Zoë Bastin
Body Politics Season 2, 2022
About
‘Body Politics Season 2’ was a workshop series that invited artists into the gallery space to experiment and explore the dynamics of performance. Body Politics was facilitated by artist mentors who shared elements of their own practice and research to use gallery spaces in performative ways. Season Two of Body Politics focussed on The Voice and was facilitated by Archie Barry, Jo Lloyd, Steven Rhall, and Lilian Steiner whose practices engage with the cultural and political histories of performance through speaking. Devised and convened by artist and curator, Zoë Bastin, this program aims to respond to the growing interest in performance within the gallery space and to foster emerging performance-based artists.
Bios
Archie Barry
Born and raised along the ocean harbour and coastal regions of the Eora Nation/Sydney in 1990, Archie Barry is an artist whose practice spans performance, video, music production and writing. Their work takes form as autobiographical, somatic and process led, cultivating a genealogy of personas based on personal histories of power and mortality. Moments of intense connection with audiences are created through disquieting bodily gestures, doubled voices, de-formed and re-formed language. Barry’s work has been presented in a range of solo and group settings including The National Gallery of Victoria, The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Heide Museum of Modern Art and Contemporary Art Tasmania amongst other spaces. They have given performance lectures and artist talks at The Centre for Contemporary Photography, The National Gallery of Victoria, Parsons and The New School, Minneapolis College of Art and Design and Monash University Museum of Art.
Jo Lloyd
Jo Lloyd is a Melbourne dance artist working with choreography as a social encounter, revealing behaviour over various durations and contexts. A graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts, Jo has presented work in Japan, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Dance Massive, Liveworks, Mona Foma and the MCA. Recent works include; Archive the archive for the NGA, the award winning OVERTURE, Melbourne Festival 2019, DOUBLE DOUBLE with Deanne Butterworth, Tina Havelock Stevens and Evelyn Morris, CUTOUT at ACCA and Confusion for Three (Arts House and PICA). Jo has worked extensively with Choreographers Shelley Lasica, Sandra Parker and Gideon Obarzanek, and collaborated with artists; David Rosetzky, Stephen Bram, Alicia Frankovich, Nicola Gunn, Speak Percussion and Liza Lim, Ranters Theatre and Back to Back Theatre. In 2016 Jo was Resident Director of Lucy Guerin Inc and in 2018 received an Australia Council Fellowship. Jo is resident artist at The Substation.
Lilian Steiner
Lilian Steiner is a choreographer and dancer/performer whose practice champions the deep intelligence of the body in movement and its unique ability to reveal and comment on the complexities of contemporary humanity. Her interests extend into visual arts and experimental sound practices where the body is the base for questioning and expression.
Lilian’s choreographic work has been presented in Australia, France, Italy, Switzerland, Spain and Hong Kong. She is a long-term performer-collaborator with Lucy Guerin Inc. and has worked on numerous projects with choreographers Phillip Adams, Shelley Lasica, Melanie Lane, Brooke Stamp and Rebecca Jensen amongst others. She frequently collaborates with artists working with sculpture, film and experimental sound performance.
www.liliansteiner.com
Steven Rhall
Steven Rhall is a post-conceptual artist operating from a First Nation, white-passing, queer, cis male positionality, geographically located on neighbouring Woiwurrung and Wathaurung lands. Rhall’s cultural background consists of Taungurung and colonial heritages – a state endemic to living in a colonised society – but goes by Taungurung when asked. His alter-ego Blak Metal is less defined and uses they/them pronouns.
Rhall’s art practice finds expression in ideas of institutional critique, interrogating modes of representation, classification and hierarchy both within and external to the art world(s). He works across various forms and interventions, including installation, performance, process-led methodologies, curatorial projects, sculpture, and art within the public realm. Many of his projects propose, explore and critique the exchange of economic and cultural capital found in the matrix of relations and intersections of First Nation art production, presentation, and encounter
Zoë Bastin
Zoë Bastin (b. 1992) is an artist, curator, sometimes writer and self-described rat-bag. As an artist who makes performances, sculptures, videos, photos and runs a radio show she’s fascinated by the porousness of the body, where it starts and ends and how culture inscribes ideas of gender and sexuality onto our physical form.
Bastin recently completed her PhD at RMIT University, where she was researching gender by transforming patriarchal hierarchies in bodies and objects. Bastin has previously exhibited and performed at Bus Projects, The Substation, Wyndham City Council, SEVENTH Gallery, MADA Gallery at Monash University, Testing Grounds, School of Art Gallery RMIT University, Tinning St Presents, c3 Gallery and BLINDSIDE.
