Alisa Blakeney

Nuytsia is the provisional title of my ongoing research towards an experimental publication focusing on environmental devastation in Western Australia and Taiwan.

I am undertaking a residency at Taipei Artist Village between July and October, supported by Asialink.

Synthetic Types is a performance conceived by Shen Xin, which took place at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam on 26 May 2019.

The project happened within the framework of Landscape with Bear, an exhibition with the Unintended Collection of De Appel.

In this filmed performance, two actors interacted with the Unintended Collection, speaking directly to the camera in Russian, Japanese and Korean in response to questions of an interlocutor who could not be seen or heard. The performance was carried out in the exhibition space at De Appel and livestreamed to the auditorium of the Stedelijk Museum, where it was transcribed live by three translators. The work explored how identity and access are created or restricted through institutional protocols and ideas of foreignness.

About the artist
Shen Xin (b. 1990, Chengdu, China) lives and works in London and Amsterdam. Her practice engages with film, video installation and performative events. Recent solo presentations include To Satiate, MadeIn Gallery Shanghai (2019); Methods of Inhabiting, K11 Shanghai (2018); Sliced Units, Center for Chinese Contemporary Art, Manchester (2018); half-sung, half-spoken, Serpentine Pavilion, London (2017); and At Home, Surplus Space, Wuhan, China (2016). Recent group shows include New Metallurgists, Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf (2018); Songs for Sabotage, the New Museum Triennial, New York (2018); and The New Normal, UCCA, Beijing (2017). Shen was awarded the BALTIC Artists’ Award in 2017, and she is currently an artist in residence at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam.

Images: Konstantin Guz

ALISA BLAKENEY, ARAM LEE, AUDE MGBA, BRUNO ALVES DE ALMEIDA, COOKIES (ANTONIO BARONE, ALICE GREGOIRE, FEDERICO MARTELLI, CLEMENT PERISSE), DITA BIRKENSTEINA, FANFARE (LOTTE VAN DE HOEF, FREJA KIR), MIGUEL JOHN VERSLUYS, NIKOLAY ALUTIN, SHEN XIN, SOFIA DOURRON, TAMAR SHAFRIR

Landscape with Bear was an exhibition with the Unintended Collection of De Appel
2 May - 1 June 2019

Within the archives of De Appel lies an accumulation of objects -- of artworks, props, leftovers, and unidentified materials -- that have come to be known as its Unintended Collection. Unintended because no-one made the decision to begin assembling them, nor seeks to add to their number, nor governs their categories. Starting from the eccentricity of this collection, Landscape with Bear presents a single continuous landscape that blurs the line between art object and display. Building from the proposition that practices of collecting are part of regimes of knowledge-production, this exhibition asks, what kinds of knowledge can emerge from the fragmentary, the uncertain and the unstable?

This project has been developed through a collaborative process between 13 individuals from fields spanning curating, art history, architecture, design and archaeology.. The Unintended Collection is ambiguous: it has an interpretive flexibility, a material structure and granularity that means that things might be individually removed without collapsing or changing the structure of the whole. For this reason, it is plastic, occupying a space between communities of practice and allowing for cooperation across disciplinary borders. Over the past six months, this group of participants have gathered with and alongside the physical objects of the collection to consider modes of access, and meanings that can be untangled from these relations. From these meetings, participants have developed a series of interwoven narratives that materialise as sound, image, physical architecture and text throughout the space of the exhibition.

Photos: Konstantin Guz

I collaborate with Howard Melnyczuk as Free Wifi.

We explore the intersection between physical and digital art through exhibition projects, publications and online gallery. Some of our projects are listed on the left. 

http://freewifi.fyi

As Exhibitions Curator at Bunbury Regional Art Gallery (2014-2018), I curated a comprehensive survey of artists working in the South West of Western Australia. I conducted studio visits throughout the region, culminating in an exhibition and publication. The exhibition took place 24 February - 13 May 2018 at Bunbury Regional Art Gallery.

Catalogue images by Howard Melnyczuk
Gallery photos by Artperth

Lyndon Blue, Philip Gamblen, Zora Kreuzer, Howard Melnyczuk, Rebecca Orchard, and Elise Reitze
Heathcote Museum and Gallery, Western Australia
17 June – Sun 23 July 2017

The way in which we listen determines what we hear. Noise Museum brings together the work of six contemporary artists to arouse modes of active listening and create a shared aural space within Heathcote Gallery. With listening and hearing central to their practices, these artists move across mediums of video, digital media, installation, text and sound, creating works that range from field recordings, sound visualisations, architectural interventions, through to intimate assemblages exploring the relationship between acts of listening and personal histories.  This exhibition works with the environment, creating an immersive social space and challenging the boundaries between sound, noise, music and art.

Photos by P.S. Cheng

Paradatabase is an ongoing investigation into the structure of digitised museum collections. The way in which we experience collections is guided by the mode and protocols of display. When objects are digitised and stored in databases, a dataset is created which can be understood as an object in itself.

CRUDREAM (Create Read Update Delete Rules Everything Around Me) is an installation presenting a material realisation of three publicly available museum databases, alongside an accompanying audioguide. The installation was displayed at the Laurie Grove Baths, 14-17 July 2017 as part of the Graduate Exhibition, MA Digital Culture, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Photos by Howard Melnyczuk

Does It Matter?
25-26 May 2017
Friendred, Orange, Ursula Pelczar, Gaby Sahhar
Performance by A'Bear

Curated with Compiler (Tanya Boyarkina, Oscar Cass-Darweish, Eleanor Chownsmith)

Does It Matter? is a pulsating slime-scape permeating the boundaries of digital and organic, virtual and physical, and self and non-self.

Bringing together five London-based artists whose work traces the relationship between matter and identity. Their work is intuitive, inquisitive and performative, investigating the way in which our individual realities are created through the mediation of pure form and raw matter.

Through video, interactive installation, sound and slime, this exhibition challenges the idea of digital technology as virtual or immaterial. It reminds us that our relationship to the digital world is also one of materiality: of circuits, wires, and silicon. The inter/trans-materiality that emerges through this relationship creates messy, unstable substances that obstruct, disrupt and interfere with the surfaces of our identity.

The exhibition took place simultaneously online at http://compiler.zone/gallery and in the basement of Out of the Brew, New Cross.

Photos by Oscar Cass-Darweish

6-8 April 2017
Compiler, New Cross, London

Five artists examine the surveillance inherent in the practices of states, corporations, technological spaces and the idioms of digital art. The works in this exhibition move from dystopian and disciplinary aspects of surveillance to the participatory, communal and ludic. 

This exhibition marked the launch of Compiler: a platform for new media art and dialogue, with a focus on creative and critical engagement with digital technologies. Check out the review of this exhibition by Samantha Penn on Furtherfield.

Photos by Howard Melnyczuk

So Long and Thanks For All the Fish

14 May - 13 June 2016
Bunbury Regional Art Galleries

This exhibition invited six contemporary artists with an historical connection to Bunbury to consider ideas around personal, community and civic identity.

Read the catalogue text here.

7 – 29 March 2015
Paper Mountain

A survey of Artist Run Initiatives across Australia curated by the Paper Mountain Co-Directors

Keep Running brought together work from nine artist-run initiatives across Australia to explore the importance of community, collaboration and collective support in national artist-run culture. Featuring work by Boxcopy, FELTspace, Firstdraft, Freerange, Gotham Studios, Kings Artist Run, Moana Project Space, Sticky Institute, West Space & Paper Mountain.

The exhibition was accompanied by a publication and discussion forum at Central Institute of Technology. The project was supported by City of Perth and the Government of Western Australia through the Department of Culture and the Arts.

Photos by Desmond Tan and Emiko Watanabe

1 - 23 February 2014
Paper Mountain

Featuring:

APPLECROSS
Aunty Mabel’s Zine Distro
Benchpress
freerange
Hard Work Club
Kurb
Marcel Studio
maxART
Moana
PSAS
Shiritori Press
The Daphne Collection
Paper Mountain

Run Artist Run was a comprehensive survey exhibition of Perth-based Artist Run Initiatives. Including projects that take the form of galleries, a printing press, a design studio, online platforms, exhibition spaces within houses, and a zine distro, this show functions as a representative map of the spaces, knowledge, approaches, practices and processes currently being generated by Perth artists. Curated by Paper Mountain and presented as a part of FRINGE WORLD Festival Perth 2014.

Photos by Emiko Watanabe