Magnetic Topographies & Friends a constellation of collaborations
Therese Keogh, Kenzee Patterson and Clare Britton in collaboration with Biljana Novakovic, Aunty Rhonda Dixon-Grovenor, Astrida Neimanis, and Betchouف (Faid Mazin & Dana Marjan) all contibuted work to Topograhies curated by Vicky Browne.
da3wa
(Screen Print on wall)
Betchouف is a collaboration between Faid Mazin & Dana Marjan.
Working towards representing South West Asian and North African (SWANA) living in diaspora. Betchouف practice experimental types of hosting to create support networks and familiar spaces. Whilst navigating the balance between being on stolen land and seeking ‘refuge’ within so-called Australia.
The River Ends as the Ocean
(Concertina book)
Aunty Rhonda Dixon Grovenor is a Gadigal, Bidjigal and Yuin elder who works in healing ceremony. Aunty Rhonda is a much loved and respected member of her communities who works tirelessly for human rights, social justice, healing mother earth and sea and redressing inequities of power and wealth across society. She is a disability advocate and a leading force in the Climate Justice Rallies. Among so many other things. Aunty Rhonda is a daughter, mother, grandmother, mentor, elder and friend to many. She has a Masters from UTS in Decolonising Methodologies and how to respectfully engage with traditional custodians. Aunty Rhonda is the Cultural Elder within the Life Rites team. She has worked in healing ceremony with many Life Rites families as well at The Dusk Ceremonies
Astrida Neimanis is a cultural theorist working at the intersection of feminism and environmental change. Her research focuses on bodies, water, and weather, and how they can help us reimagine justice, care, responsibility and relation in the time of climate catastrophe. Her most recent book, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology is a call for humans to examine our relationships to oceans, watersheds, and other aquatic life forms from the perspective of our own primarily watery bodies, and our ecological, poetic, and political connections to other bodies of water. Additional research interests include theories and practice of interdisciplinarity, feminist epistemologies, intersectionality, multispecies justice, and everyday militarists. Astrida’s research practice includes collaborations with artists, writers, scientists, makers, educational institutions, and communities, often in the form of experimental public pedagogies. Her writing can be found in numerous academic journals and edited collections, artistic exhibitions and catalogues, and online media. Astrida joins UBCO after six years in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney on Gadigal Land, in Sydney, Australia.
Listen for the Beginning
(8m Textile)
Biljana Novakovic
I construct a world as an artistic installation, as space and time for possible encounter event between viewer and artwork, where transsubjective borderlinking is possible. Charged with the grains of my personal and others’ trauma, different objects and materials that I made, sewed or transformed are involved in a complex relationship of co-inhabiting and co-existing in the same space. I work the space by weaving many strings, visible and invisible, linking with my own known and unknown others, my own and others’ histories, and my own sensitivities to the world. Traditionally handmade work, wool and crocheted pieces, and traditional methods of making are part of my installation, but are not visible in a recognizable way. As a necessary part of my art process they are transformed with deep care and commitment and are invisible elements of the installation that will become the destiny for my artwork, imbued with traces of my own trauma, that of my family, and of others.
MAGNETIC TOPOGRAPHIES is an interdisciplinary working-group organised by Therese Keogh, Clare Britton and Kenzee Patterson that brings together people with diverse areas of interest and from varying fields, with an underlying focus on collective spatial practice.
ARTICLE by Alexandra Crosby
Photos by Garry Trinh and Jessica Maurer.
