AUG 22
SEPT 5
Romy Cole-Groth
Leila El Rayes Mika Benesh Meng-Yu Yan
Sabella D’Souza
Ponnaya Devi (Dileepa Dayandaya)
Gianna Hayes
CURATED BY Isabella Cornell
& A D Space UNSW A&D
Valerie Schlosberg
WORKSHOP 1 [Process Collateral]
Edited by Isabella Cornell and Valerie Schlosberg Design by Anna May Kirk
Workshop 1 has been conceived, developed, and exhibited on Gadigal land. We acknowledge Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the first inhabitants of the nation and the traditional custodians of the lands where we live, learn and work. We acknowledge that sovereignty was never ceded and pay our respects to Elders both past and present. As we share our knowledge, learning and research practices within this project we also pay respect to the knowledge embedded forever within the Aboriginal Custodianship of Country.
ABOUT WORKSHOP 1
Workshop 1 began as a revamping of an exhibition called “Dissonance,” which was run collaboratively between Kudos Gallery and the UNSW Women’s Collective between 1997 and 2015. Workshop 1 carries on the legacy of radical activism that the original exhibition was born of, pushing the boundaries set between political content and tangible intervention in the gallery setting. An open ended, collaborative project that is not quite exhibition nor public programming, Workshop 1 exists as a platform for gender diverse practitioners across a range of mediums and contexts to find common ground and lead conversations about their own interests and practices. Avoiding the trope of a ‘showcase of diversity’ that tends to reduce artists to their oppressed identities, Workshop 1 refuses to leave women and non-binary people out of conversations about their own art. Workshop 1 has involved a series of conversations between the participating artists, allowing for shared threads and contradictions to be uncovered, independent of a prescriptive curatorial framework. The contents of these conversations were recorded and edited into the contents of this publication, leaving a ‘trace’ of the Workshop. In addition to this tangible ‘process collateral,’ the conversations and relationships generated by the Workshop process also constitute the outcomes that art pursues in and of themselves, in the sense that they foster community, promote ingenuity, and allow for free diverse expression. In this way, Workshop 1 invokes the potential of the gallery as a space to house active political interventions. Bringing together UNSW Art and Design’s most exceptional recent graduates and current students working across a range of mediums, Workshop 1 is committed to an ethos of nurturing emerging artists and experimental practices. Workshop 1 exists as a method of combat against the underrepresentation of women and all non-binary people in the art world, and against the tokenistic two-dimensionality of representation where it does exist. Furthermore, it exists as a radically democratic environment that promotes and nourishes solidarity, self-determination, and imaginative alternatives to oppressive, unsustainable hierarchies within the art Institution as well as in our broader communities. Text by Valerie Schlosberg
WORKSHOP 1: ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Romy Cole-Groth (@romes_cg ) Romy has a background in studies of social research and policy and art theory at UNSW Art & Design and the UNSW faculty of social sciences. In her artwork, Romy uses texta, oil pigment sticks, glitter pens and pastel. Colour and composition play a central role in how she works with her materials. She likes the outcome of her work to be representative of the natural world using abstract shapes and forms, combining earthy tones and assorted textural qualities with arbitrary marks. Romy is happiest when the work she produces speaks to her lyrically of landscapes, people, and the ocean. Her aesthetic is playful and she often refers to it as having a “childcare aesthetic”. She has worked with kids at PCYC as an arts mentor and was influenced by the free movements and experimental relation between learning students and blank canvas. Currently, Romy is collaborating with a clothing designer in Barcelona and working towards applying her art to wearable aesthetics with mindful clothing designer Palomawool.
Coogee women’s pool, summr, 9pm (2017), Romy Cole-Groth, mixed mediums
Mika Benesh (@smallfragment )
Mika is a first year Design student. They work with graphite, film photography and video, examining memory and acts of remembrance in relation to Jewish cultural identity and history.
ELEVEN (2017), Mika Benesh, graphite on stonehenge paper, 30x20cm
Leila El Rayes (@dingbatbabe / leilaelrayes.com ) Recently graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) from UNSW Art & Design, Sydney based artist Leila El Rayes works primarily within sculpture and performance. Born and raised in Sydney from Egyptian and Palestinian descent, Leila’s practice deals with the themes of cultural heritage and often acts as a celebration of vulnerability between melding identities and contexts. Leila uses the themes of hardship, desire and uncertainty as a vehicle to intricacy, fragility and beauty. Her diverse practice utilises unconventional materials and techniques, examining the idea of being dissolved into predetermined culture with exploration and reaction to exoticisation and otherness. Exhibiting in galleries across Sydney, in 2016 Leila was the winner of the Jenny Brit Award and a finalist of the Kudos Award’s 15th Anniversary.
A Whole New World (Hardstyle Remix), 2017, Leila El Rayes. (Photo by Enoch Mailangi) Digital print photograph, 30x40cm
Ponnaya Devi (Dileepa Dayananda) (@ponnaya_devi / facebook.com/ DileepaDayanandaArt )
My mother and her mother. my sister My mother’s sisters and my cousins, mothers to their daughters. And me And this hoodless naga. Reclamation of me-fe-male. This body in hips to wide and hips to slim. PONNAYA DEVI, the Tranny Divine, stolen breasts and budding lies burst from this trampled chest. The resurrection of my mother-me divinity. The mourning of a womb, neverborn. Me, my daughter? The self creation, the selfie as god(dess). I will make myself healthy again. Make myself whole.
Jayamangala Gatha (Reborn), Ponnaya Devi, performance 2017
Meng-Yu Yan (@mengyu.yan / cargocollective.com/mengyuyan ) Meng-Yu Yan is photographic artist based in Sydney, Australia. Drawing on themes of fragmentation, dreams and the landscape, her works represent a highly personal expression of the artist’s Chinese-Australian queer identity. Meng’s art carries a marked sense of multiplicity, mysticism and urgency. She adds a ‘sculptural element’ to her work by amalgamating various forms and materials, playing with natural light, mirrors and reflections, and layering her photographic images. Characterised by spontaneity and experimentation, her practice conveys a strong conceptual engagement with ideas of selfreflection, alienation and traversing the sublime. Meng was the winner of the 2015 DMG Curator Award for the ‘Outsiders, Imposters and Aliens’ exhibition and headliner for the group show ‘Identity’ at DMG in 2016. DOMINIK MERSCH GALLERY hosted her first solo exhibition in May 2017.
The Talking Mirror (2017), Meng-Yu Yan, framed digital print on matte art rag, 841 x 1189 mm
Gianna Hayes (@hazey___ / giannahayes.format.com)
Spice (2017), Gianna Hayes, 35mm film photograph, 29.7cm x 42cm
Pure essence and zest for individuality illuminate Gianna’s work. Her innate gift for photography has served as a way to express concepts that are personally relevant and resonate with her own upbringing. Gianna comes from a diverse background of African American and Italian decent, born in Los Angeles, California and raised in both Los Angeles and Sydney, Australia. Her own personal ride of self-discovery has influenced and motivated her exploration of other individual’s cultural backgrounds allowing her to share their own personal connection through sculpting a visual language. Ideas surrounding identity, culture, empowerment, equality, energies, and the female condition encapsulate her work. Her use of raw colour pallets and soft lighting emphasise Gianna’s spiritual connection to nature and is prevalent throughout the young photographers body of work. Gianna’s background in performance and textile design plays a significant role in her visual language. Textured textile and sculptural compositions along with conceptual motifs emphasise her works. Her work is personal, and intimate distilling a sense of peace and calmness to the viewers. Gianna’s artistic expression comes in many forms; including textile design, mixed media artworks and running Synergy Society, an inclusive creative agency in Sydney.
Sabella D’Souza (@gov.au )
Sabella D’Souza is a Sydney artist, whose performance based practice considers the notion of ownership, identity and the use of public and private spaces, in particular, cyberspace. Currently D’Souza’s focus is in the online, and the transnational with a strong emphasis on cultural ownership, virtual identities, and the performance of beauty—specifically for non-binary, and women of colour. D’Souza’s work is a direct response to being a product of digital diaspora. Thus, D’Souza’s work responds to representations of “authentic” and “traditional” cultures within cyberspace with reference to their own diasporic Indian/New Zealand/Australian/“White” identity. As such, D’Souza’s work is an intimate portrayal of what it means to occupy an inherently political “bodily space” online.
Video still from 22/f/aus (2017), Sabella D’Souza, 1080p video installation
ABOUT THIS BOOK
This project was conceived with the intention to work within a methodology which blurred the lines between public programming and exhibition. We sought to do this through a focus on the generating of ideas, and through highlighting the often lost or invisible conversations that happen around art and in the convergence of viewpoints. We worked to facilitate a platform through which to forge new connections and allow common themes to arise through inviting artists to be part of the platform, rather than an object of discussion. This came in the form of a series of recorded discussions, whereby artists engaged in conversation with one another about the politics of artmaking in 2017. As curators, we resisted the instinct to identify shared ideas woven throughout the artist’s work, and instead, collaboratively developed sites of exploration; many of which we would not have initially identified as commonalities between many of the artists’ practices.
These common undertones were revealed in the following sessions which offered insightful commentary upon diverse themes including queer theory, racial politics, solidarity, the personal as political, the internet as a radical site of resistance, reincarnation, and Gigi Hadid/Zayn Malik. We wish we could have included the entire seven hours of conversation transcripts, but we feel that the following pages of excerpts, along with a varied collection of images shared by each artist contextualise the work and practices of the artists. This collection not only reveals common areas of interest of the artists involved in Workshop 1; but actively involves the audience as a further participant, engaging with these open ended snippets of insight and questioning in a way which generates further investigation and understanding. The following pages include excerpts from the session’s transcripts, as well as work by the participating artists and other relevant images that those artists contributed to this catalogue. Text by Isabella Cornell
WORKSHOP 1: SESSION 1
Workshop 1: Session 1 was held at UNSW Art & Design campus on July 18, 2017. The session involved artists Romy Cole-Groth, Leila El Rayes, and Mika Benesh. The session was moderated by Workshop 1 curators Valerie Schlosberg and Isabella Cornell. The transcripts have been edited for clarity.
Valerie: A lot of your work deals with memory and the recovery of memory as it relates to your Jewish identity, and I was wondering if you could talk a little more about the interplay between those two things. Mika: I think the interplay is really inherent within Judaism and Jewish culture, with memory especially as it relates to history in general, and the passing down of history in Jewish communities, and the loss of history. Like when you have genocides and expulsions going on you lose a lot of your history both personally and as a whole community. There’s so much I don’t know about my family’s history and where I come from, just because it’s been lost and they couldn’t document that because they were fleeing. I also think about memory as a personal thing, how I think of my own memories, and trying to put that into [words].
THIRTEEN (2017), Mika Benesh
Mika on collage: “I suppose one medium wasn’t quite enough for me, to kind of get everything – to get a cohesive picture of my world. You know, I think its just lots of things together, it’s not just visuals, I think as well sound, moving image…”
THE HISTORY OF REMEMBERING (2016), Mika Benesh
Valerie: I was watching a past interview you did where you’re talking about your performance, Vulnerable and Volatile, and you say that it takes the thoughts and opinions of the audience and “warps them to the subject’s benefit.” Can you tell us a little about what it means to you to warp and reframe and reclaim stereotypes in the way your work often does? Leila: Yea definitely. Something that I definitely play with is manipulating this whole kind of understanding of demonized cultures, and working it to my advantage. I’m not gonna change people’s minds instantly, so what I’m doing is kind of rolling this subconscious idea they have of these particular minorities and subcultures, and I’ll say well, like, “fine, fuck you. If you have this idea, I’m gonna wear it with pride and make it work for me and I’m not gonna remove that from my identity and make it palatable for you, so you’re comfortable. So I guess I just try to use these kind of… shots and frames to make these things that are looked down upon, or as I said before demonized, and make quite a platform and a strong kind of reclamation. Valerie: Your work incorporates a lot of movement and dance, and it allows your work to be really emotive and expressive in different ways, whether it’s comical or just super intense. Can you talk a little bit about your background in movement or what draws you to use movement across multiple mediums in your work?
Leila: Yea. So, yea just growing up in the culture that I am – so being north African and Arab – dance and belly dance is just something we do, you’re born doing it at family events. And so, growing up within the Western world I kind of removed myself from that identity and now at my age I am kind of understanding how to meld them and marry them. And one thing that is always really prominent is the use of dance and movement, regardless of if you’re with your conservative family or your wild family or if you’re having some crazy night out with your mates, there’s this moment of ecstasy when you’re dancing and you’re forgetting what’s around you and that’s what I kind of try to pull from, is this moment of losing inhibitions and just being in the moment and around people who are moving as well. Regardless of your relationship with them, you know, it’s just that non-verbal kind of experience with that moment. I don’t know if that makes sense but… another thing is I think that all art has a place and is valid but in my particular practice I’ve always said I’ve never wanted to make work that’s not accessible. If my cousin can’t get it, then fuck it, I don’t want to make it. Like, I want it to be emotive, I always want it to be something anyone can grasp. I never want it to have this academic cut-off where you have to know certain art theory, to understand it. Like that’s fine and it has its place, but for me that’s never what I wanted. And for me, dance is definitely a way of accessing that and extending an arm to a larger audience, regardless of where you sit within the art framework.
Video stills from Vulnerable and Volatile, Leila El Rayes 2016
Leila and Mika on Leila’s knife skirt: Leila: Dancing is so important to me, when I go to cultural events and they have these drummers, you can feel it in your bones, it’s like this other worldly kind of feeling. I wanted to extend that into how we would go clubbing, you know, hitting 77 or something like that, how they play into each other. Mika: I’m sure you’ve been asked this a million times, but did you get hurt? Were you scared? Leila: It’s definitely an element, because I don’t blunt any of my knives, that’s the whole point of it, I’m in the skirt and I could get hurt but at the same time I have control of the skirt. I haven’t hurt myself during a performance but one time I was with a friend and he was like, “lets take photos of it” and I was like “fuck yeah!” and then…. I sliced myself. I was like “I think you should call the ambo hey” and we were getting an Uber to the ER laughing…
Image courtesy of Leila El Rayes
Romy Cole-Groth, 2017
Romy: When I started drawing and painting I was actually trying to visualise my social research data, in a way… into pictures and drawings and little illustrations about pluralism….when I started drawing I was like, “this is just me doing some doodling.” Then I started making some connection, there was some connection or communication with myself where I was like “I think this is coming from stuff I’m learning at school” but in a visual way. I’m dyslexic so I use different forms of learning to understand and comprehend things that I learn. I think the kind of forms that I use as well… is something of an articulation of things I can’t express into words as well.
Romy Cole-Groth, 2017
Mika: I was meaning to ask you, you mentioned you’re dyslexic. I was wondering how that impacts the way you choose to make art? I have a form of synesthesia where sequences and time – it’s always hard to explain, but it’s called spatio-temporal synesthesia. It’s like space and time, things like sequences, calendars, and days of the week have physical space for me. I’m not quite sure how that has impacted my work but I think it has in some way, especially just how I conceptualise memory, because I suppose I can see time… [and], if I can see it I need to fill it up, I need to know what happened. I’m just wondering because obviously dyslexia and synesthesia aren’t the same, but they definitely impact your learning in some way. There were definitely some parts of maths that I never got because of how I think of numbers. I was just wondering if you have any thoughts on that? Romy: Yeah, I feel like my drawing is very impulsive. The reason I think it is very kidlike is that when I was in primary school I would draw all over myself heaps, to the point where teachers got social services in because they thought something bad was going on at home. I had been diagnosed with dyslexia and I just didn’t want to do any of [my schoolwork]. I’d either be drawing or daydreaming. When I’m drawing now it’s kind of a little “screw you” to the word world. I get so out of whack with over-intellectualising things where literally I pick up my pastels and I can make this legitimate. Leila: You can totally feel that. Seeing your work for the first time and how I heard you speak about it before I got the visual, I can totally see. You were saying how you kind of worked with other people, and the way you use negative space is so inviting still, it takes up that whole page, and it has that tactical kind of tangible thing with the viewer, it’s not a shut-off work. It’s impulsive, expressed onto the viewer.
Mika: I want to touch it!
Leila on nails: “ a symbol I use quite often is a metal nail, and I use it for its boldness yet its softness. It’s quite a harsh item aesthetically but it’s also dangerous and fragile and intricate. So I use those as a motif for hardship and vulnerability.”
close up of another/other (2016), Leila El Rayes
Images courtesy of Leila El Rayes
Leila on her sculptural practice: “That was, like [Mika] said before, this was my lightbulb moment at uni where I was kind of like, “this is what I want to work with,” because I was very insecure working around culture. Because I didn’t feel invited, like I grew up in the West, Arab family, Muslim upbringing, was very excluded from the art world and never had any ties with it. Art was the only thing I ever wanted to do, it was my only option. And then, I forced myself, “I’m going to art school, there’s no other thing.””
Mika: “I think the day I took this photo it really clicked for me, my practice, because I know I’m really young but for a really long time I felt like I didn’t have any direction in what I was making. And a lot of what I was doing was just rubbish or me kind of just doing similar things to the people around me because I just had no idea what I wanted to make. And then there was this one afternoon – this was in my bedroom – there was this crazy sunset and I just spent the whole afternoon just taking photos.”
Leila: You were saying you make it in your room, it’s really sweet and gentle, it’s like an invitation into your own personal space… Val: These little glimpses… Bella: It kind of speaks to that in a way, that that’s what you’re making…
Romy on place: “I think the role of place is very important in my practice. It definitely kind of changes the way I view texture, colour, space… a lot of the environments that I will illustrate have a lot to do with the ocean and land. They’re just abstract pictures of the world I suppose, just my way of looking at things. I mean like, the colours are also inspired by being in inner Sydney and stuff and I crave getting out of the city so much, it’s just the way I can visualise a nice space and not be in the city, not be trapped in, get back to that nature.”
Image courtesy of Romy Cole-Groth
Romy on visual influences: “I’m very much also inspired by designs and shapes and stuff. This is in Marrickville outside the centrelink, it’s so good. If you go in the main road, Marrickville road, there’s all these little murals, there’s like “Sydney 2000”, these colours. I’m very inspired by those reminiscent childhood kind of childcare aesthetic.”
Images courtesy of Romy Cole-Groth
On identity politics as an artist: Leila: Your identity is political sometimes, and you can’t really remove yourself from that. I guess it can be a blessing and a curse. I don’t want to be put in this pigeonhole, because obviously everyone is complex and more than their identity, but with that being said identity plays such a huge role in how you perceive the the world and make your art. And as it is, [your identity can] get tokenised really quickly and easily. But sometimes using that as a platform even if it is tokenised is still getting your work out there, [getting a] voice [out] there. Mika: Thats something I’ve been thinking about recently. I was contacted recently by a lot of people who wanted to use like my transness as a talking point, as a topic [for their publication]. I shared it with my mum…. and she really freaked out. She was like, “I don’t want you to be taken advantage by these people”. [But] eventually at some point you just have to use it your advantage. We’re all in this kind of stupid, shitty art world and you just have to use what you’ve got I guess. [....] Romy: As an artist or practitioner, [do] you have some sense of responsibility to use your platform in [an activist] way? Leila: Yeah definitely, from my experience especially right now, this Muslim/Arab identity is so heavily loaded in the world right now, like fucking Trump! I was 5 years old when 9/11 happened, and it’s impacted me my whole life. That’s how the world saw me and that’s how I saw the world. Even being a Palestinian, my family left in the war in search of a better life. I feel like I owe the world my voice. How dare I be selfish about [my voice] when others don’t have one? I could’ve still been in Palestine, or dead in the war. How can I not use my voice?
LEILA: “ITS JUST EXPLOITATIVE, BECAUSE YOU JUST BECOME THIS TRENDY TYPE OF
THING THAT THEY CAN TALK ABOUT WITH THEIR FRIENDS AT DINNER.”
NINETEEN SEVENTYEIGHT (2017), Mika Benesh. Graphite on stonehenge paper.
Dry point etching “Star Chart” by Mika Benesh
Mika on being read as ‘political’: “In terms of history and jewish cultural identity, thats always going to be political for as long as jewish people are going to be targeted. Thats going to be political no matter how apolitical i want to present it. For as long as i’m saying its a jewish artwork, or that i’m a jewish artist, it’s always going to have that quality to it and I think I’m okay with that.
Romy on movement and astrology: “A lot of my stuff is like, movement, very much so… about movement. I also started drawing because I am on two chemo drugs, it was kind of like art therapy for me, everything I made… I swear it’s because I’m a libra… I was like “God, everything is so well balanced, it’s so beautiful” It’s because I’m a libra I swear. It really helped me”
Images courtesy of Leila El Rayes
Leila and Mika on the internet and community: Mika: I think the internet is such a good space because the internet is for everyone….No one is going to look out for us except for us, that goes for every group that’s ever [been] marginalized. The great thing about the internet is that you’re able to come together, all these people with shared ideals and shared values, making a space for yourself where you can all support each other. I think it does have real world repercussions. Leila: Yea, the internet is definitely a platform that is able to connect these voices from all over the place that wouldn’t have this access to each other and just having that support is so validating. Just knowing that someone is seeing what you’re doing and recognizing it. And also just taking away from that anxiety of real life interactions of having to explain yourself. Even in Sydney I find dance communities and warehouse parties so important not just because I love to dance, which I do, but because it’s so much more than that. It’s a resistance that is radical in itself because we’re all grouping together and we’re sharing these ideas and extending ourselves to have a good time, and leaving the prejudice behind. Just generating conversation. Even the most simple things like wearing what you want is such an expression of your identity, and it’s so important. Just seeing someone from afar and thinking they’re cool and then finding them online like, “hey”, that’s really important.
Romy Cole-Groth, 2017
WORKSHOP 1: SESSION 2
Workshop 1: Session 2 was held at UNSW Art & Design campus on July 25, 2017. The session involved artists Meng-Yu Yan and Dileepa Dayananda. The session was moderated by Workshop 1 curators Valerie Schlosberg and Isabella Cornell. The transcripts have been edited for clarity.
Isabella: You mentioned about the way your practice is concerned with queerness and queer tactics. Do you see an inherent link between performance as a medium or practice, and queerness? Dileepa: I always say, when I started performing its so I could wear make up. Like I would always tell my mum, ‘oh I bought this lipstick for a performance piece’… it’s not because I really like this shade of red. I kind of used performance in the beginning as a way for me to explore my gender… a bit stealth really so people didn’t quite realise what it was I was wanting to explore- because I couldn’t exactly outright be like hey I’m going to buy lipstick today, especially in the beginning. My character is ‘Ponnaya Devi’ and Ponnaya in Sinhalese means “tranny faggot” or something equivalent to that, and it is a huge slur in Sri Lanka. It’s basically a term that is applied to effeminate gay men.. It’s a big slur that I discovered from reading Sri Lankan authors. It’s not that I’m very detached but I don’t have the same connection to Sri Lanka that someone born in Sri Lanka might have. And then Devi in Sanskrit means goddess and because my family is Theravada Buddhist I have always had a relationship with Hinduism. So my character was just me exploring uglier sides of queerness but in a way that was beautiful to me. But also for me, performance wasn’t just about queerness. Growing up I was never to brown performers. We all learn about Marina Abramovic etc. but growing up I never saw a brown body performing… so for me it was like “oh I’ll do this” because I guess I needed to. Isabella: Is that what mostly drew you to performance? Dileepa: Oh no. Performance was an accident.
Image Courtesy of Dileepa Dayananda
“OH NO PERFORMANCE WAS AN
ACCIDENT.”
Isabella: On a similar note, Meng, you spoke about your work being informed by your Chinese-Australian heritage and your queer identity. Does what Dileepa was saying resonate with you in that sense? Meng: Yeah definitely. I guess same thing, seeking to see yourself represented in society, in art, in areas where I guess there is generally a lack of queer people of colour. [Dileepa] gave the example of Marina Abramovic as the most famous performance artist currently, and I suppose in photography, which is the medium that I work with the most, it is generally dominated by men. And so you really don’t get queer, chinese, Australian, female, gender fluid people controlling the gaze. Or how things are seen, or how Asian bodies are portrayed. Isabella: Is that what drew you to photography as a medium? Meng: Yeah. When I was in high school I used to take self-portraits dressing up in my dad’s clothes, or something really lame like that. And it was an avenue of exploration and performance and you know, Judith Butler style “gender as performativity”. Exploring different parts of yourself through a creative medium and being in control of how you are portrayed. Especially [regarding] the fetishisation of Asian women... [it’s] usually male photographers, who are using Asian women as this sex object, capturing her in this way. I wanted to subvert that, and be both the camera and be the subject.
Medium, Meng-Yu Yan
Image Courtesy of Dileepa Dayananda
Dileepa on their art practice: “My work sort of looks at the intersections between queerness and brownness… queering the brown, and browning the queer.… lots of sort of semi-ritual drag… festy… disgusting… lovely… beautiful…” “My performance name, and my mask making practice and how I perform, it is very messy….It is about diaspora. That whole process is really messy when you are not closely connected to your own culture, and I think my performance is sort of messy in the same way. I wasn’t born in Sri Lanka, I can’t speak Sinhalese. My performance is definitely a process of researching my heritage and transforming that into something that I can understand.”
Meng on dreams: “My name Meng Yu means Dreams of Jade. Basically my mum when she was pregnant with me, she had this dream. This person came to her and said you have to name your child with the word Jade, which is Yu, in it. So when she woke up she combined Meng which is dream and Yu which is Jade. And that is how I got my name. So dreams definitely play a big part in my work. And I suppose its that thing with names, it always defines you before you create your own life.”
Dreams of Jade, Meng-Yu Yan
Meng: My grandmother is a Buddhist nun and she lives in a temple in China. And Buddhism is a big part of my cultural and spiritual background as well, and I was particularly interested in one Buddhist deity [….] the English translation is the Goddess of Mercy. In Chinese Buddhism, this deity is portrayed as female, but I think in India, they are portrayed as male and I liked the androgyny associated with this particular deity, being both female and male. Dileepa: I think it is interesting with Buddhism; it’s very funny- people think the new Doctor Who thing is a huge deal, [casting] a female Doctor. People have been complaining about “oh my god, a thing got reincarnated as a woman, this weird alien thing…” and I am like literally my number one fear when I was a kid was being reincarnated as a frog. That was my actual fear, because I was born in Botswana, and I remember one time I had to take a poo and there was a brown frog and I thought I had pooped out a brown frog and I was very scared. And because growing up, the whole queer thing… I thought oh my god I’m queer and I am going to be reborn as an animal or something. And the whole idea of rebirth I thought of as really interesting, because rebirth in itself is an androgynous process. Because you can literally be reborn as anyone or anything… so I guess the soul is essentially androgynous or essentially has no gender because you have the possibility of being born as anything. Or as a ghost! Meng: Or a frog!
Teahouse, Meng-Yu Yan
Dileepa on mask making: “when I started with my mask making I realised I could sort of use my mask making practice to create a character that wasn’t ‘femme’ or ‘butch’ or anything like that, that was just kind of hideous, but beautiful and hideous.”
Image Courtesy of Dileepa Dayananda
Isabella: One of the big concerns that Val and I are trying to explore with the exhibition, and these sessions especially, is that often those who could be described as having marginalised identities - their work is often inherently labelled as “political” or “activist”, how do you feel about this? And would you describe your own work in that way? Dileepa: I was performing in Hayden Fowler’s dark ecology work at the MCA. And when I was working, There was a beaded mask over my head and a rabbit fur coat on me, so people could only see my nude back. And I realised a lot of people classified my body as indigenous and black. No one knew I was subcontinent [....] I realised that without me doing absolutely anything, all these politics were being applied to my body. And so I suppose it’s kind of a blessing and a curse in a sense, because I remember there were like a lot of white male bodies performing on the other days and a lot of people would view the work purely for its environmental factor and their bodies weren’t taking into account. From then [on] I was very hyper-aware that my body is inscribed with so much already that I don’t necessarily have to actively bring to the table. I can’t escape the politics of my body. I can’t turn up to do a certain work that a white cis male body can do and have the exact same response because, politically their bodies have very different significance, or insignificance or invisibility almost that people of colour, and queer bodies don’t have access to. But I think it is something we can use, because even though it is unfair in a sense….being able to mess with them and play with them is also a useful thing. Meng: That is so true. I also often feel hyper visible, and constantly looked at [...] and sort of experience this paranoia that people are looking at me. And so perhaps that’s why maybe both of us have chosen mediums where attention is drawn towards us. At least me, using photography, and using vision to talk about things like invisibility and visibility is an important aspect that I’d like to research a bit more. It’s like we don’t really get the choice of [how we are represented], it is put on to us by society and sure I’d like to just be making art that could be maybe “universal” as many white male artists think that their work is.
Meng on Plath: “I just sort of work in whatever I am drawn to and pick up and try and fit them together. [It’s like] when you have a dream, you don’t really know what it’s about, you just pick up these symbols and just carry them along with you, and hopefully by the end of it, you come to a kind of meaning or you interpret it in some way. So throughout making my exhibition at Dominik Mersch, I was just intuitively, sort of blindly going into these concepts around mirrors and reflection and identity and I came across Plath’s poem mirror and there was a really beautiful line in there which went Now I am a lake, a woman bends over me. Searching my reaches for who she really is.”
Mirror, Sylvia Plath 1961
The Talking Mirror, Meng-Yu Yan 2016
Dileepa: I did the Cocoa Butter Club at their Sydney launch at the Red Rattler. And that was an all brown performance event. I found that working with so many people of colour, it became… even though we were all people of colour [and] a lot of us were queer kids, it didn’t feel like we were just [shoved together] to be that. It more felt like a solidarity thing, understanding where we came from and being able to support each other. I think for a performance event, that was one of the most amazing experiences I’ve had. Being around heaps and heaps of brown performers…when you’re surrounded by so much of your sameness, it stops being a thing. You’re not aware of it. When I performed at other places, I am one of a few people of colour. I’m hyper aware of the politics of myself. Whereas when you’re surrounded by people who share the same politics, its not so pushed together. Meng: Yeah it is quite a tricky subject, I guess I was in a similar experience when I also did a performance for MCA artbar, curated by Louise Zhang for Chinese new year. Everything was Chinese New Year themed, or based around that. Most of the performers were Asian and there was a really nice of community and solidarity with everyone there, you’ve gone through similar experiences. I felt perhaps with the audience that came in, it could be seen as fetishized, just lanterns everywhere - something like that [seems] really stereotypical [to a non-Asian audience]. Artists just want to be themselves, and not be put in a category.
Image Courtesy of Dileepa Dayananda
WORKSHOP 1: SESSION 3
Workshop 1: Session 3 was held at UNSW Art & Design campus on August 1, 2017. The session involved artists Sabella D’Souza and Gianna Hayes. The session was moderated by Workshop 1 curators Valerie Schlosberg and Isabella Cornell. The transcripts have been edited for clarity.
Sabella: Something that’s amazing about Sydney is that people are constantly carving out spaces for themselves when we’re not given those opportunities. There’s a lot of resilience in the way that POC, women, queer people… all these people who would otherwise be seen as minorities are trying to carve out spaces, and be like “you might not want us here but…” Gianna: We’re gonna be here anyway! Sabella: And we’re gonna make it easier for other people to be here as well, which I think is a great ethos… Gianna: Yeah! And that’s what I love about Sydney, is what you just said, you’re just carving your way through! I’m gonna do this, and you’re not gonna say anything about it. You know? I love that attitude. I think that’s so special. It’s good to see.
Images courtesy of Gianna Hayes and Sabella D’Souza
Gianna on living between Sydney and Los Angeles: “I grew up in Australia in a predominately white area, and I still am in a very white area, so I’m always that odd one out, the different one… people touching my hair, just you know all that kind of thing, I’m just the entertainment of the town. But whenever I go back to LA, I’m not. I’m just like everybody else. I’m a small fish in a big pond, just swimming along.”
Image courtesy of Gianna Hayes
Sabella on My Motherland Is A Mouthful: I did that work in 2016, and originally it started out not as a digital work but as a work that I wanted to do to learn how to make traditional clothing from my culture. I’m Indian. And I wanted to learn how to make choli and lahenga and the dupatta… that’s like the top of the sari, the shirt blouse and then the skirt that goes along with it and the scarf that you can wrap around. I didn’t know how to make them because my dad assimilated and I just don’t have access to that culture. So I used this artwork to try and access that. A lot of it was me going onto online forums and messaging old indian aunties being like “how do I make this for my F size breast cup please help me, all of you are tiny.” Lots of websites were like “If you’re bigger than a size 10 you shouldn’t be wearing a sari”.... I screen printed the sentence that I thought articulated how I felt about my culture and my identity…. It’s kind of this idea of it being overwhelming but also hard to talk about and hard to say and hard to deconstruct. I wanted to use periscope as this tool to show how I participate in online culture and how my body is inherently political and also not my own when I put it online. Like, my body always has a context it’s not going to be seen as neutral. It’s not gonna be thin, it’s not gonna be white, it’s not gonna be cis, it’s not gonna be any of these things. Images courtesy of Sabella D’Souza. “My Motherland Is A Mouthful”, 2016
Gianna on place: “I’ve always grown up along the shore, wherever I’ve been it’s been near water and rock formations, the colours of the sand. So I do tend, even in my photography, the colour pallettes are very warm. They’re also very biegy, creams, browns… very sandy colours. I think living along the shore has definitely effected that without even realizing.”
Image courtesy of Gianna Hayes
Stills from 22/f/aus, Sabella D’Souza, 2017
Sabella on default whiteness and their work “22/Female/Australia”: Sabella: I want to talk about this very specific notion of being perceived as white in online spaces. It is called 22/Female/Australia and it is supposed to be in response to like A/S/L in like omegle and things like that and people would ask Age/Sex/ Location and you’d be like ‘I’m 16, Female, Australia’ and you’re like 12…And like saying “Australia” had a very specific connotation of like beach blonde.. do you know what I mean? That is the idea that we put out for tourism and stuff. Isabella: Yeah like the Lara Bingle tourism campaign? Sabella: Yeah exactly, so it’s like that image and also the idea that anonymity online is seen as white, as the default. The way in which we look at anonymous comments, we automatically assume we it is a white cis male. And mainly because a lot of comments are shitty opinions… But I think there is also something there to be said, as even online we see whiteness as the default which I think is a symptom of how we see whiteness as the default in real life.
Sabella on performative allyship: “I think that’s where like the tension and the anger and the hurt lies. Because it is like cool, but by you showcasing us, you’re still getting social capital from us. And it is one thing to use our artwork to uplift us, and its another thing to use our artwork to get a bunch of likes on facebook”
Gianna on her practice: “I find being in Australia has really pushed me to focus on identities in various cultures because it’s a very diverse nation. However I find that it is very grouped, it’s a very grouped nation. It’s about accepting the diversity and mingling and showing each other who you are. I guess that’s my main aim through my work.” Images from “Spice” series by Gianna Hayes, 2017
Sabella on the impermanence of the internet: “The thing that is so incredible about the internet but also so terrifying is that it is temporary, but it is also entirely permanent. People are like “don’t put your nudes online because everyone will know!” But it’s also like, I can have these amazing, lengthy political discussions over years and years and years with these people that I’ve never met before who may or may not live in Australia, who may or may not be of the same cultural identity as me, and we can unpack them… and then that group can just be deleted, and all those conversations are lost. A lot of my work and my research is hoping to document in some way the experience of being in those spaces, in the hopes of letting people know that they existed in the first place.” Sabella on “websites of resistance”: “Google docs is a radical space if you want it to be.”
Images courtesy of Sabella D’Souza
GOOGLE DOCS IS
A
RADICAL
SPACE
IF YOU WANT IT TO BE.
Sabella: There’s this huge study, and this book that I love called Women of Colour and Social Media Multi-Tasking and it looks at the ways in which women of colour use social media compared to any other specific individual on the planet. And one of the greatest things about it is that women of colour, more than any other person, use facebook and instagram the most. And they change the ways in which we use them the most. And when you look at those kinds of spaces, facebook and instagram are both seen as vapid, but then places like reddit and 4chan, you know, the boys clubs are seen as difficult and hard to get into, you’ve got to be a bit of an expert to use them. Even when we’re not realizing it, we’re giving those spaces more validity than we’re giving facebook and instagram even though they’re these amazing sites of resistance as well. Gianna: You can do just as much on those sites Sabella: Exactly, and it’s hard because obviously, facebook doesn’t want us...it deadnames people, they don’t let you have your non-birth name. They’re violently and constantly attacking the queer, trans, and poc communities, but at the same time it’s the only thing we can use. It’s kind of like “using the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house” in some sense. But sometimes it’s the only thing we can really do.
Sab on writing and practice: For me language and the ways in which we self-identify and the words we use to kind of curate ourselves, becomes a really big important part of my artwork and how I do it. Online space is so much about self-identification in the hopes of kind of creating a community.
Valerie: You said that your work is interested in “energies”, and looking at your work across all the mediums you work in there definitely seems to be a vibrancy and a sensitivity that speaks to that. I’m wondering if you can explain a little more about what you mean by energies and your relationship to that concept more broadly. Gianna: When I speak about energies, I mean not just the physical side of us. I’m talking about your spirit, and what you naturally reflect. What light you give off, what feeling you give people. You know, when you walk into a room you have a certain energy to you. And with my work, my photography especially, when I photograph someone I need to sit with them, talk with them, understand them, learn about them, and kind of feel that energy and see what they want to bring to the table. What they want to share to the world through my lens. Because energy is not a physical thing, it’s more something that is just in you, and you can find that in everyone, and it is very vibrant.
This project has benefitted from an Art & Design Grant courtesy of Arc @ UNSW Limited Thank you also to Angela Goh for coining the term ‘process collateral’ a key phrase in the conception of this project.