“Resistance Through Rituals”
Carla Cescon, Cuckoo, NUCA, Tony Schwensen and The Twilight Girls
25 June → 10 July 2004

West Space Inc and CLUBSproject Inc

Resistance through rituals is an exhibition, publication and events project developed for the West Space Projects Program that opens itself to multiple lines of research, inquiry and potentiality to locate current working means and methods of constructive criticality. It matches the crucial but weighty notion of ‘resistance’ with a more open-plan sense of ritual, here conceived as the multiple, elaborate, tangible and/or subtle cycles of communication and interaction in which artists and cultural producers are frequently moving. Aligning local and regional practitioners working individually, collaboratively and collectively, an idea of contemporary politicised practice will be articulated via the plural scope and agency of rigorous artist-determined making, media and initiatives. Configuring the political from multiple platforms and perspectives – personal, emotional, organisational – here artists can be seen generating their working contexts to enact a complex and heterogenous productivity.

The project seeks to engage the certain organisational informality feasible within artist-generated contexts as a lever to broader consideration of local strains of independent cultural practice and the potent alternate accounts and methodologies they might posit in counter-strategy to professional/ institutional/sociopolitical frameworks. The elaboration of ‘rituals’ might be openly interpreted as the multiple, elaborate, tangible &/or subtle cycles of communication and interaction in which artists are frequently moving. In this way the collaborative platform of multipleMISCELLANEOUSalliances developed by and sited at CLUBSproject inc. presents a direct occasion for expanded interaction around aspects of localised artist-initiated contexts and activity. Ideally, this might draw a line of potentiality between West Space and CLUBS that activates notions of artists criticality and contribution to their working environments and communities through diverse and generative practice.

‘Resistance through rituals’ also conceives of a strong role for the companion project publication, supported by the Gordon Darling Foundation, where written texts by the coordinator and participating artists will consider the local significance and scope of artists research and self-organised exhibition practice. Here the working methods of the involved artists and groups will be aligned and brought into dialogue through image reproductions of artworks, project documentation and related visual material.

Lisa Kelly is a Sydney based artist who imagines making, writing & project coordination as active tangents within an expanded dimension of artistic practice. She has exhibited in Sydney and interstate, published essays & reviews in various journals & artist publications, and was co-founder & director of Sydney artist-run gallery Blaugrau.

Carla Cescon. Living and working in Sydney. Recent projects/exhibitions include Liverpool1925-1950, Liverpool Regional Museum; Re-Group, Scott Donovan Gallery, Sydney; Shangri-la Artspace, Sydney; Afterlife, Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney; Lifeforce, Michael Lett Gallery, Auckland. Represented by Scott Donovan Gallery Sydney.

Cuckoo is a non-financial itinerant artist-run project based in Auckland that puts on shows in other people’s galleries. The organising committee is Gwynneth Porter, Ani O'Neill, Daniel Malone, Judy Darragh and Jon Bywater. The Cuckoo website is at www.cuckoo.org.nz.

Organized by Bianca Hester, with CLUBSproject members Terri Bird, Helen Walter and Spiros Panigirakis, multipleMISCELLANEOUSalliances (mMa) is a propositional and concrete context for the gathering together of practices which explore, engage, and produce multiple social relations. mMa seeks to be an unwieldy, plastic framework for the facilitation of proliferating connections between people, events and information. Incorporating discussions, workshops, games, archives, web-projects, constructions, diagrams, publications, socializing and resource sharing, mMa will emerge at CLUBSproject as an intensive event; a sort of ‘non-structural structure’, shifting and transfiguring in-between the forces of potential connections and encounters.

NUCA is a brand new nation-wide artists network connecting those who gravitate towards ephemeral projects, participatory experiences, illegal art actions and activities that oddify everyday life. Some of our artists make unwieldy installation projects, while others alter billboards, project images in abandoned spaces at night, or exchange ideas rather than objects.

NUCA’s inaugural project was supported by Next Wave 2004 and a NAVA Marketing grant. See more at www.uncollectables.net

Tony Schwensen is a Sydney based artist. Recent projects include Portable Table Dancing Shooting Gallery, Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces 2003 and Lag, Artspace 2004. He is currently working towards a PhD in Visual Arts at Sydney College of the Arts. Tony Schwensen gratefully acknowledges the support of the Visual Arts/Craft Board of the Australia Council.

The Twilight Girls are Jane Polkinghorne and Helen Hyatt-Johnston. Since 1997 the intentions of their collaborations have been located in humor and disgust as they attempt to thrust themselves into popular culture. Some exhibitions include The Twilight Girls in the Hollywood Hills 2002 Raid Projects, Los Angeles, Pretty Flamingo 2002 Locust Projects, Miami and Bad Kung Fu II 1999 Gallery 4A. multipleMISCELLANEOUSalliances (Venue: CLUBSproject inc.)

Intensifying the potential for, proliferating dialogues multipleMISCELLANEOUSalliances is a companion-project alongside, and in response to Resistance through rituals co-ordinated by Lisa Kelly which will occur at West Space Inc in June 2004.

multipleMISCELLANEOUSalliances (mMa) will emerge in June at CLUBSproject inc. as an ‘event-space’ for multiple encounters which will transfigure CLUBS into an informal meeting room/reading room/eating room, for critical negotiations, constructive dialogues, playful activity and resource sharing. mMa will open a physical and discursive space in response to the event at West Space. It will function simultaneously as a collaboration with resistance through rituals project; as well as catalysing a ‘third space’ between the organizational structures of West Space and CLUBSproject inc.

In relation to CLUBSproject inc, mMa is in effect a sub-strain; seeking to intensify aspects of CLUBSproject’s existing organizational concerns and critical interests already embedded in its approach to production and distribution. mMa manifests CLUBSproject’s intentionally paradoxical motto: ‘dedicated to the perpetually provisional’ as a context stimulated by multiple situations and proliferating connections. It is an experiment in the facilitation of potential connections and encounters. As an event, mMa will be an unwieldy, de-centered, collection of multiple groups of people, things and interests. And it is here that its interest in -and engagement with- the political lies, in the shifting ‘nodal’ space of an embodied micro-politics, constituted in-between the forces of encounter.

Conceived for the West Space Projects Program, Resistance through Rituals is an exhibition and publication project coordinated by Lisa Kelly (Sydney). The title Resistance through Rituals refers to art practices that embrace appositional, critical, agitative and self-organising approaches to cultural production. More specifically it refers to art practice as a kind of ritual that has the potential to challenge and resist the normalizing effects of dominant cultural values. It emanates from an interest in the various failings within the current Australian socio-political arena (eg active obstruction of genuine Aboriginal reconciliation, inhumane refugee policy, pro-war aggression in invasion of Iraq, absence of support for cultural initiatives that question or challenge dominant hegemonic structures).

The project framework is based on imagining and visualising pro-active counter-strategies. These visualisations will be manifested through cultural/political critique and the plurality of voices of the artists involved in the project. These voices are evident in the artist’s self-generated networks, experimental/cross media practices and their organizations/collectives. This project will function as an important meeting ground for the individuals and organizations involved to share their politics with each other and audiences not normally available through existing opportunities.

Of equal importance will be the use of humor, wit and informality as instrumental in giving audiences easy points of access to often difficult and contentious issues. In this way, healthy Australian irreverence and scepticisim towards authoratitive structures based on colloquial and vernacular references will give the art social context. This will apply to the presentation of the project and the methods used by the participating artists.

Participating artists/artist initiatives: Carla Cescon, Lisa Kelly, Tony Schwensen, The Twilight Girls (Jane Polkinghorne & Helen Hyatt-Johnson), unCollectable Artists (Lucas Ihlein et al), Cuckoo (NZ artist collective) and CLUBSproject Inc (Melbourne artist-run initiative).

The Resistance through Rituals project will also comprise a collaborative investigation into aspects of artist-initiated contexts and activity through direct relationship with and input from the Melbourne based artist project CLUBS Inc. Facilitated by Bianca Hester and the CLUBS committee, this project tangent will look to explore common practice and concerns between Sydney & Melbourne via media such as self-publishing and artist forums. It will draw explicitly on a mutual desire to activate artists criticality and responsibility for their professional context and communities.

West Space gratefully acknowledges the support of the Gordon Darling Foundation for the Resistance through Rituals publication.