MONUMENTAL (working title)

A sequence of performance works taking place within and around the Art Gallery of New South Wales, MONUMENTAL (working title) follows desultory paths of enquiry around the museum and its dealings with power, canonicity, embodiment, and history.

If you’d like to know what MONUMENTAL (working title) is about, perhaps Malcolm Whittaker can tell you. In three thirty-minute sessions over the course of this weekend, Whittaker will tour audiences around the Art Gallery’s Grand Courts, discussing MONUMENTAL (working title) and its aims, interventions, and concerns. The structure of this performance itself, entitled Dirty Work, already gives a few signals towards its probable content; we’re being asked to consider the solidity of the museum as an institution, as well as the authority and heft of its strategies of collection and display. It also asks audience to think or feel through the proposition that performance itself might function as material – though perhaps as a material characterised more by flow than fixity – occupying the physical space of the gallery in lively and disruptive ways. As Brian Fuata and Latai Taumoepeau, curators of the series, have it, “Referring to a draft document, the phrase ‘working title’ scaffolds the  word ‘monumental,’ affecting its semantic image as one under construction, a place of process. Such is the politics of our curatorial subject: performance as a material of space.” Fuata and Taumoepeau’s curatorial work on the project draws, especially, from the Oceanic philosophy of space called Vā, into which they invite audiences for the duration of the performances. 

Though the program is lush in its polysemy, threads of thematic and formal continuity do run throughout it. A number of works consider intergenerational relationships, for instance. Annette Tesoriero, Maria White and Halcyon’s Halcyon Days, for one, asks how the time of women and children is valued through a multi-generational exploration of song described as “a monument to play, openness, and courage.” Elsewhere, the brilliant House of Slé presents Opulence 2, in which members traverse the gallery space in silence, “transferring gesture and movement between the performers, diverting and refusing the gaze of those who are witnessing.” This work poses questions about passing-down and pedagogy, as well as attendant ideas of ownership: What dances belong to whom, and how are they taught?

The quietness explored by House of Slé, too, will be emphaised by Julie-Anne Long for The Invisiblists: Val, the Invisible – a slant, knowing piece in which a middle-aged woman inhabits the borderline between performance and the everyday, moving in and out of things we do in quotidian life, which ordinarily go unnoticed. This tender, taut combination of movement and sound is also “teased” out by Demon Derriere, whose Give Me One Reason explores the “art of tease” and Auslan language, in a performance of Tracy Chapman’s “Give me one reason.” 

A number of contributions pair two bodies within the gallery space for a time, exploring and exploding dyadic themes. Lucky Lartey and Angelica Osjui, in collaboration with Shane Rozario and Lucinda Clutterbuck, explore the high-contrast black-and-white visual binary inspired by the painted architecture of the Kassena people of Burkina Faso, while  Sela Vai and Fetu Taku’s Transcending bodies parses the spectrum between masculinity and feminity, asking both how we categorise binaries, and how we remember them from personal experiences. Azzam Mohamed and Jack Prest build upon a history of previous collaborations, exploring the relationship between the auditory and the visual.

Over the two days of its stay in and around the Gallery, MONUMENTAL (working title) will continually push, pull, and call at the concrete certitudes of the institution, of history, and of the canon. “Viscous transfers of energy,” as Fuata and Taumoepeau understand them, the performances redescribe the Gallery as a monument always (and, at the moment, also quite literally) under construction. Performers include: Azzam Mohamed, Jack Press, Rakini Devi, Strings Attached, Malcolm Whittaker, Sela Vai, Fetu Taku, Lucky Lartey, Angelica Osjui, Julie-Anne Long, Ivey Wawn, Niki Verrall, Samia and Adonis, Annette Tesoriero, Maria White, Halcyon, Demon Derriere, House of Slé, Angela Goh, SJ Norman, and Weather Beings.  

EXHIBITION
MONUMENTAL (working title)
9–10 April 2022
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney