Magkasama screenings (2022)

2022, Magkasama screening 01: Perfumed Nightmare by Kidlat Tahimik.

Magkasama is a series of monthly community gatherings to share in Filipino film, literature, and poetry facilitated by Saluhan Collective. In February and April 2022, we held a three-part film screening series highlighting the works of Filipino filmmaker and National Artist, Kidlat Tahimik at Siteworks in Brunswick/Naarm.

Films:

• Perfumed Nightmare (Mababangong Bangungot) (1977)

• Who invented the yo-yo? Who invented the moon buggy? (Sinong Lumikha ng Yoyo? Sinong Lumikha ng Moon Buggy?) (1982)

• Why is yellow the middle of the rainbow? (Bakit dilaw ang gitna ng bahag-hari?) (1994)

Presented with the support of the City of Melbourne, Moreland City Council, and Siteworks. With special thanks and gratitude to Kidlat de Guia and the Tahimik family for their support of the project.

Photos by Anatol Pitt.

Dialekto workshops

Dialekto is an award-winning multidisciplinary project of free workshops and events in visual arts, sound, music, and storytelling at Siteworks and Footscray Community Arts, led by artists from Saluhan Collective between February - April 2022.

Workshops:

• Un-holy Balikbayan with Kenneth Suico & Bea Rubio-Gabriel

• Tracks Club with Kuya Neil

• Kusina Konversation with Rio Withall & Catherine Ortega-Sandow

• Sari-Sari Giftshop with Aida Azin & MJ Flamiano

This project is supported by the Carstairs Prize, funded by a private donor and administered by the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA).

With additional thanks to City of Melbourne, Footscray Community Arts, and Siteworks.

Design by Rio Withall. Photo by Lucy Foster.

Video by MJ Flamiano and soundtrack by Kuya Neil.

Market Mural

2021, Market Mural, public art installation by Rafaella McDonald.

Market Mural transforms the exterior wall of Everage Street, Moonee Ponds into a multi-layered artwork. Rafaella’s work explores the history of the site as a former marketplace, now transformed into Mason Square, a residential and commercial public precinct in the heart of Moonee Ponds. The mural includes text which reads, “is the old marketplace receding or appearing?” inviting the viewer to contemplate the echoes and sensory impressions of the old market and imagine how the remnants of this place move with us through time. Working with the visual language of abstraction, a form of non-representative art-making, Rafaella encourages the viewer to interpret the shapes and gestures present through their own thoughts and experiences.

Commemorating past and present notions of place, Market Mural illustrates the role that public art can play in celebrating our local neighbourhoods and communities. Rafaella McDonald has a painting and sculptural practice, working across gallery settings and public spaces. Her practice is concerned with the gestural and playful elements of materials, documenting interactions between materials, bodies and the structures that hold them. This work has been commissioned by Moonee Valley City Council through the support of Caydon Property Developers.

Photo and video by Shuttermain.

Low Brows, High Hopes

2021, Low Brows, High Hopes, Midsumma workshops with Queer in Kingston and Connect youth groups.

Artist, Willow Franklin, and poet, Zoe Kingsley, in collaboration with Queer in Kingston and Connect present an online zine and outdoor projection for Midsumma Festival 2021. Willow and Zoe have collaborated with the young people of Queer in Kingston and Connect, two social support service groups for LGBTQIA+ young people living in Kingston to produce this new visual art and creative writing project. Over a series of workshops, the artists and young people have come together to explore the idea of ‘lowbrow art’, inspired by key social and pop-culture movements in visual arts and literature.

Video by Ella Sowinska.

Queer in Kingston

2020, Queer in Kingston, QiK in collaboration with Yandell Walton and Willow Franklin, Kingston Arts Centre Galleries.

A collaborative exhibition project commissioned by Kingston Arts for Midsumma Festival by established projection artist, Yandell Walton and emerging digital media artist, Willow Franklin, with Queer in Kingston.

This immersive multimedia exhibition explores queer identity from the perspectives of Queer in Kingston, a social support group for LGBTQIA+ young people living in the City of Kingston.

Six Moments in Kingston

2019, Six Moments in Kingston, A Public Art Bus Tour, featuring artists Tal Fitzpatrick, Steven Rhall, Laresa Kosloff, Shane McGrath, Spiros Panigirakis, and Field Theory. Curated by David Cross and Cameron Bishop, commissioned by Kingston Arts.

Six contemporary artists working across performance, music, craft, installation and video were commissioned to create public works that responded to six local stories:

• the election of Moorabbin’s first female councillor in 1976

• the disappearance of aviator Fred Valentich who flew out from Moorabbin airport in 1978

• a celebration of globally successful Parkdale-raised rocker Rick Springfield, who received a Grammy for his song Jessie's Girl

• VFL player Phil Carman’s notorious head-butting incident at Moorabbin Oval, which resulted in a 20-week suspension

• The story of The Grange, a homestead built on the Nepean Highway in the late 1800s, controversially demolished in 1983 and replaced with the Moorabbin Police Station

• The protest movements that mobilised Moorabbin, including the tent protest against homelessness by two teenage girls, protests for fair wages and anti-nuclear armament marches.

Through workshops, site visits and historical talks, community members worked with artists to develop and deliver a creative response to each story. The works were presented via a public art bus tour across two weekends in May; featuring voice-over stories told by legendary Australian actor Michael Caton, the tour took passengers on a 2-hour experience that stopped at six locations where each historical moment originally occurred.

Insurge

2019, Insurge, New Wayfinders, Kingston Arts Centre Galleries.

Insurge, presented by New Wayfinders artist collective and curated by Isabella Whāwhai Waru at Kingston Arts Centre Galleries. Insurge features new work by visual, sound, and performance artists of Oceanic descent, commissioned by Kingston Arts for Melbourne Fringe Festival.

In the United Nation’s International Year of Indigenous Languages, Insurge ignites the voices, and documents the languages, stories and talanoa//korero//conversations of Birraranga’s diasporic Pasifika peoples.

We call in the mana of our peoples, our voices and our storytelling for a process of cultural resurgence, revitalising the power of our ancestral tongues; the vast and complex languages of the Pacific.

Artists: Grace Vanilau, Isabella Whāwhai Waru, Ella Rowe, Jacynta Fuamatu, Peter Lemalu, Yasbelle Kerkow. Collective artists led by Fallon Te Paa & Elaine Toma

Photos by Art Documentation Melbourne.

Fertile Ground

2018, Fertile Ground, group show, Kingston Arts Centre Galleries.

Fertile Ground is a group exhibition across G1 + G2 curated by the six resident artists of Kingston Arts Centre. Featuring recent works by artists, Christina Darras, Rebecca Marshall, Robert Scholten, Te’ Claire, Narelle White & Paula Whiting during their time in the Artist and Ceramics Studios in Moorabbin. Envisaging the site of the studio as common ground, which supports and nourishes each individual artist, the exhibition seeks to celebrate the shared strengths and diversity across their creative practices. Exhibited works include hand-built and wheel-thrown ceramics, drawings, paintings, printmaking and sculpture.

Photos by Art Documentation Melbourne.

Go Have A Look

2018, Go Have A Look, Art Day South, Kingston Arts Centre Galleries.

Go Have A Look is a collaborative artwork by inclusive and experimental arts studio Art Day South. Using sound and video recording, green screen, cardboard sets, paint, music, fashion, and performance, the artists have constructed a world that changes and evolves before your eyes. Go Have A Look will continue its transformation throughout the exhibition whereby the artists will build, recycle, reconfigure and activate the artwork into different forms and experiences. 

Artists: Katina Anapaikos, Melissa Atwell, Robert Brown, Greg Colley, Deanna Dixon, John Eslick, Lorraine Hayes, Debra Lissek, Vinh Nguyen, Shelley Preston, Karim Sarakbi, Kristy Sweeney, Edward Treloar and Paula Whiting.

Arts Access Victoria facilitation and production team:

Dale Gorfinkel (Lead Facilitator), Sebastian Fowler, Annalies Visser, Carol Smith, Ollie Hiscox & Geoff Robinson (Program Coordinator).  

Photo by Shuttermain Photography and video by Jacqui Shelton.

Crafty Queers

2018, Crafty Queers, Anna Dunnill and Nicholas Smith, Kingston Arts Centre Galleries.

Crafty Queers is Kingston’s inaugural visual arts residency and exhibition program celebrating craft and queer culture through the work of contemporary artists, Anna Dunnill and Nicholas Smith.

Working on-site from the new Ceramic Studio in Moorabbin, Anna will produce a series of ceramic objects and small textile works that continue her research into craft, queer community and acts of devotion. Nicholas will develop a new body of work that uses objects constructed from clay, along with hand-sewn garments to respond to popular gay iconography.

Photos by Art Documentation Melbourne.

The Sub-committee

2018, The Sub-committee, Arie Rain Glorie, Bridget Balodis, and Jake Preval, Kingston Arts Centre Galleries.

Presented by Kingston Arts, The Sub-committee has made it their duty to unearth the ‘gaybourhood’ within Moorabbin for Midsumma Festival 2018.

Transforming the galleries into a temporary office over summer, The Sub-committee will map the queer subtext of the local culture; leaving their door open to anyone who may have ideas about how queerness can be defined, located and referenced. It is the Sub-committee's mission to help find better ways for people to understand the complexities of queer visibility through art.

Photo by Shuttermain Photography.

Tarnuk Biik: Earth Bowls

2017, Tarnuk Biik – Earth Bowls, Baluk Arts, Kingston Arts Centre Galleries.

Tarnuk Biik – Earth Bowls an exhibition of over 30 hand-built ceramic works by more than 15 Indigenous artists associated with Baluk Arts for NAIDOC17: Our Languages Matter.

Tarnuk Biik translates into Boonwurrung as Coolamon Earth. Tarnuks or coolamons are based on Indigenous carrying bowls traditionally carved of wood. The Indigenous artists in the Baluk Arts program have experimented with ceramics as a new material for building coolamons; visiting Clayworks in Dandenong to learn about the origins of the clay used to build a greater sense of place and connection to culture.

Photos by Shuttermain Photography.

Superhero

2017, Superhero, Vipoo Srivilasa and ClayLAB, Kingston Arts Centre Galleries.

In collaboration with Vipoo Srivilasa for Melbourne Fringe, this exhibition brought together 12 adult participants, each designing a fictitious and totemic character unique to their individual self. 

Each character’s story and design was developed through consultation with the participants to unpack the potential of ‘superheroes’ to provide support and comfort to the lives of adults. The project equipped participants with practical skills in clay-building through a rare mentorship opportunity with a professional artist.

Participants: Amanda Mitchell, Aurora Crombie, Daniela Zimmermann, Eva Lubulwa, Georgia Banks, Jenni Flew, Karen Hannon, Lauren Joffe, Luke Cunningham, Sai-Wai Foo and Zelal Basodan. 

Photos by Shuttermain Photography.

Contents

2017, Contents, group exhibition, Kingston Arts Centre Galleries.

Contents considers the enduring ‘reign of the image’ in everyday cultural production, examining its social and aesthetic relationship to contemporary abstraction through painting, textiles, video, sculpture & performance.

Artists: Tia Ansell, Tim Bučković, Caspar Connolly, Katrina Dobbs, Amalia Gray Lindo, Georgie North, and Tace Kelly.

Performance of Between Hysteria And Narcissism, I Am Me, Through Screen I Am, Hysteria And Narcissism by Caspar Connolly in collaboration with Anna Fiedler and performed by Tace Kelly.

Photos by Shuttermain Photography.