Liveworks 2019: Culture Disruptors
Liveworks has always highlighted artists who disrupt our existing cultural frameworks and myths. This year, an array of Culture Disruptors take this work a step further by challenging the stories we tell ourselves about who we are, presenting alternative visions of cultural identity. These artists question the foundations of what we believe, and dare us to imagine something different.
Daddy by Joel Bray is the latest work from one of the most exciting new figures in Australian dance, comparing an insatiable craving for father figures with an imperial hunger for Aboriginal Australia. Esteemed independent choreographer Vicki Van Hout tackles the complexities of Indigenous art-making and what it means to negotiate culture across disciplines, with gleeful humour and sharp observation in her work plenty serious TALK TALK.
John Vea is a New Zealand-born artist of Tongan descent, who explores the visibility and invisibility of Pacific communities in Australia and New Zealand: imported workers (a hidden practice that mirrors colonialism) and other ways in which Pacific populations underpin so much of the economic success of Australia and New Zealand, yet sit at the margins of our everyday experience and cultural narrative. If I pick your fruit, will you put mine back? is a specially-curated exhibition and performance that brings Vea’s work to Australia for the first time.
Elsewhere, new works by Choy Ka Fai and Samara Hersch employ technology in ingenious new ways to tackle the ghosts of the past in Unbearable Darkness, as well as invoke the voices of the future in Body of Knowledge.
As always, Performance Space is humbled to provide a platform for some of the most brave, bold and visionary artists from across the Asia Pacific - stay tuned for more on our 2019 artists from this exciting region.
