View From a Body

View From a Body

Hayley Millar Baker, The Umbra (still), 2023.

View From a Body
Screening and conversation

Admission starts at $5

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Date
September 26, 2024, 7pm
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172 Classon Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11205
USA

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.

Category
Film, Indigenous Issues & Indigeneity, Bodies, Feminism, Colonialism & Imperialism
Subject
Video Art, Oceania, Queer Art & Theory, Affect

Melbourne-based artist Cate Consandine works across a wide range of formal and discursive media including sculpture and spatial practice, film, and performance. She works with the body as material for her practice and is particularly interested in the physical expression of emotional and psychological states, centering 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. 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. Consandine has exhibited locally and internationally including: Buxton Contemporary (Melbourne), Galeri Soemardja (Bandung, Indonesia), Museum of Contemporary Art (Taipei), POSCO Art Gallery (Seoul), Sydney Theatre Warf (Sydney), Institute of Contemporary Arts – ICA (London), the Melbourne Art Fair (Melbourne), 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), and Gertrude Contemporary (Melbourne).

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.

Hayley Millar Baker (b. 1990) is a distinguished lens-based artist living in Melbourne, Australia. Her identity is deeply rooted in her Aboriginality, belonging to Gunditjmara, Djabwurrung, and Nira-Bulok Taungurung peoples through her maternal lineage, with Anglo-Indian and Portuguese-Brazilian ancestry on her paternal side. Hayley’s work visualizes multifaceted Indigenous feminine narratives, offering poignant reflections on being, identity, spirituality, and the psyche, all rooted in her personal experiences and heritage. Focusing on the psychological landscapes of Indigenous women, she portrays their emotional and mental depth while exploring perspectives that honour their indomitable spirit and innate spirituality. Through her conceptual and abstract vision, she employs oblique storytelling to challenge conventions and push boundaries in photography, collage, film, and video.

Raised in Macclesfield, North of England in the 1970s Claire Lambe acknowledges the complexity of leaving, a probing flirtation between transformation, hostility, and tenderness. Trained as a traditional sculptor and returning from Sydney in the late 1980s, Lambe obtained her MFA from Goldsmiths, London in 1995, moving to Melbourne in 2003. Lambe was awarded the Australia Council, ACME International Residency, London (2018) and the Edwards Trust award, ISCP, New York (2015/2016). Exhibitions include Melbourne Now, NGV Melbourne (2013 and 2023): The Body Electric, NGA, Canberra, curated by Shaune Lakin and Anne O’hehir (2020); From Will to Form, Tarrawarra Biennale, curated by Emily Cormack (2018); and Mother Holding Something Horrific, ACCA, Melbourne, curated by Annika Kristensen and Max Delany (2017).

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 humor is woven throughout Kosloff’s work, whether 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 works as a lecturer at RMIT University in Melbourne/Naarm.

Leyla Stevens is an Australian-Balinese artist who works within a lens-based practice. Her work has made a significant contribution to expanded documentary genres in Australian video art, as well as exploring the reparative potential of artmaking framed within political and social justice issues. In 2021 Leyla was awarded the prestigious 66th Blake Art Prize for her film Kidung, which engages with Bali’s silenced histories of political violence. Her immersive video installations have been exhibited widely through major national and international institutions, including: Museum of Contemporary Art, TarraWarra Museum, UQ Art Museum, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Artspace, West Space, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Guangdong Times Museum and Seoul Museum of Art. Her latest film project will be presented as a solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in late 2024.

Tina Stefanou is a visual artist, performer-vocalist, researcher, and filmmaker from Naarm/Melbourne, Australia, raised in a working-class Greek migrant family. Her multidisciplinary practice, shaped by experiences in rural Western Australia and international cities, spans cinema, voice, performance, and ethnographic research. She explores social class, species boundaries, and the impact of neoliberalism on relational practices. Stefanou’s work engages with public spaces, museums, and site-specific contexts, blending experimental voice with visual arts to provoke, soothe, and convey sonorities beyond words. She has received the Schenberg Fellowship (2020), Marten Bequest Scholarship (2021), and the 68th Blake Prize (2024). Her work has been exhibited in many contexts including the National Gallery of Victoria, Salt Museum (Istanbul), and the Adelaide Biennale of Australia Art. Currently, she is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, VCA, University of Melbourne.

James Barth is a Meanjin/Brisbane-based artist whose practice is grounded in self-portraiture and transgender self-representation. Barth’s multidisciplinary practice draws on and complicates portraiture’s history, exploring digital identities, placeholders, and embodiment through various applications of painting, screen printing, CGI imagery, and video. Barth is the recipient of the Copyright Agency Partnerships (CAP) commission with the Institute of Modern Art (IMA), and she will be presenting the newly commissioned works in an exhibition, The Clumped Spirit, at IMA in late 2024. Barth’s solo exhibitions include Earthbound (2023) and The Placeholder, Milani Gallery, Brisbane/Meanjin (2021). Her group exhibitions include Inner Sanctum, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia (2023), Embodied Knowledge: Contemporary Queensland Art, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane/Meanjin (2021), and New Woman, Museum of Brisbane, Brisbane/Meanjin (2019). Her work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra; Monash University Museum of Art, Naarm/Melbourne; and Griffith University Art Museum, Meanjin/Brisbane.

Ezz Monem (born Mohamed Ezzeldin M. Abdelmonem, 1985) is a photo-based artist from Egypt who lives and works in Melbourne, Australia. He uses photography to explore the pluralism of reality, playing with sensations of ambivalence and conflict, and giving visual form to the multiplicity of identity in places, people, and objects. Monem sources images from found photographs, fiction films, videos, and the internet, utilizing the mechanical reproduction capabilities of the camera along with various darkroom techniques to transform them into photographic works and alternate archives. Through the repurposing of images, Monem makes autoethnographic works drawing on his background growing up in Egypt and his experience migrating to Australia. Monem graduated from the Faculty of Engineering, Cairo University and worked as a software engineer, but his explorations in visual arts began years earlier. His work has been shown in exhibitions in Egypt, Australia, and various other countries in Europe and the Middle East where he has received numerous awards. Monem recently completed a Master of Contemporary Art at the VCA, University of Melbourne.

Stephen Garrett’s art sits at the intersection of queer and colonizing legacies and the physical paradigms of sexual power and gender. A practice such as this represents more than a reinterpretation of historic narratives; it serves as a testament to the transformative power that art possesses—by cultivating empathy and fostering a shared emotional journey that transcends temporal and spatial boundaries. Garrett finds profound inspiration in unravelling the intricate narratives of historical sites. His aim is to challenge conventional accounts through art and evoke a profound emotional resonance; delving into the raw human experience—allowing viewers deep connection with stories of the past. By reshaping and reimagining historical narratives, Garrett ignites a collective dialogue that highlights a distorted world view by making apparent alternate possibilities of being. Garrett is a critically awarded, reviewed, and acclaimed artist who has exhibited his art projects in Australia, Vietnam, China, Japan, USA, Italy, France, Ireland, and the United Kingdom.

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