Performance Space celebrates 40 years

Performance Space, one of Australia’s leading platforms for experimental art and new approaches to creativity, has revealed how it will celebrate its 40^th birthday. The annual festival Liveworks will this year be a celebratory program, exhibiting new art and works from Performance Space alumni. Titled OF THE TIME, it will include performance, installation works, dance, video works and music.

Rosie Dennis and Daniel Mudie Cunningham, both Guest Co-Artistic Directors and former exhibitors, will be curating this year’s edition. “Performance Space is a living, breathing organism of performativity, having birthed and nurtured generations of experimental creativity since its inception” say the pair, “as PSpace turns 40 this year, we reactivate the time machine to consider a history of radical artists, practices and thinking”.

“Liveworks 2023 unpacks the archive to consider the impact of time on art, actions, ideas and the bodies that carry and move culture forward. By looking to the future through the lens of the recent past, our anniversary program, OF THE TIME, surveys the communities, collectives, shapeshifters and storytellers who form the beating heart of PSpace, through a curated mix of work, old and new”, they continue.

Events will include a new performance by Rainbow Chan 陳雋然, with the work The Bridal Lament combining new songs with ancient Weitou ritual, as well as Mickey by dance-artist Brooke Stamp, wherein the dancer brings the rehearsal studio into the performance space to the tune of music created by Daniel Jenatsch. Installation work by Elvis Richardson will be on display, as well as video work by Denis Beaubois, Peter Callas, Stephen Cummins, Adrienne Doig, John Gillies & Sydney Front, Derek Kreckler, Tracey Moffatt, Romaine Moreton & Jacqui North, Randelli, Eugenia Raskopoulos, r e a, Tony Schwensen, Salote Tawale, Monika Tichacek & Emma Price, and Ronnie van Hout. Artists Latai Taumoepeau and Rosanna Raymond will be performing in a two-day ceremony K’AINGA CommonWealth, while a suite of works see Antistatic return as Antistatic Redux, curated by Rosie Dennis and Martin Del Amo. Visitors can also see a live re-voicing of the duration performance Night 1001 by Barbara Campbell will be performed throughout the festival.

Also not to be missed is Nighttime Righttime, a series of archival seminars exploring the practice of artists such as The Fondue Set, Post, Julie-Anne Long, Kaz Therese, Tei Kim Pok, Wart and Tina Havelock Stevens. New conversations will also be held as part of LIVE FUTURES.

Liveworks will celebrate its opening night Thursday 19 October, and will run until Sunday 29 October. For a full list of participants and to book your tickets, visit Performance Space’s website here.