Artists
James Brennan
Aliansyah Caniago
Dale Gorfinkle
Raisa Kamila
Willyday Namali
Andreas Siagian
Natasha Tontey
Willoh S. Weiland
This program was made possible by the Australian Government’s Regional Arts Fund, which supports the arts in regional and remote Australia.
Screening Event
5.30pm Friday 13 November 2021
CAT Gallery
Free, bookings essential. Click here to book now.
Contemporary Art Tasmania shares the ingredients that will feed our future exchange programs with artists and organisations in Indonesia.
This one-night-only screening event will showcase collaborations and projects that highlight current alignments and networks of artistic exchange between Tasmania and Indonesia. Screenings will include past and present iterations of work from the Instrument Builders Project, a long-term cultural exchange between Australia and Asia Pacific founded in 2013 by curators Kristi Monfries (Volcanic Winds) and Joel Stern (Liquid Architecture) to be hosted by CAT for Mona Foma 2021, work by Indonesian artists to be included in CAT’s upcoming exhibition Composing Archipelagos curated by Jasmin Stephens, a video work from the 2020 Performance Space Experimental Micro-Fellowship initiative and some extra special collaborations of the future.
Screening List
Nada Laut – As Above So Below, Andreas Siagian (Yogyakarta) and Dale Gorfinkle (Victoria) 2013 and 2020
Gold, Natasha Tontey (Yogyakarta) and Willoh S.Weiland (Tasmania), 2020
Tanah/ Air (Land/ Water), Raisa Kamila (Bandung) and Aliansyah Caniago (Bandung), 2020
Grindcore on the dancefloor, James Brennan (Tasmania), 2020 and The Story of Gender Namali and Axon Breeze, Willyday Namali (Yogyakarta),2020
The Order of Autophagia (work-in-progress), Natasha Tontey (Yogyakarta), 2017-2021
Image credit: Natasha Tontey, The Order of Autophagia (2017-2021) a work-in-progress. Supported by Performance Space Micro-Fellowship 2020 and Kyoto Experiment. Photo directed by Natasha Tontey and photographed by Fajar Riyanto (2020)
Biographies
JAMES BRENNAN is a performing artist, curator and criminal justice activist, working in theatre, film and music. In recent years his work has interrogated ideas of crime and virtue and has been presented in Australia, Finland, Indonesia, Germany, Japan, The United States and Poland. Currently James is producing a series of performance, musical and video works that employ a unique collaboration between artists, ex-offenders, partnering organisations and criminologists. Since graduating from VCA School of Drama in 2000, James has worked, trained and researched with Teatro Vertigem (Brasil); Ridiculusmus (UK); Wooster Group (USA), Deborah Hay (USA) and renowned avant-garde Polish theatre company Gardzienice, where he was company member and instructor between 2010 and 2014. Currently James is co-director of Faux Mo, Mona Foma Festival and a PhD candidate at UTAS School of Theatre.
ALIANSYAH (Alin) CANIAGO works across painting, drawing, video, installation and performance. Collaborating with partner Raisa Kamila, his interventions and site-specific projects often engage with communities and their environmental concerns. Recent exhibitions include: Morning in Gyeongju, Gyeongju Arts Centre, Gyeongju, South Korea (2019); The Tree Without Roots, Taipei Botanical Garden, Taipei, Taiwan (2018); Unsettled, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne (2018); and Lyon Biennale, Lyon, France (2017). Through the establishment of a conceptual museum in his family’s traditional home in Barus, Sumatra, he is currently exploring the historic movement of regional ceramics and their links to China and Vietnam. Working across Bandung, West Java, and Banda Aceh, Northern Sumatra, Caniago regularly participates in regional and international performance workshops. He has an ongoing association with MoT+++ artist-run experimental space in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
DALE GORFINKLE is a musician-artist whose stylefree improvisational approach informs his performances, instrument-building, kinetic sound installations and animations. Dale’s work aims to reflect an awareness of the dynamic nature of culture and the value of listening as a mode of knowing people and places. He is interested in finding fresh ways of presenting and making music, bringing creative communities together and shifting perceived boundaries of scenes and artforms. Dale has presented installations and performances throughout Australia and internationally. Amongst numerous creative collaborations, his current projects include: Prophets, Sounds Like Movement, Snacks, and Music Yared. He is a lead facilitator for Art Day South, an inclusive arts studio with Arts Access Victoria and has recently taught instrument building for artists at RMIT. In 2014 he was awarded an Emerging Artist Creative Fellowship from the Australia Council for the Arts.
RAISA KAMILA is a historian and curator who has a focus on the circulation of people, goods and knowledge between the port cities along the Strait of Malacca in Southeast Asia from the 1920s to the 1940s. Her research at Leiden University in the Netherlands has been at the intersection of family and vernacular histories and wider records from the Dutch and Japanese periods. Kamila has been a recipient of a Mutual Learning Research Fellowship awarded by the Goethe Institute, Jakarta (2015-17) and has participated in Site and Space in Southeast Asia, Penang, Malaysia, funded by the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art History Initiative (2018-present). Working across Bandung, West Java, and Banda Aceh, Northern Sumatra, Kamilla collaborates with partner Aliansyah Caniago supporting community-initiated environmental campaigns. In 2020 Kamila published a collection of short stories, Bagaimana Cara Mengatakan ‘Tidak’? (How To Say ‘No’?) with Buku Mojok Publishing House, Yogyakarta, Java.
WILLYDAY NAMALI is a Malang Indonesian artist who has been producing complex instrumental artworks from a young age. Subverting the classical traditions of Javanese karawitan and gamelan has led Namali into composition producing highly innovative, wild and unpredictable vitamins for the ears. Namali has created a new instrument named ‘Gender Namali’, as a form of love and devotion to the world of Gamelan.
ANDREAS SIAGIAN is an artist/engineer working broadly in DIY electronics and interdisciplinary art. Self taught in programming, producing installations, and developing workshops, he co-initiated initiatives such as breakcore_LABs, urbancult and Lifepatch. In 2014 he was the co-director of Hackterialab 2014 (Yogyakarta), a two week hacklab program of interdisciplinary collaboration. He brought his solo practice of DIY electronics and instrument making to The Instrument Builders Project, 2013 (iCAN, Yogyakarta) & 2015 (National Gallery of Victoria). He collaborated with Wukir Suryadi to create senjatajahanam, two instruments that were performed in the opening of Jogja Biennale 2015 and went on to produce visuals for Senyawa’s performances. In 2018, he was the co-director of Biocamp Tokyo, artistic director of Indonesia Netaudio Festival, co-host of the Hacklab Nusasonic, and facilitator of Arisan Tenggara. In 2019 he co-hosted Musicmaker Hacklab – CTM Festival in Berlin, and curated contemporary audio visual performances in Festival Kebudayaan Yogyakarta.
NATASHA TONTEY is an artist and graphic designer based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. She is interested in exploring the concept of fiction as a method of speculative thinking. This investigation brings forward the fictional account of the history and myth surrounding ‘manufactured fear’ and see how it determined the expectation for the future.
Her works have been shown at Next Wave Festival, Melbourne (2016), Koganecho Bazaar (2015), Instrument Builders Project, Kyoto (2018), Other Futures: Multispecies Experiment (2019), Polyphonic Social (2019) by Liquid Architecture, K4 Gallery of Video and Moving Image, Norway (2019), The Wrong Biennale for Digital Arts (2019), Hubei Museum of Arts in Wuhan (2020). In 2019 she received the Young Artist Award by ArtJog MMXIX, HASH Award 2020 for Net-Based Projects in the Fields of Art, Technology, and Design by ZKM | Karlsruhe, Akademie Schloss-Solitude, Performance Space Micro-Fellowship 2020 and Martin Roth Initiative Virtual Residency for transmediale 2021.
WILLOH S.WEILAND is an artist, writer and curator based in Hobart, Australia.
She works across art forms and is concerned with creating epic impossible ideas and trying to fulfill them, working with non-artists, the possibilities of liveness in emergent technology and destroying the patriarchy. She is currently an Honorary Fellow and Artist in Residence at the Interaction Design Laboratory at the University of Melbourne and a Creative Associate of the Mona Foma Festival. From 2010-2018 she was Artistic Director/ CEO of the artist-led experimental arts organisation Aphids, presenting work nationally and internationally.
Recently commissioned works, Visions (Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide Bienniale of Australian Art, 2020) and Lick Lick Blink (Museum of Contemporary Art, The National, Sydney, 2019) are both collaborations with older women exploring their social visibility.
Her trilogy of works Forever Now, Void Love and Yelling at Stars (2008-2015) explored the relationship between art and infinity by sending artworks into outer space.
She was a recipient of the International Prize for Live Art (2015) for which she created Artefact, a funeral for obsolete technology (Anti Contemporary Art Festival, 2016) and was the recipient of an Australia Council Fellowship for Experimental Practice in 2018.
