This event has now passed.
Make Art After Dark your new mid-week meet up.
Every Wednesday throughout the exhibition from 5–9 pm you can experience the 23rd Biennale of Sydney at Barangaroo late into the night alongside a variety of weekly programs inspired by the works and themes of rīvus.
Stay the whole night and experience everything or choose your own adventure. Gather and walk with friends, participate in performance and watch cutting-edge contemporary films from around the world.
Grab a drink at the bar with P&V Wines or at Galleria Campari and grab a burger at Mary’s in The Cutaway.
Art After Dark – Queer Ecologies
Dates & Times
This event has now passed.
Wednesday, 25 May 2022
5–9 pm
Program
The ‘queering’ of ecologies is more than sexuality and gender, it celebrates a non-binary approach to thinking of nature as a realm of plurality and paradox – an ecology that is many things at once, not dualistic. In essence, it strives to diversify our narratives of the natural world by challenging widely accepted norms including ‘natural and unnatural’ and ‘living and non-living’.
5.30 pm – Gathering (walk) with Radha La Bia
6–6.30 pm – Knowledge Holders (talk) with Gary Bigeni – Shape / Line / Fold
How can the shape, line and fold of fabric queer the way we engage with the narrative and gendered story of that fabric? Shape / Line / Fold is a participatory talking and making exercise that introduces the nuances of Bigeni’s gender-neutral clothing line (Gary Bigeni) through providing glimpses into his design process and overall philosophy of practice. By eroding the boundaries of male / female clothing lines Bigeni embraces a fluidity of self-identification in relation to the urban landscape.
6.45–7.15 pm – Assembly (live performance) with Blake Lawrence – Contact Call
Contact Call combines the gestures of drag performance with improvised ASMR, humming and whistling – offering queer directions for grief-work in the Anthropocene. Contact Call is an abstract lip-sync against a backdrop of looped marginal sound and approximated bird calls – a faggy lament for compounding biological losses amid swirling vortices of extinction.
7–7.45 pm – Wednesdays Up Late at Galleria Campari (live music)
Campari has collaborated with Sydney musician and composer Megan Alice Clune to bring you Wednesdays Up Late at Galleria Campari. Megan has curated a 13 week program of experimental, ambient and new classical music from both emerging and established Sydney/NSW musicians that will be framed with projections by artist, Carla Zimbler. Join us in Galleria Campari and experience the diverse landscape of Sydney and NSW music alongside mesmerising projections.
Performance by Gut Feeling (DJ set) starts at 7.15 pm.
7.45 pm – Projector (film)
Metamorphosis
2020
48 mins
USA
Director: Institute of Queer Ecologies
Metamorphosis is a 3-part proposal by the Institute of Queer Ecology to restructure how the world is imagined and how it operates today. These three stages are modelled after the life cycles of holometabolous insects: bugs who undergo a “complete metamorphosis” where the organism fully restructures itself to adapt to its changing needs and ensure its survival. Queerness, we claim, is a strategy as important as imagination, rooted as it is in a history of establishing alternative worlds of mutual support and care that bloom in the spaces underneath and between this one. A body breaks down and a new one forms from the same material. This change comes from within. Voiced by Mykki Blanco and Danny Orlowski
Venues
Pier 2/3 Walsh Bay Arts Precinct
Gathering (walk)
The Waterhouse at Barangaroo (Level 1)
Knowledge Holders (talk)
Assembly (performance)
Projector (film)
The Cutaway at Barangaroo (Ground Level)
Wednesdays Up Late at Galleria Campari (live music)
Mary’s and P&V
Cost
Free – including all programs and exhibition entry
Wednesdays Up Late at Galleria Campari is free to attend, no bookings required
Access
The Biennale of Sydney strives to make all events accessible. You can advise us of your access requirements when booking online, by email or calling our box office on 02 8484 8702.
Participant Biographies
Gary Bigeni
Gary Bigeni pushes the limits of fashion as individual expression through his custom made-to-order fine art collections. Original designs are hand painted by Gary directly onto ethically sourced eco-cotton, then made in very limited production runs using sustainable manufacturing practices. Intended to last a life-time, all pieces are gender neutral and designed to reflect the distinctive personality of the wearer. Even as a young Maltese boy living in Sydney, Australia with his three siblings and mother, creativity was always present for Gary Bigeni. As a child he would sneak into his mother’s wardrobe and cut large circles out of the bottom of her dresses so he could create collections for his GI Joes and Barbies. Years later, following fashion training at East Sydney Tech, Gary Bigeni launched his eponymous label and secured himself as part of the Australian fashion cohort.
Gut Feeling
Gut Feeling is the project of artists and friends, Eleanor and Susanna. They host a monthly radio show called Gut Feeling on LYL Radio where each episode they expand on a different theme.
Blake Lawrence
Blake Lawrence is an interdisciplinary artist working across writing, drag, photography, video and performance. They are a PhD candidate at the University of Technology Sydney, and have exhibited and presented live works locally and interstate—at Firstdraft, Seventh Gallery, C3 Contemporary, Airspace, Verge, the Art Gallery of NSW and more.
Shahmen Suku
Shahmen Suku(b.1987) is a Singaporean living and working in Australia and arrived in Australia. He is a performance artist based in Sydney who explores ideas of racial, religious and cultural identity, gender roles, the home and the kitchen, food and storytelling. Growing up in a modern matriarchal Indian family in Singapore, Shahmen processes his sense of displacement from home as Radha, the Diva from India. Moving to Australia has given Shahmen multiple perspectives on migration, culture, race, colonisation and gender identity. Shahmen discusses these issues openly through his alter ego, Radha, sharing stories the way she learnt them from his mother’s kitchen.
The Institute of Queer Ecology
The Institute of Queer Ecology (IQECO), is a collaborative, decentralized organism that works to imagine and realize an equitable multispecies future. With programming that ranges from exhibitions, artwork, and publications to direct community actions, IQECO lays the groundwork for a (bio)diverse utopia.