View From a Body

Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Thursday, September 26 at 7pm for View from a Body, a program exploring provocations that surround moving-image culture and notions of embodied affect via the works of ten Australian contemporary artists: Cate Consandine, Archie Barry, Hayley Millar Baker, Claire Lambe, Laresa Kosloff, Leyla Stevens, Tina Stefanou, James Barth, Ezz Monem, and Stephen Garrett. Navigating the imaginings of First Nations, diasporic, queer, and female artists, the screening presents affective embodied and disembodied perspectives, creating the space to reflect on how our bodies affect the way we see and understand moving images, and how artists use this through their work. Guest-curated by Cate Consandine, the screening will be followed by a discussion between Consandine and participating artists Tina Stefanou and Claire Lambe.

The screening is organized in collaboration with Buxton Contemporary as an extension of The View from a Body, a symposium convened on the occasion of the exhibition The Same Crowd Gathers Twice held at Buxton Contemporary, University of Melbourne, Australia and curated by Annika Aitkin. The View from a Body symposium was supported by Art + Australia and the Dr Harold Schenberg Bequest.

Films

Cate Consandine, RINGER #1 (2024, 7 minutes)
Exploring the physical expression of psychological and emotional states, RINGER is a filmic work that re-imagines the world of roller derby as a tensile site of violence between female players. Centering on the relationship between bodies and their contingent registers, the work presents a hauntingly embodied choreography of moving image, action sequencing, and sound. Meditating upon the dimensions of the female gaze, RINGER explores the alertness of its acute sense, psyche, and immersive power.

Archie Barry, Scaffolding (Preface) (2021, 11 minutes)
Through distilling powerful vocal expressions with friends in times of loss, grief, and madness, Scaffolding (Preface) is an audiovisual flight from surveillance and individualism. Narrated by a 3D-animated coronal cross-section of the artist’s head, an out-of-body view traverses scattered scenes of microscopic lifeforms, the CGI topography of the inner plane of the artist’s face, dilapidated buildings, and the interior of construction sites at night. Finding a locus for human exchange beyond the ubiquitous optics of facial recognition and proposing a future generation of people who sing instead of speak, the artwork evokes an extant embodied infrastructure for processing grief.

Hayley Millar Baker, Nyctinasty (2021, 7 minutes)
Nyctinasty translates these vital movements of self-preservation and survival to echo the delicate balance between the physical and spiritual realms. This “in-between” dimension—where spirits linger and the mind and body tether life, death, and the afterlife together—reveals a continuous link of communication. Through Nyctinasty, the convergence of ritual and narrative transforms everyday acts into sacred rites, connecting us with our ancestral past and evoking a contemplative space where the spiritual and temporal coexist in the ethereal. Solitude becomes a gateway to deeper connections with guiding, guarding, and haunting spirits.

Hayley Millar Baker, The Umbra (2023, 6 minutes)
The Umbra casts an ethereal light on the witching hour, the paranormal time when the veil between the physical and spiritual realms is thinnest and supernatural activity is heightened. It follows the astral journey of a young woman and a fledgling spirit, both taking bodily form as they converge in the enigmatic “in-between”—a realm that mirrors, yet is distinct from, our tangible world. As consciousness and form transition into this state, The Umbra intertwines the living and the ethereal into a shared space. It examines non-linear time, space, and the intricately entwined temporal slippages within the “everywhere and everywhen” theoretical constructs alongside Aboriginal cultural “magic” practices. This interdisciplinary approach defies conventional genre boundaries, offering a nuanced contemplation of existence.

Claire Lambe, Sudden Bursts of Nasty Laughter (2022-2023, 7 minutes)
A subject finds it challenging to separate their body from the objects occupying space before them. Recalling the physicality of a sculpture conjures more than just an image; it evokes a sensory experience that goes beyond mere visual memory—never a static image, but an encounter with something tangible. The subject senses the surrounding space, the time of day, the political climate of that decade, and the sound of someone laughing; all of it is woven into that recollection. Even the weight of sunglasses on a nose becomes palpable. Thinking of sculpture is inseparable from thinking of a body. 

Laresa Kosloff, The Bleaching (2024, 7 minutes)
The Bleaching is a short film made entirely from commercial stock footage purchased online. The artist has used this footage to tell the tale of an environmental problem outsourced to artificial intelligence (AI). Far from identifying a scientific solution, the AI offers a comprehensive analysis of hegemonic systems, including white supremacy, the military-industrial complex, and the billionaire class. The film is narrated by the satirical comedian and actor Andrew Hansen, and First Nations actress and director Rachael Maza of the Yidinji and Meriam people.

Leyla Stevens, Patiwangi, the death of fragrance (2021, 8 minutes)
Patiwangi, the death of fragrance expands upon Leyla Steven’s ongoing interest in recuperating histories made marginal within dominant representations. The focus was upon female artists within Balinese art collections in Australian museums and how women are often made absent in these records. The intention was to construct a two-channel film that creates a speculative archive, connecting disparate disciplines, spaces, and temporalities as a way to rethink whose lineages are being told within the space of the museum collection and who gets to do the telling. On one screen we watch objects housed in Australian museum collections being cared for by anonymous conservators, and against this we watch dancing diasporic bodies who dance in response to sustained images of dancers’ muses in Bali’s late colonial period.

Tina Stefanou, Back-Breeding (2023, 11 minutes)
Back-Breeding is a poignant exploration of vocality and community performance rituals set against the backdrop of agribusiness landscapes in rural Western Australia. The piece features local participants, including children and women, who engage with a new industrial animal—a one-eyed woolly tractor—across sunburnt crops. They spend days tending to the creature and singing to it, while other members of the community observe this strange and unfamiliar scene unfold. The contrast of surreal and innocent exploration with the harsh economic exploitation of the land, worker, and animal offers a new commentary on human and non-human resilience in the face of precarious conditions.

James Barth, Stone Milker (2024, 5 minutes)
In Stone Milker, Barth revisits a digital avatar of herself that has been used in various works throughout the past eight years. Barth’s avatar performs a motion captured dance—developed in collaboration with choreographer Lisa Wilson, performed by Soleil Harvey, and scored by Isha Ram Das–within an uncanny and imagined post-corporate office building. For Barth, dancing offers a space to explore movement and control, mimicry and mimesis, as they relate to the creation and destruction of the self. Barth developed the avatar’s dance routine with movement consultancy from choreographer Lisa Wilson, citing 1960s minimalist dance as well as emblematic dances of female “robots” in cinema and art: whether Brigette Helm’s uncanny dance as Maria in Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927) or the unnerving animatronic performance in Female Figure (Jordan Wolfson, 2017). Barth observes, “I’m interested in the dissonance that occurs when various forms or bodies imitate one another, whether humans playing robots, robots as humans, or CGI as humans, but also what robots dancing to and [what they] might look like.” To achieve this, Barth used a motion-capture suit to record the performance of Soleil Harvey before folding it into the complex idiosyncrasies of their digital worlds.

Ezz Monem, And He Said: This Is Power? Prodigal Son (2024, 2 minute)
And He Said: This Is Power? Prodigal Son is a two-channel film inspired by the 1978 Egyptian movie Return of the Prodigal Son. The work deconstructs a significant scene where a man returns home after a twelve-year disappearance, confronting deep disillusionment and familial expectations. Through repetitive, silent performances, the film reimagines a conversation between father and son about the failed revolution and the decision to leave the country. This work is part of a greater project that explores the complex dynamics of authority, control, and emotional expression.

Stephen Garret, The Poverty Gully Project (2012, 2:45 minutes)
Originally commissioned by the Melbourne International Arts Festival (2012), this work became the first of three works created over three years of the artist confronting his vulnerability of being alone in the Australian landscape. Each work is the artist metaphorically unravelling in front of us. The three works transition with the artist as he “comes out” as gay and remakes himself and his life through: an abandoned Mineshaft, the Desert, and a Mountain. The Poverty Gully Project reflects the disorientation the artist was experiencing in his life at the time. While on residency in New York, the original idea for the work was an attempt to destabilise historical forms of male heroic sculpture such as Rodin’s Monument to Balzac (a bronze copy was always on display where Stephen grew up). The obvious relationship here is the historic inseparability of the sculpture and the body, memory and time. But for Garrett his desire was to disconnect from that allusion by using his body as the sculpture. For him, there was a sense of queering happening to his memory of Rodin’s Balzac (more than the play on words of “ball-sack”).

For more information, contact program [​at​] e-flux.com.

Accessibility
– Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
– For elevator access, please RSVP to program@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.          
– e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the Screening Room and this bathroom.