View from a Body Symposium

(Image: Cate Consandine, RINGER at Buxton Contemporary, the University of Melbourne, 2024. Courtesy the artist and Sarah Scout Presents. Photography by Christian Capurro.)

VIEW FROM A BODY: Symposium on Moving Image Culture and Embodied Affect 

Thursday 8th August 2024 

12.15pm - 5.30pm 

  

A half-day program of talks, panel discussions and screenings connecting researchers and artists to discuss how bodies interact with and experience the moving image.  

Exploring questions and provocations that surround moving image culture and notions of embodied affect, View from a Body, will explore conceptions of the filmic gaze that reflect upon the personal and collective, cultural, political and constructed landscapes inhabited and experienced through engagements with haptic visuality. 

  

Convened by Dr Cate Consandine and hosted between the VCA Art Forum and Buxton Contemporary, the Symposium envisions affective embodied and disembodied perspectives on moving image practices in dialogue with artistic researchers and cinematic scholars. The program is designed to create the space for critical reflection on how our bodies affect the way we see and understand moving images, and how artists use this through their work. 

The symposium welcomes Associate Professor Lukas Brasiskis as its Keynote speaker. Brasiskis is Curator of Film and Video at e-flux (New York), where he seeks to bridge the gaps between the appreciation, curation, and study of artists' moving image through regular screenings and discursive events.  

   

View From a Body is supported by Art + Australia and the Dr Harold Schenberg Bequest.  

PROGRAM 

VENUE: Federation Hall 

12.15–1.15pm 

SYMPOSIUM INTRODUCTION 

Cate Consandine, Artist and Senior Lecturer in Honours Art, VCA 

KEYNOTE | ART FORUM 

Lukas Brasiskis, Adjunct professor, New York University and CUNY/Brooklyn College and Associate Curator of Film and Video, e-flux | Embodied Film: Aesthetics of Intimacy as Forms of Resistance 

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VENUE: Buxton Contemporary 

1.30–2.00pm 

COFFEE & REGISTRATION 

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2.00–2.20pm 

WELCOME  

Cate Consandine | The embodied eye, sculpture and situated screen architecture in filmic practices

2.20–3.40pm 

PANEL SESSION 

CHAIR: Tristen Harwood, Writer and Lecturer in Critical and Theoretical Studies, VCA  

Dr Laresa Kosloff, Artist and Senior Lecturer, RMIT | The paradox of agency 

Hayley Millar Baker, Artist | The Indigenous Feminine Body as Universe 

Tina Stefanou, Artist and PhD Candidate, VCA | Moving-the-Image through the Social Flesh: Gathering in Difference | Talk and response with a chorus of first-year sculpture students from the VCA. 

CHAIRED PANEL DISCUSSION 

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3.40–4.10pm 

BREAK 

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4.10–4.40pm 

SPECIAL SCREENING 

James Barth | Stone Milker 

Archie Barry, Artist and PhD Candidate, VCA 

  

4.40–5.00pm 

SYMPOSIUM SUMMATION 

Lukas Brasiskis  

5.30pm  

GALLERY CLOSES 

Attendees are encouraged to head to Monash Caulfield, for the 2024 Margaret Plant Lecture in Art History: Marsha Meskimmon at 6pm. Please see here for more information.  

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PARTICIPANT BIOS 

Archie Barry 

Archie Barry is an artist who works with performance, video, sculpture and music composition and production. Born in 1990 and raised on the coastal regions of the Eora Nation/Sydney, their work is autobiographical, somatic and process-led. They create self-portraiture that troubles dominant notions of personhood as stable, legible and sequential. Their practice takes shape through a genealogy of personas, devised from their experiences of mortality, power and transgender embodiment. Barry’s work has been presented at leading Australian institutions including The National Gallery of Victoria, The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art, The Monash University Museum of Art, The Heide Museum of Modern Art and Contemporary Art Tasmania, amongst other spaces. They have undertaken a range of artist residencies including the FD13 Residency for the Arts in Minneapolis, USA, Visiting Artist Scholar at Parsons and The New School (School for Art, Media and Technology), New York, USA and Artist in Residence at Phasmid Studios, Berlin, Germany. In 2019, they co-wrote (with artist Spence Messih) ‘Clear Expectations: Guidelines for institutions, galleries and curators working with trans, non-binary and gender diverse artists in Australia’, which has been widely received as a best practice document in Australia and internationally. 

James Barth 

James Barth is a Meanjin/Brisbane-based artist whose work explores trans self-representation and embodiment. Her group exhibitions include the 18th Adelaide Biennale: Inner Sanctum (Art Gallery of South Australia, Tartanya/Adelaide, 2024), Embodied Knowledge: Contemporary Queensland Art (Queensland Art Gallery, Meanjin/Brisbane, 2022), New Woman (Museum of Brisbane, 2019), and Assuming Surface (Outer Space, Meanjin/Brisbane, 2018). Her work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra; Monash University Museum of Art, Naarm/Melbourne; Griffith University Art Museum, Meanjin/Brisbane; and V&A, London. Barth is represented by Milani Gallery, Meanjin/Brisbane. 

Lukas Brasiskis 

Brasiskis is a Curator of Film and Video at e-flux, where he seeks to bridge the gaps between the appreciation, curation, and study of artists' moving image through regular screenings and discursive events at e-flux Screening Room, and online programming. He is also a co-curator of The 14th Shanghai Biennale: Cosmos Cinema (Power Station of Art, 2023/2024) and Jonas Mekas and the New York Avant-Garde (Lithuanian National Gallery, 2022). He received his PhD degree in Cinema Studies from New York University in 2022 and teaches moving image art related courses at CUNY and Columbia University (The School of the Arts). His writings are widely published in academic and non-academic books and journals, most recently he is the co-editor of Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe(Berghahn Press, 2024) and Jonas Mekas: The Camera Was Always Running (Yale University Press, 2022). Since 2024, Brasiskis is an editor of e-flux Film Notes, a weekly online publication that explores the intersection of contemporary art and cinema through conversations with filmmakers, theoretical reflections, and historical and experimental writings. 

Dr. Cate Consandine 

Melbourne-based artist Cate Consandine works across a wide range of formal and discursive mediums including sculpture and spatial practice, film and performance. She works with the body as a material for her practice and is particularly interested in the physical expression of emotional and psychological states, centring on the relationships between bodies and their contingent registers. Her work envisions affective embodied perspectives on moving image practices in dialogue with sculpture and situated screen architecture. Acts of cutting, and the resulting fragment or part-object, are often utilised as an editing and performing strategy in the moving image, and as a reductive strategy central to the sculptural process. Meditating upon the peripheral dimensions of the female gaze, her work seeks to locate experience between stillness and movement, or the place where desire is posited—the edge of movement—and particularly fixes on the liminal body; a body on edge in the landscape. Cate Consandine has exhibited locally and internationally including: Buxton Contemporary (Melbourne), Galeri Soemardja (Indonesia), Museum of Contemporary Art (Taiwan), POSCO Art Gallery (South Korea), Sydney Theatre Warf (Sydney), ICA Institute Contemporary Arts (London), The Melbourne Art Fair (Melbourne), LOOP the International Festival & Fair For Video Art (Barcelona), Belfast Exposed (Ireland), Art Gallery of NSW (Sydney), Centre of Contemporary Photography (Melbourne), Heide Museum of Modern Art (Melbourne), Gertrude Contemporary (Melbourne), and The Northern Centre for Contemporary Art (Darwin). 

Tristen Harwood  

Tristen Harwood (Ngalakgan) is a writer, critic, and editor. He is a Tutor in Critical and Theoretical Studies at the Victorian College of the Arts. He is currently undertaking a PhD at RMIT University, which looks to understand the historical relationship between carceralism and Indigenous art making. Tristen is a contributing editor at MeMo review and a board member of the Plumwood Committee. His most recent book is Variations A More Diverse Picture of Contemporary Art (2023), co-edited and authored with Grace McQuilten and Anthony White. Tristen has published in Art Monthly Australasia, The Age, The Saturday Paper, MeMo Review, ArtReview, Art Guide, Overland, Artlink, Un Magazine, and various exhibition catalogues. 

Dr. Laresa Kosloff 

Laresa Kosloff (b. 1974) makes performative videos, short films, audio works and participatory artworks. Her practice examines various representational strategies, each one linked by an interest in the body and its agency within the everyday. Some of her projects are structured around language, whilst others use slapstick physicality to communicate ideas. An incisive humour is woven throughout all of Kosloff’s work, whether it be in questioning the act of “looking” within the public realm, or drawing out the tensions between received cultural values, individual agency and free will. Laresa is the recipient of the prestigious 2019 Guirguis New Art Prize and the 2023 Nillumbik Art Prize. Recent solo exhibitions include Benalla Art Gallery (2024), IMA, Brisbane (2023) and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne (2021). Her work has been presented in group exhibitions at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, the National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Te Tuhi Art Museum in Aotearoa, Casula Powerhouse and Monash Museum of Art. She is represented by Sutton Gallery and works as a lecturer at RMIT University. 

Hayley Millar Baker 

Hayley Millar Baker (b. 1990) is a lens-based artist based in Melbourne, Australia. She is Aboriginal from Gunditjmara, Djabwurrung, and Nira-Bulok Taungurung and has Anglo-Indian and Portuguese-Brazilian heritage. Hayley’s work intricately weaves multifaceted Indigenous feminine narratives, offering poignant reflections on identity, spirituality, and the human psyche, rooted deeply in her personal experiences and cultural identity. Employing her conceptual and abstract artistic vision, Hayley utilises oblique storytelling techniques to challenge conventions and push boundaries in photography, collage, film, and video. Her work resonates with deep emotional intensity, inviting audiences on evocative and non-linear journeys of discovery and interpretation that unfold and evolve over time. Hayley's work has been prominently featured in major group and solo exhibitions locally and globally, including the National Gallery of Australia (Canberra), MCA Australia (Sydney), Australian War Memorial (Canberra), Nasher Museum of Art Duke University (North Carolina, USA), Art Gallery of South Australia (Adelaide), Melbourne Museum (Melbourne), Fremantle Arts Centre (Fremantle), Heide Museum of Modern Art (Melbourne), Chau Chak Wing Museum (Sydney), Al Hamriyah Studios (Sharjah, UAE), Artspace Sydney (Sydney), UQ Art Museum (Brisbane), Gertrude Contemporary (Melbourne), SAMSTAG Museum (Adelaide), MUMA (Melbourne), ACCA (Melbourne), Salamanca Arts Centre (Hobart), Broken Hill Regional Art Gallery (Broken Hill), Flinders Street Ballroom (Melbourne), Shepparton Art Museum (Shepparton), Ballarat Art Gallery (Ballarat), FUMA Gallery (Adelaide), ACE Open (Adelaide), The Substation (Melbourne), MAMA (Albury), and UNSW Gallery (Sydney). And has received significant commissions from prestigious institutions such as Buxton Contemporary, Rising Festival, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), the National Gallery of Australia, PHOTO2021: International Festival of Photography, the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA Australia), and the International Ballarat Foto Biennale. 

Tina Stefanou 

Tina Stefanou is a visual artist, performer-vocalist, researcher, and filmmaker from the outer suburbs of Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. Raised in a working-class migrant family from Greece, she has lived, worked and studied in various places including Istanbul, Thassos, Berlin, Sydney, Carnamah, San Roque de Cumbaza and Paris. These experiences inform a filmography that traverses social class and species boundaries, using cinema-voice-performance to explore the social flesh and various forms of life and knowledge-making. Stefanou works across public spaces, site-specific environments, museums, ethnographic fieldwork, socially-engaged contexts, para-pedagogy, and experimental and new music frameworks. Her films and filmic traces delve into territories affected by agribusiness, local-global dynamics, post-industrial degradation, automated farming and resource trade routes, often working with a multispecies cast. Extending from her vocality, Stefanou's activities are also embodied in live performative actions, writings, ephemeral events, sculptures, installations and workshops. Stefanou has received the Schenberg Fellowship (2020), Marten Bequest Scholarship (2021), Nillumbik Contemporary Art Prize (local category), a CultureLAB program with ACCA and Arts House (2023-24), and in 2024 the 68th Blake Prize (emerging artist category). Stefanou's work has been exhibited, screened, broadcast, published, and performed internationally and nationally including: National Gallery of Victoria, Gertrude Contemporary, Salt Museum (Istanbul), the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Cementa, Art + Australia, Journal of Sonic Studies and she was recently a featured artist in the 2024 Adelaide Biennale of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia. She is currently a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, VCA, University of Melbourne.