Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art presents provocative, ambitious and unpredictable new work across digital realms. Over five days, Performance Space invites us to gather and experience art that affirms our capacity for renewal, wonder and transformation with a series of digital installations, parties, workshops and conversations.
Wed 20 Oct – Sun 24 Oct
Presented by Resident Company Performance Space and Carriageworks.
In this conversation and screening event, Cherine Fahd will share an exclusive preview of her new video installation Ecdysis and discuss its themes, origin and process with project curators Daniel Mudie Cunningham (Carriageworks) and Jeff Khan (Performance Space).
20 Oct, 6:30pm
This inspiring series of audio broadcasts asks you to take a walk through the city whilst listening to conversations between Field Theory and a series of young people from the LGBTIQA+ community of Sydney. A different conversation will be broadcast each afternoon, inviting listeners to walk with these young people as they playfully persuade, conflate and scramble their intimate perceptions of what it means to be young, queer and vulnerable.
20-23 Oct, 5pm
Curated by SJ Norman (Koori, Wiradjuri descent) and Joseph M. Pierce (citizen of the Cherokee Nation), this series of digital gatherings and events unpacks notions of S/kin through the knowledge and expertise of First Nations artists and cultural workers from across the world. S/kin is the second celestial season of Knowledge of Wounds, evolving over the course of an entire solar year.
21 Oct, 10am
Dr. TallBear speaks with Bundjalung journalist Daniel Browning on her work on critical non-monogamy. TallBear situates her critique of the assumed, settler-imposed norms of dyadic coupledom and marriage within the Indigenous ethics of Right Relationship. In her work, TallBear traces a compelling line between the strategic imposition of colonial familial structures and sexual mores and the seizure and partitioning of land.
21 Oct, 10am
Hear directly from Queenie, the undignified dignitary making a special guest appearance at Liveworks. Don’t miss this opportunity to meet one of Julie-Anne Long’s Invisiblists up close, sharing this very special address as part of her larger unentitled project.
21 Oct, 6pm
Meet The Invisiblists: women of a certain age whose invisibility in the eyes of society-at-large is both a curse and a superpower. Over the course of Liveworks, The Invisiblists will infiltrate the Festival in a series of intriguing performance vignettes. Creating subtle magic, awkward moments and fleeting encounters, they invite us to question the way we think about ourselves and the people around us.
23 Oct, 9.30am and 10.30am
What is it about the beginning that remains intoxicating? Our persistent lust for the first rush of a romance, scene, canon, theory, relationship, meal or country. Created by extraordinary dance artist Amrita Hepi, Rinse explores the romance of beginnings and what happens next, when those initial thrills begin to fade and inertia takes over.
22 Oct, 7pm
In this iteration of In Perpetuity Ivey Wawn presents a video work featuring three dancers, using dressage choreography to highlight the pressures of a life subjected to wage labour. Working people are, like the dressage horse, cut off from their spontaneity in order to fulfil the demanding rhythms of a labour process.
23 Oct, 6:30pm
This year, while so many of our queer spaces, dancefloors and meeting places remain closed, Day For Night will beam directly into your house for an extraordinary night of queer performance, club music, loungeroom dancing and sacred revelry. Day For Night will bring the party to you, with some of the most beloved queer performers, artists, DJs and troublemakers reconnecting us, as we voyage together through the night.
23 Oct, 8:30pm
Sue Healey's On View: Panoramic Suite was created over 8 years across 3 countries: a sweeping panoramic vision of dance across cultures, landscapes and individuals. This specially-crafted digital event augments the ways we see and experience dance and includes precise, meditative portraits of 27 dancers aged 28-106, from Australia, Hong Kong and Japan.
24 Oct, 8pm
What does it mean to be on (or be) an island? Works that interrogate counter-currents of isolation, paradise, protectionism and sovereignty amidst shifting weather patterns and uncertain futures. Live Dreams is a new platform for artists to share works-in-progress and ideas in development in a dynamic and responsive environment. Performance Space expands this program inviting four Guest Curators to theme each stream with powerful provocations.
23 Oct, 6pm
This conversation brings together key voices working across performance, politics and cultural restitution to consider the transformative potential of Indigenous knowledge systems and the activation of the collective through gathering. How might the renewal and reinstatement of Indigenous knowledge generate ancestral-futurist kinships and possibilities beyond the carceral, the fascist and the hateful?
20 Oct, 2pm
As the inevitability of global warming becomes impossible to ignore and human-caused extinctions become widespread, how might the body-centred practices of the deep ecology movement, activist interventions and the work of contemporary artists inform where we go from here? How can we reinstate different relationships between humans and the network of animals, organisms, weather and environment that we are inextricably connected to?
21 Oct, 2pm
In an age of skin hunger and physical distancing, how can art reimagine what constitutes intimacy and connection? If our touch is predominantly mediated through sensors, screens and surfaces, what does this mean for the future of radical intimacies? Artists, sex workers and queer communities are pioneering innovative responses to the global pandemic, including sharing sex-positive public health messaging, mobilising funds for mutual aid and creating COVID-safe experiences of intimacy.
22 Oct, 2pm
Auckland-based artist Rosanna Raymond draws from the warps and wefts of more than 30 years of experience in the creative arts. Fearlessly fusing artistic disciplines and finding new methods for the strengthening and evolution of Pacific cultures, Raymond’s work draws strongly from her Samoan heritage and imagines new possibilities for artistic practice.
23 Oct, 2:30pm
Bequest technologies—such as keeping places—and other forms of direct action, offer a range of options by and for First Nations peoples to support critically important opportunities for cultural continuity. The increasingly escalated destruction of natural environments, within which First Nations cultural knowledge is embedded, requires us to urgently re-think how these knowledges are retained if access to Country is denied.
24 Oct, 2pm