One-night-only exhibition Next to Nothing explores the limits of performance
Project8 Gallery will this week host a special one-off exhibition exploring the nature of performance and its central role in the generation and presentation of the creative arts.
Next to Nothing, a ‘one evening only’ curated exhibition event, considers the elemental nature of performance through the lenses of three artists working through very different modalities.
Performance sits at the core of creative expression, functioning both as a framework for and a registration of embodied experience. This event frames performance as a creative practice reduced to its barest essentials, shifting the focus from what performance is to how it offers insights into the nature of the artistic process itself.
Featuring artists Archie Barry, Brooke Stamp and Jiayang Zhang and curated by Cūrā8 (Associate Professor Kim Donaldson and Associate Professor Sean Lowry from the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music), Next to Nothing will explore the limits of what it means to perform without elaborate staging, supporting props, or external narrative frameworks. Emphasising the immediacy of presence and gesture, the performance becomes both process and encounter — an ephemeral act that unfolds in real time and space to leave an impression in the minds of those who bear witness.
Cūrā8 said: “This exhibition seeks to explore what is revealed in the seeming absence of anything other than voice and body, and by extension, better understand what kinds of aesthetic, political and ethical dimensions might emerge through reductive forms of performance.
“We both know this space intimately inside and out, and we have certainly never experienced anything remotely like this before in the gallery.”
ABOUT PROJECT8 GALLERY
Project8 is a contemporary art space in Melbourne’s CBD committed to expanding aesthetic languages of speculative poetic and material innovation through curated exhibitions and related events. The gallery also promotes exchange, collaboration and partnerships between Australian, Chinese and international artists, researchers and communities actively engaged in contemporary art and discourse.
Project8 is supported by a Collaborative Research Agreement between Arts@Collins International Gallery Pty Ltd and The University of Melbourne.
EXHIBITION INFORMATION
Next to Nothing
Friday 21 March, 6-8pm
Project8 Gallery
Level 2, 417 Collins Street, Melbourne VIC 3000