All School Crit Club (ACT)

All School Crit Club (ACT)

Wed
19
Wed 19 Apr 6:00 PM

Ralph Wilson Theatre, Gorman Arts Centre
General Admission
120 Mins
April
Wed 19 Apr

Co-curated by Next Wave and You Are Here  
Wed 19 Aprill 6-8pm AEDT 
In-person at Ralph Wilson Theatre, Gorman Arts Centre
Want to join online?
Register → https://bit.ly/3m2kKLy 
Free – bookings essential
 
All School is back in 2023 and we’re kicking off this year’s program with a special event happening simultaneously online and across territories.

This year’s All School program kicks off with a special event: Crit Club, co-curated by Next Wave and You Are Here. Happily coinciding with Cahoots Lab 2023, Crit Club is being hosted in Canberra by Ainslie + Gorman Arts Centres, at the Ralph Wilson Theatre.  Join us, and co-curators You Are Here as we peel back the layers of artistic practice, diving deep into experimental methodologies of collaboration for All School Crit Club*. 
 
*Crit Club is an invitational and informal opportunity to meet with peers and artists. 
 
Artists Derrick Duan x Lachlan Thompson (VIC), Tom Campbell (ACT), ZHI x Joanne Leong (ACT) and Mohamed Chamas (VIC) will be sharing practice across live and digital spaces, from their home states and beamed online and to our IRL audiences in Melbourne and Canberra. Join us as four works are presented, followed by facilitated conversations that consider what it means to embrace hybridity, working locally, by distance, and digitally.  
 
Both in-person events will close with a mini Radical Hospitality, offering a site to converge, share food and make new connections. Can’t make it in person? Join us online.  
 
When is it? 
Wed 19 April, 6-8pm in person at Brunswick Mechanics (VIC) and Ainslie and Gorman Arts Centre (ACT), tune in online at allschool.nextwave.org.au.

Artist Bios:
Derrick Duan is a hybird visual artist preoccupied with body, text, tech and spatial magik/rituals, working and living on unceded Wurundjeri land. Duan’s practice thrives in cross-disciplinary collaborations that allow an open-endedness & the freedom to experiment, initiating dialogues about identity, decolonisation, the anxiety of modern living, and their experience within the PoC queer community. Born in China, 1998, Duan has spent their formative years drifting between continents. They bring this open, fluid and mosaic-like way of life to each project, and turn a documentary eye to their ever-shifting surrounds, using image, text and video as a mimetic device to preserve intangible moods and stories.

Mohamed Chamas is an artist, independent game developer and poet based in Naarm (melbourne). Mohamed’s work holds magickal, spiritual and mystic practices in both friction and synergy to emerging technological phenomena. This unseemly tension reconstitutes the borders of heresy and divine convolution, led by the 'dijital djinni' ; a speculative research tool. The entanglements that emerge are framed by religious and occult studies, language, ludology, gamification, and the military-entertainment complex. Mohamed’s illusory workings emerge as image, sound, writing, utterance, interaction, virtual reality (VR), artgames, installation, performance, and often as hybrid forms that dance across these mediums. Mohamed’s location-based VR altars are made for the healing of orientalised (and otherwise marked) bodies. Namely,’سايبر تصوف (cyber tasawwuf)’ (2018), which received two Freeplay Independent Game Festival nominations in 2019. Mohamed has exhibited at Siteworks, Testing Grounds, Seventh Gallery, Trocadero Arts Space, Incinerator Gallery and MARS Gallery. Mohamed's literary work has appeared in Co-, The Lifted Brow, Liminal Magazine, Cordite Poetry Review and Running Dog.

Tom Campbell is an artist and writer who works in fundraising in Kamberri/Canberra. His work often attempts to articulate the gap between disclosure and resistance, muscles and memories through various forms of the spoken and written voice. In doing so, Tom considers a lineage stretching towards scotland and sabah borneo, where both sets of ancestors were involved in various forms of conflict mediation. Tom is a current studio resident at ANCA, has most recently exhibited with Tuggeranong Arts Centre, and has been selected for residencies and development programs including You Are Here’s Cahoots program in 2021, and the 2022/23 KINGS ARI Emerging Writers Program. Depending on which anecdote you choose to pursue, Tom has or hasn’t inherited the supernatural strength required to pull the palm tree up and out of the ground.

ZHI is an experimental poet/artist based on unceded Ngunnawal, Ngunawal, Ngambri country. They are the author of the award-winning collection of poetry, blur by the; and is one half of the experimental poetry/sound duo known as 莎瑜 (ShaYu). He loves lo-fi stuff, emotional maximilism and not being perceived.

Joanne Leong is an Asian-Australian artist born in Hong Kong, based in Canberra. A recurring theme of their practice is translation and belonging between cultures and time. Their works often explore how language and identity mediate relationships. Using video, sound, programming and installation , they engage with the technological/cultural frameworks.

All School is a new platform by Next Wave exploring new artist-led learning experiences; hosting a mix of content including talks, livestreams, videos & downloadable resources. 
 
This iteration of Crit Club is co-curated by You Are Here with generous support from Ainslie + Gorman Art Centres. All School is supported by the Australia Council for the Arts.