31 Oct 2019
7:00 pm — 9:00 pm

VENUE: D8 Theatre, Studio One, UNSW Kensington

The panic is immanent: it is the shape of a seizure bumping into language, leaping into a body, becoming-sound in an ictic dance of hands, feet, head – reterritorializing as memetic contagion, sticky abjection […]  Virginia Barratt

About

Rupture investigates the ways in which the body and the world mimic each other in modes of panic and crisis. Through a performance of vocalities and gestures sited within a multi-channel video and sound installation, this work interprets how symptoms of environmental and human ‘disorder’ can be seen as an appropriate response to personal traumas and global catastrophe.

In our current age of anxiety; global politics, ecological devastation, insecurity and instability pervade our daily lives; we are constantly faced with present and imminent environmental and psychological ‘rupture’. These ruptures reveal a human moment beneath the machinations of catastrophic late capitalism doing its work. By considering this human panic as both urgency and agency, can we begin to develop ways of engaging with, and exiting from, catastrophe?

Supported by Creative Practice Lab, School of the Arts and Media, UNSW

Artist Biography

Virginia Barratt

Virginia Barratt is an Australian researcher, artist, writer and performer. She is writing a PhD at Western Sydney University, which focuses on panic, affect and deterritorialization, explored through performance, experimental poetics and vocalities. Barratt is a founding member of the cyberfeminist collective VNS Matrix. Barratt has performed widely in Australia, as well as globally, including the USA, Canada, France and Berlin. Her writing has been widely published, including in: AXON, Writing from Below, TEXT Journal, Cordite, Overland, Plinth Journal, Artlink Journal and Offshoot: Contemporary Lifewriting Methodologies and Practice in Australasia.

Jessie Boylan

Jessie Boylan is an artist based on Dja Dja Wurrung country in Central Victoria, Australia. Spanning a documentary-based practice, Boylan is interested in collaborative praxes, modes of affect and disruption and uses photography, video and sound to explore environmental, social and psychological disturbances and upheaval. Boylan is member of Lumina, an Australian photography collective, the Atomic Photographers Guild, an international group who aim to render visible all aspects of the nuclear age, and the Nuclear Futures/Alphaville Community Arts Project.

Linda Dement

Linda Dement has worked in arts computing since the late 1980s. Originally a photographer, her digital practice spans the programmed, performative, textual and virtual. Her work deals with issues of disturbance, commingling psycho-sexual corporeality and the digital and electronic, giving form to the difficult territory of the unbearable and conflicted. Dement’s programmed and still image work has been widely exhibited internationally and locally.

Jenna Tuke

Jenna Tuke is an experienced trauma counsellor & psychotherapist who has worked in direct practice, education and management roles in health and legal services. Jenna specializes in working with people living with the aftermath of violence and traumatic loss. She provides education, supervision and debriefing to front line emergency response and health workers, as well as specialises in working with LGBTI individuals and couples. Jenna is recognized for her expertise in relation to legal responses to sexual assault and is currently the Coordinator at the Centre Against Sexual Assault (CASA House) in Melbourne.