⬤ — Emergent

Urgency, Nicholas

Building

Emergent Urgency (performance text), 2017, live performance with single channel audio at the Nicholas Building

Art and Performance by Research (catalogue excerpt), 2017, Sally Walker Project Space: Emergent Urgency 2017, three channel video loop with single channel audio, 6”28’

A copy of the video can be seen here.

The Capital, 2022, Room 313 - Joseph Beuys Cafe, Nicholas Building: Emergent Urgency 2022, single channel video loop, 10’56”

Emergent Urgency (EU) was a site specific performance installation at the Nicholas Building as part of the first Night at the Nicholas (2017), an annual open studio event organised by the Nicholas Building Association. It was subsequently remade as a 3-channel video installation for exhibition at the Sally Walker Project Space in Geelong. For The Capital a section of the video was cut and looped for installation at the Joseph Beuys Cafe.

Drawing on Banaji’s theory as a critical frame, I created two outputs in the first year of the PhD that sought to investigate how art and political action are imbricated in a time of creeping authoritarianism. The resulting works Emergent Urgency (2017) and Different Bodies (2017), combined performance installation, lecture, action, audience perspective, video, sound, food, and forum, to form alternative pedagogical situations. I chose to work these elements together as modes in my arsenal to create a profound impact on audiences.

Emergent Urgency presented a radical unpacking of the notion of independent subject formation and called on the audience to get in-between my performed (gender) identities and co-construct a new persona via removing an aspect of my body (hair). Whilst these performance lectures did not make it into the final cut of The Capital due to their different subject matter, they are experiments and trial examples of alternative pedagogies. From live spoken word to pre-recorded text and computer-generated readings, these texts attempted to open spaces for radical ideas to arise in unexpected places. This technique was also experienced by examiners in The Struggle Against Identity (2022) where the voice of a critical border studies scholar is heard delivering a polemic on forgery as a necessary survival strategy against border politics. It was also used beyond the in the impressionistic mud facade in Wall and Pen (2022), where I and the examiner sat and listened to a stream of consciousness text, Resonant Fields (2022), on the conditions required for creativity, and the struggle for poetics as important in opening the space for a politics that opens further spaces of creativity.