Imagining Futures with Performance Space
Artists have always been in the business of imagining futures.
Over the month of June we've brought you 5 experimental artists—all close PSpace collaborators—and their electrifying visions of the future. As the last few days of June come to an end, we thought we'd recap these rich and varied perspectives on the futures which artists are manifesting with their work.
Your support enables us to continue to foster these and many more artists by collaborating with, commissioning, developing and presenting their expansive visions. PSpace brings this new work to life: work that inspires a better future for us all.
Donate to Performance Space before the end of the financial year, and help create new art and future possibilities.
- Victoria Hunt, artist
"As contemporary Indigenous artists we assert our position to reclaim, restore and reinstate the power of Indigenous creativity within the politics of Rematriation.
We are seekers of transformative justice, inserting our bodies into frameworks of power, for future ancestors. It’s a pilgrimage towards the ancestral, and a protest about the things that stand in the way."
- Betty Grumble, artist
"The first show I toured was called Sex Clown Saves The World. It is a genre smash of styles born out of my experience as a performer and a woman. I start in a bin in a pile of garbage and finish lip -syncing (with my OTHER mouth) 'Don't Leave Me This Way' with a globe of the world on my head. Love & Anger started with another Yoni love song ('Lovin' You' by Minnie Ripperton) and ended with me turning myself into a tree/vase. I have turned myself into a Pussy Printing machine in The Unshame Machine and am currently wielding Enemies of Grooviness Eat Shit, a work that honours Grief, Pleasure and asks what Justice looks like. A Grumble future is a simultaneous love letter and war mask.
I can see that I have made work expressing my grief and hope for moving beyond the entitlement that the corporate cannibals and supremacist patriarchy have to the Earth body and to our bodies. My work in performance has always wanted to provide a space for dreaming and dealing with 'the trouble' through colliding joy and rage together. I pay respect to feminist and eco-feminist queer makers who have kept this lineage alive. Art that acts as a re-fueling station, that helps you breathe, that lights a fire under your ass, that reminds you that you do have power, that we can absolutely show up and listen and feel and mobilise. An alternative future is one that listens to First Nations knowledge, to our ecosystems - that is radically tender to the body and pursues pleasure. Grumble wants a future where we worship our aliveness and create culture together."
- pvi collective
"We want to make the future more hopepunk[1] – radical positive resistance is the lens we need to be leaning into. It’s a worldview that argues that the fight to build equitable, progressive, sustainable social systems is a fight worth having. It’s a future that champions kindness, embraces creativity, respects difference and prioritises First Nations voices at the heart of it all. Hopepunk is a call to arms for us to imagine better, in order to do better. That’s our challenge and we are willing it to life through our work.
We see a radical shift in the function of art in society, one that elevates the contribution of artists and seeks to reposition their role within a wider social context. We see governments recognising the possibilities of these alternative perspectives in the workplace and eagerly funding an expansive program of unlimited 3-year-long fellowships. These fellowships embed artists into non-art environments in a triple role of lateral thinker, creative consultant and artwork maker. In all government and commerce environments; from your local Coles supermarket, to your Bendigo Bank and your favourite tavern, there is an artist busy working there.
Art is everywhere and accessible.
[1] hopepunk is a literary term from social sci-fi created with the intention to counter the dominant popularity of dystopian fiction. it stands for positive resistance and hanging onto our humanity at all costs."
- Joel Bray, artist
"In my vision of the future, everyone knows their local Aboriginal language and Traditional Owners hand out the planning permits. In this future, we live lighter on the land because Aboriginal knowledge leaders have changed the way we farm. The wallabies and quolls and river fish have all returned. This is the future I and my fellow Blackfella artists are dreaming and manifesting."
- Angela Goh, artist
"As always, the future will reveal the blind spots of the present. In the future we will have new ways to look back, which will give us new ways to look forward. Of course the future doesn't wait, it is arriving and passing us all the time, we're already in it so we can already start looking back and forward, from now.Time is a tool of perspective, with which we can forge, create, and alter other trajectories, but it demands that we both remember and dream in equal measure."
In 2021 we look towards:
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Commissioning a major First Nations-led project for our 2021 Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art. The future is First Nations.
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Expanding our new digital presentation platform to bring you more experimental work by Asia Pacific artists – even when our borders remain closed. The future is connected.
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Keeping artistic process thriving with at least 10 artist residencies and lab opportunities. The future is experimental.
Your donation helps create new art and future possibilities.
For nearly forty years Performance Space has nurtured, collaborated with, commissioned, developed and presented the artists who inspire us to create new futures.
Support our work bringing artists’ visions to life, at a time when we need it most.
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