Creative Exchanges: 2010

Cobra (Japan) Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces

Supported by Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces and Tokyo Wonder Site

Artist COBRA from Japan was Asialink’s artist in residence at Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne, as part of a residency exchange with Tokyo Wonder Site. During the residency he held two open studios and exhibited in Brisbane at No Frills. His research is based on love stories and romance. In the past he has presented work in group exhibitions at Tokyo Wonder Site and Magical Art Room. He is also the founding Director of artist collective MIHOKANO which represents emerging artists working in range of media.

Hiroharu Mori (Japan) Monash University Museum of Art

Supported by Monash University Museum of Art, Monash University Faculty of Art and Design & Tokyo Wonder Site

Hiroharu Mori works largely in video and installation, making critical works that comment on the mechanics of mass culture. He participated in the 52nd Venice Biennale ‘Think with the Senses – Feel with the Mind’, and has exhibited widely internationally. During his stay at Monash University Hiroharu Mori held a solo exhibition at Monash University Faculty of Art & Design Faculty Gallery entitled Speech Rehearsals: Students, housewives, politicians. This exhibition was composed with two major video installations, focusing on ideas of acting and speech.

Jeong-Hoo Lee (Korea) Artspace

Supported by the National Art Studio: Chandong, Korea and Artspace, Sydney

Based in Seoul, Korea, Jeong-Hoo Lee is an installation artist who works with sculpture and photography. Lee focuses on the emotions she feels at the moment she is faced with a particular situation or sees a particular object. Her work is a compilation of fragmented, three-dimensional objects that encourage the audience to use their own imaginations. Lee will continue her work in two-and three-dimensional spaces at Artspace Sydney.

Jia-Jen Lin (Taiwan) Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts

Supported by Taipei Artist Village and Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts

Jia-Jen Lin is a visual artist who currently lives and works in New York and Taiwan. Her work integrates sculpture and installation art with performance, video, and photography. Lin has exhibited internationally, including USA, Taiwan, and South Korea. Her recent solo exhibitions include Vermont Studio Center, VT (2008); Taipei Cultural Center, NY (2009); and Power Space Gallery, Taiwan (2009). She will be undertaking a residency at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts.

Allyson Hose (VIC) Nou Hach Literary Association

Supported by the Malcolm Robertson Foundation & The Australia Council for the Arts

Allyson Hose is a writer, editor and researcher who has worked extensively in book and web publishing and in community organisations. Hose will use her residency to complete her first novel, set in Cambodia in the early 1990s during the United Nation’s peacekeeping operation. She will further work with the Nou Hach Literary Association, exploring the revival of contemporary Khmer culture. Nou Hach is a community organisation dedicated to the revival of Khmer literature, and publishes the country’s only literary journal.

Kalinda Ashton (VIC) Nou Hach Literary Association

Supported by Arts Victoria & the Australia Council for the Arts

Kalinda Ashton is a short-story writer, playwright and published her first novel, The Danger Game, in 2009. Her stories have been broadcast on ABC radio and published in major anthologies and journals including Overland, Meanjin, The Sleepers Almanac, The Readings and Writings Anthology and Kill Your Darlings. She is the Associate Editor at literary journal Overland, and a teacher of creative writing at RMIT University. At the Nou Hach Literary Association she will work on stories that deal with isolation and sense of place, exploring how landscapes influence the lives of travellers. She will also assist her host with their event and publishing programs.

Benjamin Hampe (QLD) Beijing Film Academy

Supported by The Australia-China Council & The Australia Council for the Arts

Benjamin Hampe was most recently Manager – Visual Art Projects at the art and cultural consultancy firm Positive Solutions. He is based in Singapore this year managing a commercial art gallery, working with Sculpture Square Ltd, and starting his own consultancy company. For his residency, Hampe will be based at the Beijing Film Academy where he will participate in the first international internship program, working with curatorial and public programming staff to present an international new media festival.

Benjamin Law (QLD) Peking University

Supported by Arts Queensland and The Australia Council for the Arts

Benjamin Law is a writer and journalist, and contributes regularly to various publications including The Monthly, frankie, Qweekend and The Big Issue. He completed a doctorate in television screenwriting at the Queensland University of Technology in 2009, and his personal essays have been anthologised in The Best Australian Essays 2008 and 2009, as well as a forthcoming book to be published by Black Inc. in 2010. He intends to use his Asialink residency with Peking University to research and examine the lives of young gay, lesbian and transgender people throughout China.

Catherine Croll (NSW) Red Gate Gallery

Supported by The Australia-China Council & The Australia Council for the Arts

Catherine Croll has worked in the Community Cultural Development and Cultural Planning sectors for over 20 years as a facilitator and trainer. In Beijing she will work with Red Gate Gallery on the 10th anniversary of their residency program, and a series of exhibitions to be held in China as part of the Year of Australian Culture in China. The program will include a tour by six Australian artists to artist colonies and studios in Chengdu, Chongqing, Lhasa and Beijing.

Jennifer Mills (NT) The Bookworm

Supported by The Australia-China Council & The Australia Council for the Arts

Jennifer Mills is the author of the novel The Diamond Anchor and a chapbook of poems, Treading Earth. She won the 2008 Marian Eldridge Award for Young Emerging Women Writers, the Pacific Region of the 2008-09 Commonwealth Short Story Competition, and the 2008 Northern Territory Literary Awards: Best Short Story. During her residency at bookstore and event complex The Bookworm, she will immerse herself in Chinese writing, and hopes to investigate the cultural impact of the changing economic relationship between Australia and China.

Mark Siebert (VIC) Beijing Studio Centre

Supported by Arts SA & The Australia Council for the Arts

Mark Siebert is a practising visual artist who completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts with Honours at the South Australian School of Art, Adelaide in 2004. Siebert works across media and has exhibited in galleries across Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Vietnam. The focus of his studio-based practice is pop cultural iconography and the way that it influences identity. He also has an interest in consumption, mass culture and modes of production, which will see him explore the People’s Republic of China’s currency — the Renminbi — during his time at the Beijing Studio Center.

Rebecca Holborn (VIC) Shanghart Gallery

Supported by The Australia Council for the Arts

Rebecca Holborn has curated exhibitions in Australia and overseas, including at the ICA in London, and as part of the 2005 Melbourne International Arts Festival working with eminent Chinese contemporary artist Xu Zhe. Holborn’s residency will build on her past experience and further inform her contribution to discourse surrounding cross-cultural exchange and multimedia practice. She will work with Shanghart Gallery, Beijing to extend her understanding of curatorial practice in China.

Jane Fuller (QLD) Hong Kong Fringe Club

Supported by Arts SA & The Australia Council for the Arts

Currently Creative Producer at Vitalstatistix Theatre Company in Adelaide, Fuller has been involved in producing performance for the past 15 years, working in a variety of festivals throughout Australia. As the Creative Producer for three Adelaide Fringe Festivals, Fuller began working as an independent producer. She produces Sydney’s Brown Council and The Format Collective in Adelaide with BIG! During her residency at the Hong Kong Fringe Club Fuller will work on a program of performances for the City Festival.

Catriona Mitchell (VIC) Teamwork

Supported by Arts Victoria and the Australia-India Council

Catriona Mitchell was Program Director for the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival in Ubud, Bali, in 2008, and previously worked for the Melbourne Writers Festival. She runs an annual event for the Melbourne International Film Festival called Books at MIFF. Mitchell will work with Teamworks on the planning and organisation of the Jaipur Literature Festival to broaden her programming, managerial and production experience, with a view to utilising her newfound knowledge in her career as a literary programmer in Australia.

Jacob Boehme (VIC) Ishara

Supported by the Australia-India Council & The Australia Council for the Arts

Jacob Boehme is a Melbourne-born artist of Narangga/Kaurna heritage and a graduate of the National Aboriginal and Islander Skills Development Association and Victorian College of the Arts. He has worked extensively in Indigenous cultural preservation and the development of contemporary performance of traditional Indigenous stories, as well as cross cultural dance and puppetry presentations with Indigenous and Indian, Maori and Native American communities. His residency with Ishara in Delhi will afford the opportunity to further explore the relationship between Indigenous and Indian forms of physical and visual storytelling, and to seed new projects.

Sally Golding (QLD) Filter

Supported by Arts Queensland & The Australia Council for the Arts

Sally Golding is a media artist and curator based in Brisbane. She uses cross-discipline approaches to create startling sonic/visual explorations into expanded cinema, performance and audiovisual installation. Golding has both performed in and programmed for key festivals and events internationally and throughout Australia. During her residency in Bangalore with host organisation Filter, Golding will research and produce new live media work and explore collaborations with local media artists. She will perform at Filter’s annual festival Experimenta, develop screening programs for exchange, and facilitate workshops for participatory live outcomes.

Sangeeta Sandrasegar (VIC) 1.Shanthiroad

Supported by Arts Victoria and the Australia-India Council

Sangeeta Sandrasegar’s practice centres around postcolonial and hybridity theory and draws strongly from her mixed heritage: an Anglo-Australian mother and Indian-Malaysian father. Sandrasegar has been represented in group and solo exhibitions since 1996, and is the recipient of several fellowships and prizes. In 2004 she completed a Doctorate of Philosophy between the Victorian College of the Arts, and The Australian Centre at the University of Melbourne. Sandrasegar explores her context within Australia and its relationship to migrant communities and homelands in her work. At host organisation 1 Shanthi Rd in Bangalore she plans to broaden this methodology through research and dialogue that explores how artists render the political, religious and social environments of metropolitan India.

Sylvie Haisman (NSW) Himachal Pradesh University

Supported by the Australia-India Council and the Australia Council for the Arts

Sylvie Haisman's forthcoming book This Barren Rock: a True Tale of Shipwreck and Survival explores her ancestors' abortive attempt to migrate to the Antipodes – a story first visited in her 2008 ABC radio feature Tell Me A Shipwreck. Her short stories have been published in Heat, Southerly, Island and Turbine magazines, and she was a prize-winner in the 2008-09 Commonwealth Short Story Competition. At Himachal Pradesh University she plans to extend her interest in nineteenth century global travel and migration by working on creative non-fiction stories about early Indian migrants to Australia.

Agnes Michelet (WA) Kelola

Supported by the WA Department of Culture and the Arts

Agnès Michelet worked as an arts manager with Paris-based Friches Théâtre Urbain (FTU) before coming to the Perth International Arts Festival with FTU in 1998 and 1999, and migrating to Perth in 2000 where she worked with Ausdance WA. She is currently the Director of STRUT dance. Michelet will undertake residencies in Jakarta with the Kelola Foundation, and in Berlin supported by the Goethe Institut, to develop dance exchange programs between Australia, Indonesia and Europe.

Ellen Kent (ACT) IVAA

Supported by Arts ACT and The Australia Council for the Arts

Ellen Kent works in education and public programs at the National Portrait Gallery, developing and delivering programs for children and families. Kent has lived and studied in Indonesia, and undertook an internship at Cemeti Art House. During her residency with the Indonesian Visual Arts Archive, Kent will be investigating formal and informal arts learning for children and families in Indonesia, and researching contemporary Indonesian portraiture.

Julie Clark (NSW) Ubud Writers & Readers Festival

Supported by Arts NSW & The Australia-Indonesia Institute

Julie Clark is an arts manager and journalist with 20 years’ experience in the creative industries in Australia and the UK. Since 2008 she has worked as Communications and Arts Development Officer for Arts Northern Rivers regional arts board, as well as consulting across a range of local arts initiatives in northern NSW. During her residency with the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival she aims to establish an Indonesian-Australian exchange for writers and poets, in conjunction with the annual Northern Rivers-based Byron Bay Writers Festival.

Peter Wilson (VIC) Made Sidia

Supported by The Australia Council for the Arts

Melbourne artist Peter Wilson has been working in puppetry for the past 35 years as a director, writer, puppeteer, producer and teacher. He co-founded Handspan Theatre in 1977 and was Artistic Director for Company Skylark during the 1990s. Large-scale works have included The Sydney 2000 Olympics and The Asian Games, Doha and Commonwealth Games, 2006. Wilson established the Postgraduate Puppetry Program at the VCA in 2004. He has worked extensively throughout Asia with an Asialink residency in 2002 in Japan. For his residency in Bali he will work with Master Puppeteer Made Sidia, with whom he has previously worked on The Theft of Sita to extend their collaboration with a view to developing a new production.

Rod Cooper (VIC) Principle of South

Supported by the Australia-Indonesia Institute & The Australia Council for the Arts

Rod Cooper is a Melbourne-based sound artist working in the area of instrument building and performance. He transforms traditional instrument designs into new metallic hybrids. His instruments incorporate percussion, strings, bowing mechanisms, and resonant springs. Cooper has performed in America, the United Kingdom and New Zealand. During his residency in Java, he will focus on his passion for gamelan and the instrument-building practices of the Javanese metal workers. Through his host Principle of South, Cooper also hopes to use his teaching experience to conduct instrument building workshops with the local community of Yogyakarta.

Sally Sussman (NSW) TKM

Supported by Arts NSW & The Australia Council for the Arts

Sally Sussman is Artistic Director of Australian Performance Exchange, a company devoted to creating intercultural theatre projects that respond to issues of identity, politics and social justice, with artists from Asia and Australia. She trained at The Central Academy of Drama in Beijing and the Shanghai Conservatorium of Music. In 2007 she collaborated with Ram Prapanca, artists from Teater Kita Makassar (TKM) and Indigenous artists to create The Eyes of Marege, which was presented at the Adelaide Festival Centre’s OZAsia Festival and The Studio, Sydney Opera House. During her residency at TKM, she aims to learn more about their approach to making work, to deepen the relationship between the two companies, and improve her skills in intercultural performance practice by collaboratively developing a work around the idea of asylum.

Tim Woodward (QLD) Cemeti Art House

Supported by Arts Queensland and the Australia-Indonesia Institute

Tim Woodward employs diverse media forms including sculpture, photography, video and installation. He holds a Bachelor of Visual Art with Honours, completed at the Queensland University of Technology. As well as exhibiting nationally and internationally, he is a co-director of the Brisbane artist-run-initiative Boxcopy. During his residency at Cemeti Art House, Woodward will conduct research on the street vending culture of Yogyakarta, in particular the Alun-Alun centres where a highly creative, resourceful and tactical approach to street vending is performed. Woodward will develop a series of sculptural works in response to the social mechanics of communal space.

Bic Tieu (NSW) Kitamura Koubou

Supported by Arts NSW & the Australia-Japan Foundation

Bic Tieu is a Sydney-trained artist and teacher with a special interest in makie, the traditional Japanese technique built up from thin layers of lacquer followed by metallic dustings and rubbings. Tieu’s practice draws inspiration from the colours and sensibility of the seasons inherent in Asian aesthetics. Her work reinterprets these esoteric and ancient crafts within the language of contemporary jewellery and objects. During her residency at the Kitamura Studio in Japan, specific traditional makie techniques will be studied. These will then be reinterpreted and applied in a contemporary Western setting in Australia.

Briohny Doyle (VIC) Hiroshima City University

Supported by the Australia-Japan Foundation & The Australia Council for the Arts

Briohny Doyle has published poetry and essays in Going Down Swinging and Overland and received commissions from The Sydney Festival and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Her obsession with disaster and how we write apocalypse resulted in the monologue ‘Meet me at The End’, first staged in a Melbourne train station tunnel by torchlight. While based at Hiroshima City University, she will contact survivors of atomic attacks in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and investigate the nuclear imagination in Japanese art and literature. This research will inform a collection of prose poems that splice the cinematic image with a poetics of 'The End.'

Mark Feary (VIC) Tokyo Metropolitan Museum for Photography

Supported by the Australia-Japan Foundation & The Australia Council for the Arts

Mark Feary is currently curator at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), Melbourne, and a lecturer in the School of Art at RMIT University, Melbourne. Previous positions have been at West Space, Melbourne, La Biennale di Venezia, Venice, and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. Feary participated in Korea’s inaugural Gwangju Biennale International Curator Course. His residency will be at Tokyo Metropolitan Museum for Photography where he plans to investigate the feasibility of curating an exhibition of Australian work in 2011.

Meg McKinlay (WA) Aichi Skukutoku University

Supported by The Department of Culture and the Arts, WA & The Australia-Japan Foundation

Meg McKinlay is a writer and academic who has taught Creative Writing, Japanese Language and Asian Studies at tertiary and secondary levels. Her debut poetry collection, Cleanskin, was released in 2007 and her children’s fiction, ranging from picture books through to junior novels, is published by Walker Books Australia. During her residency at Aichi Shukutoku University, McKinlay will bring together her academic and creative interests, researching and developing a novel for adults centering on Australian-Japanese cross-cultural negotiations against the backdrop of the Second World War. She will also establish links with Japanese poets and children’s writers.

Will French (NSW) Tokyo Wonder Site

Supported by the Australia Council for the Arts

Will French works across a range of media and explores a vast array of themes, from cultural history to rock & roll tragedy, responding to these with playful wit and wry humour. He completed a Masters in Visual Arts at Sydney College of the Arts in 2005 and was the 2008 recipient of the Fauvette Loureiro Memorial Artist Travel Scholarship and 2009 Redlands Westpac Emerging Art Prize. Whilst in residency at Tokyo Wonder Site, French intends to delve into Japanese subcultures, and reflect on the impact spending the majority of his childhood in South East Asia has had on his current art making process. He will also be partaking in an on-site workshop focused on the theme of ‘Creative Dialogue and Commitment to the Environment’.

Anthony Pelchen (VIC) Rimbun Dahan

Supported by the Australian High Commission-Kuala Lumpur & The Australia Council for the Arts

Anthony Pelchen works across painting, drawing, video and installation. He has exhibited widely in Melbourne since 1992, as well as undertaking projects in Japan and Denmark. In 2009 he participated in the inaugural Melaka Art and Performance Festival, and will again present work there in late 2010. During his residency at Rimbun Dahan he plans to continue his research on the body and embark on an exploration of Shamanistic trance practices, developing new drawings in response. These drawings will also inform later installation work and ongoing collaborations with performer Tony Yap.

Daniel Jaber (SA) Rimbun Dahan

Supported by Arts SA and the Australia-Malaysia Institute

Daniel Jaber joined Gary Stewart’s Australian Dance Theatre (ADT) as a full-time company member while finishing his studies at the Adelaide Centre for the Arts. Daniel has created roles and performed in ADT works including G, Devolution, Held, Age of Unbeauty, Birdbrain and Vocabulary. Since 2008, Daniel has been working independently in Adelaide and Berlin. Jaber premiered his first full-length solo work Too far again, not far enough... at the Adelaide Fringe Festival 2010. During his residency in Malaysia at Rimbun Dahan, Jaber will create a new work with Malaysian dancers to be performed in Malaysia and in Australia.

Sean Taylor-Leech (QLD) Instant Theatre Café

Supported by the Australia-Malaysia Institute and the Australia Council for the Arts

Sean Taylor is an electronic music producer, broadcast content maker, and arts curator. With a Bachelors Degree in Sound Design and over five years’ experience in production, broadcasting, performance and installation, Taylor creates immersive sound and new media products with global perspectives. He freelances through his own Mute-til-late Productions, specialising in production, performance and management for music, radio, film, and fine arts, with recent clients including Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art and ABC Radio National. Through his residency in Kuala Lumpur, Taylor will collaborate with the Instant Theatre Café to design sound and music for a new Instant Theatre Cafe production entitled Closer.

Hayley West (VIC) Green Papaya Art Projects

Supported by Arts NT and The Australia Council for the Arts

Hayley West's installation/performance practice focuses on place, memorial and the exploration and exposition of memory. She has exhibited nationally and internationally in a variety of contexts and has held residencies at the Cité Internationale des Arts - Paris, Hill End AIR Program NSW, Lost Generation Space - Kuala Lumpur; and she has a future residency later this year at ACME Studios, London. She enjoys a variety of arts advocacy roles in Darwin. During her residency with Green Papaya Art Projects, West will undertake research on experiences and representations of death and mourning.

Adelaide Jaspa Wood (TAS) Esplanade: Theatres on the Bay

Supported by Arts Tasmania & the Australia Council for the Arts

Adelaide Jaspa Wood’s career in arts and events management spans a decade and includes work on festivals, 3D, visual and performing arts. She currently holds the position of Festival Director for Festival of Voices, Tasmania’s premier winter arts event. During her residency with Esplanade Theatres by the Bay in Singapore she will explore programming in a different cultural context with the Esplanade Dance Festival, and be involved in the design of a new event to be launched by Esplanade in December 2010.

Kerry Digby (NSW) LIG Art Hall

Supported by the Australia Council for the Arts

As a percussionist and arts manager with a focus on cross cultural collaboration, Kerry Digby has worked with performing artists and theatre companies from Australia, Korea and the Pacific region including REM Theatre, LATT, Pacific Wave Festival and the Sydney Festival. In her current role at the Bondi Pavilion Cultural Centre, she coordinates the Bondi Wave Youth Music Project and the Bondi Pavilion music program. She will be resident in Seoul, with LIG Arts Centre working with their programming team on developing their music program and new exchanges in 2011.

Locust Jones (NSW) National Art Studio

Supported by the Australia Council for the Arts

Locust Jones’ drawing-based practice is inspired by global news imagery and stories. Since 1993, Jones has held over 25 solo exhibitions within Australia and internationally including in Germany, India, Lebanon, New Zealand, and the United States. His work features in several major public and corporate collections. During his residency at the National Art Studio, Changdong, he intends to investigate and incorporate Korean news media imagery to produce a series of ink drawings. Jones selected a residency in Korea due to its rich paper making culture. He plans to draw on the very fibrous Hanji paper that is made in rolls from the mulberry tree and is perfect for his large-scale drawings.

Robbie Avenaim (VIC) Balloon and Needle

Supported by The Australia Council for the Arts

Over the past 25 years, Robbie Avenaim has been recognised in Australia and internationally as a significant and highly innovative music and sound artist. Avenaim is also a founder and co-organiser of the What Is Music? Festival, Australia's largest showcase of local and international experimental music. Avenaim has worked with a wide range of international musicians including John Zorn, and Tesuya Yoshida. His residency will be at experimental music publisher and sound event organiser Balloon and Needle, Korea, where Avenaim will work on collaborative compositional projects, a touring survey exhibition, give artists talks and perform with leading Korean sound artists.

Alan Fewster (ACT) National Archives of Sri Lanka

Supported by Supported Arts ACT and the Australia Council for the Arts

Alan Fewster is a historian, journalist and diplomat. He worked for major Australian newspapers in Sydney, Brisbane and in the Canberra Press Gallery and is the author of Capital Correspondent, the Canberra letters of Edwin Charles 1936-3 and Trusty and Well Beloved: A life of Keith Officer, Australia’s first Diplomat. Hosted by the National Archives of Sri Lanka, Fewster will research a famous legal case involving an Australian who was deported from colonial Ceylon for alleged communist agitation, and the story of his five great aunts who travelled to Ceylon to become tea planters’ brides.