SYDNEY.- Today, BLEED – Biennial Live Event in the Everyday Digital – opens for its second instalment, exploring what lies between the live and the digital (IRL and online) for the next 28 days, through art, conversation, and audience participation from 29 August-25 September.
Following a stellar debut in 2020, BLEED 2022 reaches a new height – presenting their most major program and new creative and collaborative scope – as founding partners Campbelltown Art Centre (Sydney) and Arts House (Melbourne) welcoming new Taiwanese partners, Taipei Performing Art Center and Museum of Contemporary Art (Taipei).
An international contemporary art event presented across four organisations, three cities and the world-wide-web – this extremely innovative, collaborative and forward-thinking format interrogates creative boundaries with a cross-disciplinary and multi-platform approach.
Pairing and blurring the line between live and digital components, BLEED 2022 premieres 8 ‘live’ and 9 ‘digital’ contemporary art commissions, exploring how art can be consumed, experienced, and translated online today – rooted in accessibility, inclusivity, and diversity.
Accessibility includes a mostly free program, information in English and Chinese, captioning, live audio description, tactile tour and recorded audio description, and Auslan interpretation.
Brought to you by some of the most visionary creatives across the Asia Pacific – meshing together performance, video installation, dance and technology – BLEED 2022 artists explore the intersection between humans, technology, media, history and nationhood, and our emotional, physical and digital geographies.
Strengthening our sense of connection and familiarity after many years of turbulence – the commissioned works are an expansive consideration of care through crisis, and the delays, disruptions, lags and glitches that make us more human.
Also launching today is BLEED Echo – bringing together a range of artists, thinkers and activists to interrogate the curatorial framework and commissioned works of BLEED 2022. The program will include a series essays, poems and creatives discussions exploring the broad themes of the program for writing commissions; conversations with BLEED lead creatives on their process and vision for artists talks; and a collection of talks, panels, a keynote, and online party that coalesce the ideas and key curatorial enquiries of the 20202 program – over two days and one night – for BLEED’s first ever collaborative Symposium.
BLEED 2022 commences today, across three cities, four organisations, online and in person from 29 August-25 September.
View the full program via the BLEED website:
bleedonline.net
BLEED 2022 PROGRAM:
Campbelltown Arts Centre (Sydney)
Multi-disciplinary artist Jodie Whalen presents Endless Blue Edge – a new video work which captures the Western Sydney sky and explores the borders of internal and external landscapes, belief and transformation. Connected to the onsite installation, the digital work offers a more personal and intimate experience – reminding us that the sky is omnipresent but always changing, signifying a passing of time and the experience of transformation that we carry both in our bodies and mind. The hyperreal video and accompanying soundscape offer viewers a sit to contemplate their internal landscapes.
Sap 濕 by celebrated musician and interdisciplinary Chun Yin Rainbow Chan 陳雋然 is an audio-visual installation contemplating the intimate ties between love songs, cultural memory, and identity formation. Through a repetition and degradation, Rainbow traverses the borders of meaning in her own family history and in the cultural legacy of Asia’s eternal queen of pop, Teresa Tang. Seemingly trivial pop songs turn into hypnotic soundscapes for the interactive online installation,
Born and raised on Ngunnawal/Ngambri Country, Worimi man and paratactical artist Dean Cross brings together a still image, moving image and an augmented reality (AR) sculpture replicating Australia’s largest bird of prey, the Wedge-tailed Eagle for you can never touch your shadow. The digital work mirrors the onsite version. The AR component of the work can be accessed onsite at Campbelltown Arts Centre, and viewers can witness the digital eagle fly around the building. The AR experience can also be accessed on the BLEED website, allowing the viewer to bring the digital eagle into their own environment and surroundings.
Arts House (Melbourne)
For the four weeks of the Biennial, Patrick Hase and Anuraag Bhatia present room2 and room2 async – a suite of interactive in-person and online performance spaces that encourage contemplation, sharing and conversation. Room2 async’s online-only space is available 24/7 via web browser – cycling every few days through a series of multi-art works constructed of sound compositions, procedurally generated visuals and written prompts – with audiences are free to make use of their time as they wish. room2 is a hybrid in-person and online VR performance space centred on the curation and interplay of artworks across disciplines – seeking to disrupt existing expectations towards face-to-face versus online events.
Enter the Running Machine virtual world by diving into a simulated experience that re-centres the body at the core of our mediated experience and considers the simple act of walking to strenuous physical labour. By Australian and Japanese artists Yuiko Masukawa, Sam Mcgilp, Harrison Hall, Makoto Uemura and Kazuhiko Hiwa – the digital component is a playful and experimental world with a 360-degree video work that can be accessed from either VR headsets, computers or phones. Reflecting both the diversity of its international team of creators and the possibilities opened up by a practice freed from commercial constraints, Running Machine invites you to walk-the-walk.
Kafai e he kitea e koe ni ata ko tona uiga ko tō tino e he ia iloa fakalogo ki ona laloga is a multi-disciplinary in-person work by Studio Kiin – imagining the reality of diaspora in the digital and projecting the future of a digital afterlife that automates and immortalizes our stories, forever reminding us of our own memories, so that we do not have to. Studio Kin’s digital work Au mino ni nanuma – presented as a 90s-style website – includes a desktop series of folders labelled in the Kadavu-Yale dialect and named after a particular memory, person or iTovo vakaviti (Fijian cultural protocol), reflecting the ways digital memory, data and colonization have affected iTaukei traditional forms of memory capacity.
Tapei Performing Art Center
Paeonia Drive is an on-going exploration and collaboration between Sydney-based dancer and choreographer Angela Goh and Taiwanese artist and filmmaker Su Yu Hsin – performing their digital garden, bringing together performance, dance and video installation. Exploring the metaphor of “gardens” as the organisation and control of nature, bodies, and power explored through colonialism, automation, and surveillance. Peonia Drive utilises these historical, infrastructural, and symbolic aspects to explore contemporary techno-cultural anxieties, and as methods of image production.
Transforming and translating a VR work into an online screening setting, Thank You Movie God is a project by Su Wen-Chi exploring the theatricality and cinematic variations between 3D and 2D filmmaking and coding. Screening performance works online is no longer any surprise than what we used to take for granted watching in theatres. As the notion Movie God suggest, mediums of screen, cinema, film, and 360-degree VR imagery have all coded certain protocols and engagements of spectatorship. Through 3 ephemeral screening events, the artist invites you to experience the expanded cinema of “Black Hole Museum + Body Browser” for online settings.
Museum of Contemporary Art (Taipei)
The Pailang Museum of Settler Colonialism, or, The Pailang Museum, is a sinophone media collective led by Wu Chi-Yu, commissioning writing, experimental film and guided tours to narrate a plethora of ways in which settler colonial subjects organise land and, as it were, its species. The word pailang is Chinese-Hokkein pronunciation of “villains” commonly used by Taiwanese Indigenous groups to call their settler counterpart: Chinese-Formosan. Visit two video works of the Pailang Museum of Settler Colonialism (2022–) – IRL or via their interactive website – which explore a denaturalized presentation of the settler gaze and its historicity.
