa New Zealand, and now living and working on unceded Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung lands, in Naarm-Melbourne, Australia. D’Evie’s projects are often collaborative, and resist spectatorship by inviting audiences into sensorial readings of artworks and texts. A lifetime of fluctuating vision has spurred creative research into blindness as a critical and imaginative position. She is also the founder of independent imprint 3-ply, which approaches artist-led publishing as an experimental site for the creation, dispersal, and archiving of texts.

Lloyd Mst is a graphic designer based in Naarm who creates inclusive experiences celebrating diverse voices. Their practice expands across sensory performance and publishing spaces, exploring the intersections of technology, description, and accessible communication.

Tara Heffernan is a vision impaired art historian and critic. Currently, she is completing a PhD at the University of Melbourne on postwar Italian artist Piero Manzoni. Her work concerns modernism and the avant-gardes, conceptual art and the lineage/s of the New Left. She is a regular contributor to Melbourne’s Memo Review and has written for national and international publications such as Artlink Magazine, Third Text Online, Eyeline and Overland. In 2024, she was a judge for the Darling Portrait Prize at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra. Heffernan was the guest editor of Un Magazine issue 18.1 Badaud and recently contributed a chapter to Jeff Gibson: False Gestalt (Griffith University Art Museum x Perimeter Editions, 2024) edited by Wes Hill. She is currently a sessional academic at the University of Queensland, Brisbane.

Tina Stefanou is an undisciplined artist working across performance, film, music, voice, sculpture, and socially engaged practice. Her work explores the performative potential of vocality to materialise immaterial relations between humans, animals, infrastructures and forces. Through experimental ethnography Stefanou develops deep, long-term and co-creative collaboration with diverse interspecies communities — from humming to cows during artificial insemination and working with pony club riders and their elderly horse companions, to staging public actions with teenagers in zoos and creating site-specific interventions in agribusiness landscapes. Now, she turns the gallery into an instrument, exposing the limits and possibilities of working class vocalities within institutional frameworks.

Tessa Laird is a writer, occasional artist, and Senior Lecturer in Critical and Theoretical Studies at VCA Art, Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne. She has written monographs on colour: A Rainbow Reader, Clouds, Auckland, 2013; animals: Bat, Reaktion, London, 2018; and the intersections of animal and artistic practices: Cinemal: the becoming-animal of experimental film, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2025. In 2021 she edited a special issue of Art + Australia on the theme ‘Multinaturalism’, and in 2022 curated the exhibition Baroquetopus: Humanimal Entanglements and Tentacular Spectaculars at Gertrude Contemporary. Her current interests include investigations of expanded cinema in relation to more-than-human ecologies. She is Tina Stefanou’s PhD supervisor.