Jamming with Strangers

Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre's Jamming with Strangers celebrates the local communities of Western Sydney and the role of music in bringing them together.

My Le Thi and Azo Bell’s Gukoongboom, 2021, occupies the expanse of the room it sits within at Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre. One of the first works that audiences encounter stepping into the free exhibition Jamming with Strangers, this work can be taken as emblematic of many of the show’s themes and aims. The work itself can be played; it is a fully-functioning, tuned instrument. It, like the exhibition as a whole, is as much a reflection on and of the ways its many artists engage with music and the cultural practices which cluster around it – dance, photography, video, textile design, costuming – as it is an invitation for audiences to participate in these cultural activities themselves. 

The show is  resplendent with colour, texture, movement – and, of course, with sound. A sequence of video works by Julian Day and Luke Jaaniste are placed at intervals around the gallery space, so that their sounds might be heard meeting each other in different ways as we cross the gallery. The Centre’s intern, Lorena Biasotti, writes that “when outside noise is at a minimum it feels like the building is filled with music,” adding that the works have a connection to the gallery space which reaches far beyond this exhibition: they “were developed through a series of workshops with local residents at Casula Powerhouse between 2012 and 2019.” The videos, filmed in Hospital Hill, show strangers from the community creating music together.

Attending, similarly, to the connections forged between and amongst communities by shared experiences of music and place, is the video work of Justine Youssef (currently also featured in the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia’s Primavera, for audiences in Sydney) and Leila el Rayes. Commissioned by Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre and made with a large team of collaborating videographers, sound and title designers, and participants, the film Say Swear, 2019–2021, is set in the surreal surrounds of the Auburn Botanic Gardens. The work turns over the complex history of the area, including the Darug people’s custodianship of the land, its colonial desecration as a clay mine turned rubbish dump, and its subsequent re-styling as a Japanese-inspired garden. The landscape, here, is also a dreamscape, where historical fantasies and connections to the land meet the music subcultures of the communities who gather in the area today.

Fabric is a surprising, and tenderly-approached, thread of the exhibition. Gillian Kayrooz’s Residual, 2021, is a wisp of profound feeling in the centre of its room. Images of friends gathered to recreate the rituals which surround a big night out at a gig  are printed onto silk organza, suspended from a metal frame. Another work commissioned by Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Kayrooz’s installation is more acutely aware of the loss it contemplates than the simple frame of “nostalgia” would allow. It looks back fondly on its gatherings, but registers in its materiality – soft, transparent, barely there – their shocking contingency, which we have all come to feel over the past two years. Other key textile works in the show include a collection of ballroom costumes, sourced from a number of Western Sydney-based artists, which celebrate the local ballroom scene. Worn at events including West Ball, Sissy Ball, Winter Ball and Bad Bitch Summer Ball, these intricate, extravagant, and joyful garments are pieces of contemporary culture already on their way to becoming invaluable historical items. 

The exhibition, like Gukoongboom, doesn’t just celebrate collaboration through music and art, but invites it as well through a series of public programs. These include an education session on recording music using Bandcamp, a half-day of panel discussions called “Western Sydney Music Futures,” and a dinner event later in February. 

Jamming with Strangers features works by Carla and Lisa Wherby, Blu Jay, David McDiarmid, Fetu Taku and Billy Keohavong, Gillian Kayrooz, Jamaica Moana, Joanne Saad, Joshua Taliani, Julian Day, Kerry Toomey, Kevin Diallo, Ladstreet, Leila el Rayes and Justine Youssef, Māhia aka Kaos, My Le Thi and Azo Bell, Tina Havelock Stevens, Troy-Anthony Baylis and Xander Khoury.

EXHIBITION 
Jamming with Strangers 
4 December 2021 – 27 February 2022
Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, New South Wales