This panel discussion explores ideas of safety, movement, surveillance, physical distancing, visibility and invisibility within Melbourne’s public spaces.

Think Tank Moderator Nur Shkembi, artist, curator and PhD candidate, University of Melbourne, and Curatorial Advisory Group member for Who’s Afraid of Public Space?, is joined by esteemed local cultural contributors including Idil Ali, writer, performer, youth practitioner and community organiser; Antony Hamilton, Artistic Director, Chunky Move; Nicole Kalms, Associate Professor in Department of Design and founding director of Monash University XYX Lab; and Steven Rhall, artist, curator and PhD candidate at Monash University.

This Think Tank is fourth in the series presented by ACCA and produced as part of 'Who’s Afraid of Public Space?'

MTalks—Who’s Afraid of Public Space? Think Tank #4: Movement of People & Safety in Public

Listen to artist Mithu Sen in conversation with Max Delany, ACCA’s Artistic Director & CEO, alongside special guests Irina Aristarkhova, Professor at the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design and Digital Studies Institute of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Deepanjana Klein, Director of Acquisitions and Development, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA). 

They discuss Sen’s major solo exhibition 'mOTHERTONGUE', which surveys the past two decades of her compelling art practice, including a series of major new installations.

This conversation was recorded at ACCA on Monday 24 April, 6–7pm and is presented with the support of Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi (KNMA).

Read more about the free event here: acca.melbourne/program/mithu-sen-in-conversation

Image: Mithu Sen, Museum of unbelongings 2016. Courtesy the artist

Mithu Sen in conversation

Listen to writer and curator Laura Raicovich discuss the artworks and methodologies that inform Mithu Sen’s exhibition 'mOTHERTONGUE' in relation to Raicovich’s own practice which calls for institutional change to improve cultural spaces.

This conversation was recorded at ACCA on Tuesday 16 May, 6–7pm and is presented with the support of Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi (KNMA).

Read more about the free event here: acca.melbourne/program/laura-raicovich-undoing-and-redoing/

Image: Opening event, 'Mithu Sen: mOTHERTONGUE' 2023, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. Photograph: Casey Horsfield

Laura Raicovich: Undoing and Redoing

Through a series of media and artworks, Mimi Ọnụọha’s performance lecture explores absence, knowledge, and how what is missing is still there.

Mimi Ọnụọha Performance Lecture

Roe v. Wade is overturned while gene editing is opening entirely new reproductive futures. What does kin mean as reproductive technologies shift our relationships? How much control should we have over a birthing person’s body, and over a life before it begins?.

‘The Surrogate project began with a desire to serve as a surrogate. During the pregnancy, the parents would have an app I made that provides 24/7 access to all my biodata, and an interface to control me. So in essence, they could have complete control over my body in which their baby is growing.

The past few years of the pandemic have reshaped our bodily boundaries. We’ve swabbed and spit in tubes and traded ownership of our bodily substances in an attempt to feel safe. But these fluids hold the data of our DNA, our personal information, and our identity.

I’m fascinated by the ways we’re taught to interact with data, and how this shapes the way we interact with each other. Central to my work is a critique of the simultaneous technological and social systems we’re building around ourselves. What are the rules? What happens when we introduce glitches?’

Lauren Lee McCarthy In Conversation With Jenny Kennedy

Listen to the performance lecture 'Expositio, Iudicium, Lacrimae, or, Does an AI God Have an Ass?' by exhibiting artist Zach Blas exploring the idea of religious-un/conscious thriving in today’s tech industry. Charting his encounters with various artificial intelligence gods, Blas tells of a computational world of divine judgment and devout submission, where artificial intelligence exists alongside mystical glyphs, occult sigils, captured bodies, and corporate transcendence. Through a consideration of religious sermons, offerings of worship, and spiritual iconography, an AI religiosity is traced, in which flesh becomes biometric and emotional crying transmutes into a symbolic language of holy quantification.

Acca Podcast - 3. Zach Blas Performance Lecture

Listen to performance lectures 'Loops, Echoes, Phonophanies, and other Détournments' by Suvani Suri and 'Listening to Misrecognition' by Thao Phan, as well as an Artist Talk with Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne on their new digital commission 'Offset'.

Suvani Suri with Aasma Tulika, Uzma Falak, Shareeka Helaluddin, Mehak Sawhney

What is the sound of racialisation? How might we listen to misrecognition? What does machine error tell us about the precision of racism? And how can the tools of a racist system be used to transcribe new forms of resistance?

This experimental presentation is a collaboration between feminist technoscience researcher Thao Phan and Machine Listening, an ongoing investigation and experiment in collective learning, instigated by artist Sean Dockray, legal scholar James Parker, and researcher, curator and artist Joel Stern. Part lecture and part performance, this event brings together critical work on race and algorithmic culture with new techniques for dissecting and analysing automatic speech recognition, applied to personal and public archives drawn from Thao’s life and research. It features a discussion and demonstration of the Word Processor tool, developed in 2021 by the Machine Listening team and Reduct, a US-based tech company co-founded by the artist Robert Ochschorn.

Thao Phan Performance lecture: Listening to Misrecognition

Listen to exhibition artists Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne for a talk about their new digital commission 'Offset' on the ACCA Digital Wing.

Tega Brain & Sam Lavigne Launch of 'Offset'

Conversations and events from Melbourne's flagship contemporary art space

MTalks—Who’s Afraid of Public Space? Think Tank #4: Movement of People & Safety in Public

ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art)

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