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The Different Shades of Place and Displacement
July 19, 2017 - July 30, 2017
Free – $35
The different shades of place and displacement
Arts House is presenting a series of installations, performances, spoken-word events, readings and conversations during July, which will reveal and explore the complex relationships of place and belonging.
Arts House Artistic Director Angharad Wynne-Jones said the works, which run from 19 – 30 July 2017, explore narratives around the violence of colonialism, the migration of people as refugees or those asserting new futures, and our connection to the land on which we live on.
“Twelve lead artists and their collaborators from across the globe, and around the corner, are bringing their urgent, powerful explorations of histories and possible futures to Arts House in July,” said Wynne-Jones.
Artists include multi-media spoken word maestro Nástio Mosquito with his work Respectable Thief. Known for his performances, videos, music and poetry with an intense commitment to the open-ended potential of language, Mosquito comes to Arts House via MoMA (NY) and Berliner Festspiele (BER).
South African based Sethembile Msezane will present Excerpts from the Past, a powerfully eloquent love letter to those who have been disposed of their history; and Sydney’s PYT | Fairfield will present TRIBUNAL, a truth- telling and fiercely ambitious verbatim performance addressing Australia’s history through the parallel stories of Indigenous Australia and newly arrived refugees.
The series also includes local Melbourne-based artists include the 2017 Slamalamadingdong Champion wāni, with his first full-feature solo show Tales of an Afronaut, and Samara Hersch and Lara Thoms with the world premiere of We All Know What’s Happening; a collaborative work with seven young people in Melbourne in response to Australia’s ongoing relationship with Nauru.
“Through this series of performances, discussions, readings, lively interactions anda special large Supper Club in the main hall of the North Melbourne Town Hall, audiences can expect to be taken to new worlds through ancient, new and crucial narratives,” Wynne-Jones said.
19 – 22 Jul We All Know What’s Happening – Samara Hersch & Lara Thoms [World Premiere]
20 – 23 Jul TRIBUNAL – PYT | Fairfield [Victorian Premiere]
23 Jul The Long Lunch – Jamie Lewis
26 – 28 Jul Tales of an Afronaut – wāni [World Premiere]
27 – 29 Jul Respectable Thief – Nástio Mosquito [Australian Premiere]
29 – 30 Jul Excerpts from the Past – Sethembile Msezane [Australian Premiere]
29 – 30 Jul Sonic Hieroglyphs – Stéphanie Kabanyana Kanyandekwe [World Premiere]
19 – 30 Jul The Community Reading Room – Torika Bolatagici [World Premiere]
30 Jul Art & Action: Displacing Whiteness in the Arts – Tania Cañas with Sethembile Msezane & Odette Kelada
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World Premiere
19 – 22 Jul 2017
Set against a backdrop of handmade costumes and colonialism, this is an absurd, true story about Leonardo da Vinci, the Pacific, seagull shit and state- sanctioned abuse. This new work sees Samara Hersch (Sex and Death, META) and Lara Thoms (A Singular Phenomenon, Howl) collaborate with seven young people in Melbourne in response to Australia’s ongoing relationship with Nauru. Part school musical, part history lesson and part political probe, We All Know What’s Happening sees people too young to vote, confront power, complacency, children’s rights and the future.
Samara Hersch samarahersch.com
Lara Thoms projectswithpeople.tumblr.com
Season 19 – 22 Jul 2017
Times 6.15pm Wed – Fri, 5pm Sat
Duration 75 minutes
Post-show Q&A Sat 22 Jul 2017
Access Auslan Interpreted Sat 22 Jul + Q&A
Address Arts House, 521 Queensberry Street, North Melbourne
Tickets $25 – $35
Bookings artshouse.com.au or (03) 9322 3720
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Victorian Premiere
20 – 23 Jul 2017
TRIBUNAL is a ceremony we are all invited to. Australia’s history of colonisation and detention will be put on trial when Indigenous elders, artists, human rights activists, refugees, lawyers, young leaders and outlaws come together to create an Australian Truth and Reconciliation Tribunal. This compelling collaborative work addresses Australia’s history by telling the parallel stories of Indigenous Australia and newly arrived refugees. A truth-telling, a sharing of stories, a celebration of resilience, a way forward – PYT | Fairfield’s profoundly moving and fiercely ambitious verbatim theatre project fuses participatory performance with legal procedure, personal history and intimate conversations to create a parallel democracy for our times.
PYT | Fairfield pyt.com.au
Season 20 – 23 Jul 2017
Times 8.15pm Thu – Fri, 3pm and 8.15pm Sat, 5pm and 8.15pm Sun
Duration 70 minutes
Access Auslan Interpreted 8:15pm, Fri 21 Jul
Address Arts House, 521 Queensberry Street, North Melbourne
Tickets $25 – $35
Bookings artshouse.com.au or (03) 9322 3720
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23 Jul 2017
The Long Lunch is a conversation series between independent artists. Over a shared meal, participants meditate on their place within old and new spaces, in response to the themes of place and displacement. The Long Lunch is a durational event. You are invited to consider your place in the discussions, and to vacate when you are ready, so that someone else’s voice can also be heard.
Jamie Lewis jamielewis.com.au
Season 23 Jul 2017
Times 1pm, 2pm and 3pm Sun
Duration This is a durational event. Please book for one of the sittings, but note, you are welcome to come and go as you please.
Address Arts House, 521 Queensberry Street, North Melbourne
Tickets $10
Bookings artshouse.com.au or (03) 9322 3720
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25 Jul 2017
Supper Club: Place & Displacement is a facilitated exploration of our overlapping relationships to place. Wurundjeri elder Joy Murphy Wandin, urban planner Timmah Ball and natural history expert Gary Presland each frame their view of place through Indigenous culture, our natural environment and the ways that we design new spaces and transform place. Supper Clubbers can then grab a plate and join in hosted discussions examining wider concepts of place and displacement – ranging from homelessness, migration and ageing to space travel and the internet – designed to draw upon the expertise and experiences of all present. Facilitated by human ecologist and artist Asha Bee Abraham (Invisible Cities) and purveyor of participatory art forms Dan Koop (The Stream/The Boat/The Shore/The Bridge), entry includes a meal by Tamil Feasts.
Asha Bee Abraham ashabeeabraham.com
Dan Koop dankoop.net
Facilitated by: Asha Bee Abraham & Dan Koop
Guest hosts include: Aunty Joy Wandin / Author and Historian, Dr Gary Presland / Writer & Urban Researcher, Timmah Ball / Poet, Humanitarian Innovator & Collaborator, Baqir Khan / Writer & Artist, Annie
Raser-Rowland / Professor Barbara Creed
Season 25 Jul 2017
Time 7pm Tue
Duration 120 minutes
Address Arts House, 521 Queensberry Street, North Melbourne
Tickets $20 – $25
Bookings artshouse.com.au or (03) 9322 3720
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World Premiere
26 – 28 Jul 2017
Melbourne-based poet wāni Le Frère transports audiences through the world of a third-culture generation, delivering a raw performance of vulnerability, resilience and honesty in an evening of spoken word poetry. An ode to the flourishing of life and the telling of the untold, Tales of an Afronaut pays tribute to the incredible lineage of storytelling embedded deep within the black/African diaspora. Through a lens both retrospective and current, Tales of an Afronaut is an evening like nothing else.
Created & Performed by: wāni Le Frère
Season 26 – 28 Jul 2017
Times 7pm Wed – Fri
Duration 40 minutes
Address Arts House, 521 Queensberry Street, North Melbourne
Tickets $10 – $15
Bookings artshouse.com.au or (03) 9322 3720
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Australian Premiere
27 – 29 Jul 2017
We are remixers. We are thieves. And then there’s natural selection.
We pick up where the last human has left it.
We are in the business of making it our own.
We are respectable thieves.
In a near-trancelike barrage of music, text, physicality and imagery, artist Nástio Mosquito charismatically unpacks the good and the bad of what we ‘take’ as we create identities, maintain relationships and gain power. From Wall Street hubris to downloading songs, from guilt to entitlement, Respectable Thief delivers an urgent and seductive demand: that we decide what’s important, what to follow, what to focus on and what to complete. Respectable Thief straddles the epic, the intimate, the banal and the visceral – provoking, coaxing and celebrating the power of questioning and the productive eloquence of anger.
Nástio Mosquito nastiomosquito.com
Season 27 – 29 Jul 2017
Times 8pm Thu – Sat
Duration 45 minutes
Address Arts House, 521 Queensberry Street, North Melbourne
Tickets $25 – $35
Bookings artshouse.com.au or (03) 9322 3720
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Australian Premiere
29 – 30 Jul 2017
Excerpts from the past are reincarnated in this striking visual and performance-based installation, which considers current conversations of land in relation to the colonial quest of Africa. Intimate and unsettling, Sethembile Msezane’s embodiment of Nolwazi, a time traveller, hypnotically moves amongst the antique furniture and decaying structures of a domestic colonial landscape, invoking ancestral memory and unearthing associations of belonging, dislocation and displacement. Based in Cape Town, South Africa, Msezane is a self-described KwaZulu-Natal, ’90s-born millennial, whose work interrogates issues of identity shaped by her background in the ‘New South Africa’. She uses a racial, cultural and gendered lens to subvert colonialist ideologies and injustices wrought through selective history, and to address the absence of the black female body in the public and private domains. Disruptive and subversive, Excerpts from the Past is remembrance as resistance, and Msezane’s powerfully eloquent love letter to those who have been dispossessed of their history.
Sethembile Msezane sethembile-msezane.com
Season 29 – 30 Jul 2017
Times 5pm Sat, 2pm Sun
Duration 60 mins (with an Artist Q&A post show)
Address Arts House, 521 Queensberry Street, North Melbourne
Tickets $15 – $20
Bookings artshouse.com.au or (03) 9322 3720
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World Premiere
29 – 30 Jul 2017
The construction and archiving of culture is often analysed and documented through words, yet 93% of communication is not verbal. Join Stéphanie Kabanyana Kanyandekwe as she live-transcribes visitors’ conversations into Western music scores and Rwandan hieroglyphs. Kabanyana Kanyandekwe will question, listen, transcribe into and perform from the scores on the walls of her re-constructed lounge room. She invites you to become part of the work as she poses the questions: ‘Ancestry?’ on Saturday and ‘Legacy?’ on Sunday. Sonic Hieroglyphs continues a conversation in the archive Kabanyana Kanyandekwe began in 2007.
This work exposes her construction and archival of identity as a ‘third-culture kid’ through graphic scores, narrative ceremony, and cultural contextualisation via cross-generational conversations.
Stéphanie Kabanyana Kanyandekwe kabanyana.com
Season 29 – 30 Jul 2017
Times 1pm – 7pm Sat – Sun
Duration This is a durational event – you can come and go as you please
Address Arts House, 521 Queensberry Street, North Melbourne
Tickets FREE
Bookings artshouse.com.au or (03) 9322 3720
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World Premiere
19 – 30 Jul 2017
A pop-up destination for researchers, artists and book lovers, The Community Reading Room (CRR) holds space for individuals who identify as First Nations and People of Colour to encounter texts that acknowledge and place their lived experience and practice at the centre, rather than the margin. Fijian-Australian artist and academic Torika Bolatagici has critically curated and lovingly gathered an extensive repository of texts spanning contemporary art and theory from Oceania, Africa and the Americas – postcolonial art, literature and philosophy on migration, citizenship and cultural identity. Part intervention, part education and part inspiration, CRR is a discursive project that invites us to consider the inclusivity of public spaces and to contemplate how our knowledge institutions privilege particular ways of knowing and being.
Drop in, peruse the selection of texts, and join us for D I S P L A C E A N D D I S P L A N T, a closing event hosted by Still Nomads and CRR that sees black artists – First Nations, Afro-diasporic and Pasifika – share words, visuals, sounds and space.
D I S P L A C E A N D D I S P L A N T with Still Nomads 5pm-7pm, Sun 30 Jul
Torika Bolatagici bolatagici.com
Season 19 – 30 Jul 2017
Times 11am – 7pm Wed – Fri, 1pm – 7pm Sat – Sun
Address Arts House, 521 Queensberry Street, North Melbourne
Tickets FREE
Bookings artshouse.com.au or (03) 9322 3720
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30 Jul 2017
How can art, actions and interventions create sites of resistance within colonial and institutionalised arts settings? Hosted by Tania Cañas, an all-female panel will explore the intersecting roles of race, gender and class in the lives of First Nations Women and Women of Colour navigating the arts sector. In particular, discussion will focus on how First Nations Women and Women of Colour can use their arts practice to challenge systemic racism and oppression within the arts, including the whiteness of institutions; strengthening these knowledges to find better ways to work together.
Tania Cañas tania-canas.squarespace.com/home-1
Season 30 Jul 2017
Time 3.30pm
Duration 90 mins
Address Arts House, 521 Queensberry Street, North Melbourne
Tickets $10
Bookings artshouse.com.au or (03) 9322 3720
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Please note: Peril provides these details as a courtesy, but we’re not in charge of the events, so please don’t harrass us if the Facebook page is down for a particular event – unless we make that really really clear, in which case you’ll know because we’ll probably be hounding to you come along.