Art Forum

Heman Chong is an artist whose work is located at the intersection between image, performance, situations and writing. His practice can be read as an imagining, interrogation and sometimes intervention into infrastructure as an everyday medium of politics. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at STPI, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Weserburg Museum, Jameel Arts Center, Swiss Institute New York, Art in General, Artsonje Center, Rockbund Art Museum, South London Gallery, NUS Museum, amongst many others. Chong is the co-director and founder (with Renée Staal) of The Library of Unread Books, a library made up of donated books previously unread by their owners.

Gladys Kalichini is a scholar and contemporary visual artist from Lusaka, Zambia. Her work centres on notions of erasure, memory, and representations and visibilities of women in colonial resistance histories. Focussing on the duality of memory and history, Kalichini’s work considers ideas about mourning, remembering and forgetting in relation to the commemoration of women. Kalichini is currently artist in residence in the department of Drawing and Printmaking at the VCA, University of Melbourne.

At the core of Christensen’s work is a deep commitment to painting, and a consideration of its complex legacy and enduring nature. Constantly re-evaluating the medium and pushing it’s spatial and perceptual limits, she experiments with the physicality of paint and the endless ways it can be applied. Christensen’s paintings chart a perpetual motion through art and life as she negotiates her immediate environment – studio, home, neighbourhood, work and back again, gathering objects and ideas.

Nik Pantazopoulos is an artist and educator based in Naarm, Melbourne whose work explores immigrant homosexual narratives. His work remediates art history and public and private space that is influenced by queer culture and erased by hegemonic politics. Pantazopoulos’ studies include BFA at VCA, Honours at RMIT, MFA at Goldsmiths and PHD at Monash. He is currently a lecturer at RMIT University.

Recent exhibitions and commissions include, Adelaide Biennale of Australian Art, Friendship as a way of life, UNSW and Spring1881 with Kalli Rolfe Contemporary art, Friendship as a way of Life UNSW Galleries, Vic Nets touring Exhibition, Great Movements of Feeling curated by Zara Sigglekow, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne 2018; DISMANTLE, Gertrude Contemporary, Glasshouse, Melbourne, 2017; Like a clap of thunder, Centre of Contemporary Photography, Melbourne 2017, The Nude Show, LON Gallery, Melbourne, 2016; These Economies, Sydney Contemporary, Sydney 2015; Boutique Politics, Bus Projects, Melbourne, 2015; Wearing, Westspace, Melbourne, 2014; The Purple Onion, TCB art inc, Melbourne, 2014; Rebuilding, The Substation, Melbourne, 2014

Tina Stefanou is a Greek-Australian artist, performer, and researcher living on unceded Wurundjeri country in Wattle Glen, Victoria. With a background as a vocalist, she works undisciplined, with and across a diverse range of mediums, practices, approaches and labours. Stefanou has an ongoing relationship with a herd of elderly horses with who she co-creates performative co-inventions. Other projects include working with her grandmother and family to create living memorials as forms of personal and political sustenance. Stefanou is a PhD candidate in Fine Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.

“For as long as I can remember, I have been pulling things apart – attempting to understand them – and then putting them back together (but not always in the same way). My practice is driven by the desire to make sense of the world by unpacking histories and possible narratives that surround specific contested sites and objects. This investigation explores the unstable relationship between culture and nature, evidencing the flows of matter, energy and ideologies that are produced through the tension of these two realms. A disputed tropical mine, a bankrupted island nation, a geological sample of the earliest earth crust, discarded tourist souvenirs and the remnants of a demolished architectural icon have each lent material to this process of dissection and reconfiguration. By rerouting these events, stories and objects, new forms and latent narratives are unearthed. Recent projects have utilised a confluence of film and sculpture as an agent for both formal and metaphorical excavation.”