Resident Artist

Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro

admin Resident Artist, Yearlong Visual Arts Residency
Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro
Sean Cordeiro & Claire Healy. 'Seal'. 2014. Lego, IKEA foot stool, IKEA glass cup & saucer. Work in Progress for ‘Habitat’
Sean Cordeiro & Claire Healy. ‘Seal’. 2014. Lego, IKEA foot stool, IKEA glass cup & saucer. Work in Progress for ‘Habitat’

Habitat

The physical description of the project is relatively straightforward: the exhibition contains Lego blocks and IKEA furniture. Installed within the gallery are life-sized exotic animals sculpturally rendered in Lego bricks. These animals intersect IKEA furniture; giving the impression that the animals and the furniture have simultaneously materialised within the same space. The animals are assembled utilising a randomised reduced palette of between 3 and 5 colours per animal.

The IKEA furniture literally penetrates the animals at random angles. The combination of these two elements creates a viewing space that is part menagerie, part showroom. Just as an entomologist pins beetles or other insects upon a viewing board, like a prized taxidermy trophy, our body of work emulates this using IKEA furniture as the skewering device that penetrates the animal.

This fairly uncomfortable scenario (for the animals, at least) draws visual influence from late nineteenth century hoax photographic documentation of ectoplasmic manifestations in which, foreign objects would appear to reveal themselves on photographic plates during séances.

The project is a natural continuation of our line of investigation illustrated in the work ‘Future Fragment’. This work is a sculpture comprised of neatly stacked and bound IKEA furniture- tables, cupboards, and bookshelves structure that hold together a full-sized replica Monolophosoraus fossil: locating human endeavour within the timeframe of natural history.

The combination of fantastic animals with quotidian furniture creates an uncanny situation that hopefully goes beyond the polar juxtaposition of the man-made with the natural, creating a combined sculptural installation that creates an open-ended question into our relationship with our built and natural world.

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Artists’ bio:

The collaborative practice of Claire Healy (b.1971), and Sean Cordeiro (b.1974), began in 2001 while undertaking their Master of Fine Arts research degrees at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. Their collaborative practice brings together ideas of home, movement and destruction. Healy and Cordeiro create sculpture and installation works that re-use and reform the everyday consumables and detritus of modern life.

In 2005 they were awarded Australia Council residencies at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, and Tokyo, Japan. In 2006-2007 they were Guest Artists at the Universität der Künste, Berlin, having been both awarded the Samstag Scholarship. In 2010 they participated in the residency program at the Akiyoshidai International Artist Village, Japan. In the same year they took part in the inaugural Art Setouchi Festival, which took place over nine islands in the inland Seto Sea of Japan.

Their solo exhibitions include flatpack at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin 2006, The Paper Trail at the Art Gallery of New South Wales 2007, PREMS at La bf15, Lyon 2009, Are we there Yet? at the Corcoran Gallery, Washington DC 2011 and a survey exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney 2012.

Their work has been included in numerous group exhibitions in Australia, Belgium, China, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, Switzerland, Turkey, Taiwan, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Healy and Cordeiro’s installation Life Span was part of the Australian representation at the 53rd Venice Biennale. Most recently, they took part in the 5th Auckland Triennale, curated by Hou Hanru.

Their works are in public collections including The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Newcastle Regional Art Gallery, The Art Gallery of South Australia, The University of Queensland Art Museum and The Gallery of Modern Art Queensland.

Work It!

admin Choreographers Residency, Dance, Projects , , ,
Work It!

Image: Doris Uhlich in 'Rising Swan', photo: Andrea Salzmann.

Work It! was a project bringing together female performing artists from Asia and Europe whose work revolves around the gendered depiction of the body on stage. For 10 days in November 2012, these artists met in Kuala Lumpur to share their artistic practice, create new networks and explore their diverse understandings of feminism.

Participating artists:

  • Cynthia Ling Lee (Taiwan/USA)
  • Rita Natalio (Portugal)
  • Donna Miranda (Philippines)
  • Joavien Ng (Singapore)
  • Cuqui Jerez (Spain)
  • Doris Uhlich (Austria)
  • Naomi Srikandi (Indonesia)
  • Mia Habib (Norway)
  • Geumhyung Jeong (Korea)
  • Un Yamada (Japan)
  • Margarita Tsomou (Greece/Germany)
  • Mislina Mustaffa (Malaysia)

Download: Work_It!_Press_Release
Download: Work_It!_Participant_Bios

Teater Garasi, in a play directed by Naomi Srikandi.Public Performances

2 nights of sharing their work and perspectives

Program A: 8.30pm, Friday 9 Nov
Program B: 8.30pm, Saturday 10 Nov

Venue: The Black Box, MAP @ Publika, Solaris Dutamas

How do you perform a woman onstage? How do you negotiate how a society regulates work, power, sex and truth? What is creativity’s reaction to convention? And how will women thrive in the performing arts in the current global climate?

The Work It! public showing tackled these questions with theatre, dance, music and good old fashioned women’s wit.

Entry by donation at the door
RM 20 regular, RM 15 for students, seniors & MyDance Alliance members.
Q&A session with the artists following the performance.

Cuqui Jerez, 'Croquis Reloaded'. Work It! Open Studio

The focus of the Work It! project is on the week of closed-door studio sessions for the participants at Rimbun Dahan, in which they will be sharing and developing their arts practice with each other. For one afternoon only, join the artists in an open studio session to get a taste of the Work It! project. All practicing artists, in visual or performing arts, and both male and female, are invited to attend.

2-5pm, Wednesday 14 November 2012
The Dance Studio at Rimbun Dahan

Free entry, but attendance is limited, so please register by emailing bhijjas@gmail.com with your name, phone number, and brief bio.

Donna Miranda. Photo: Brendan Goco.

Work It! Panel Discussion

At the conclusion of the 10-day project, the participants of Work It! will present a public panel discussion to discuss the process of the closed-door discussions at Rimbun Dahan and to share their findings.

2-5pm, Saturday 17 November 2012
Annexe Central Market
Free Entry

Work It! was co-produced by Bilqis Hijjas of Rimbun Dahan, Anna Wagner (Germany) and Fumi Yokobori (Japan).

Main Sponsors

tanzconnexionsGoethe_institutCreative-Encounters

Supported by

JFKL  wao

Public performance venue sponsor

map_publika

 

Sangeeta Sandrasegar

admin Hotel Penaga, Resident Artist ,
Sangeeta Sandrasegar

Sangeeta Sandrasegar works within a research-based practice, building narratives in which every new work connects to previous projects. Her practice consolidates postcolonial and hybridity theory, exploring her context within Australia and its relationship to migrant communities and homelands. Her work concerns itself within the overlap of cultural structures – sexuality, race and identity, in contemporary society – and interpreting and representing these shifts. These themes are explored through a visual language concerned with shadows. From installations of paper cutouts, material works and/or sculpture, the constructed shadows of the installation become a motif for themes of self-hood, otherness and in-between spaces. By extending the scope of the art object the cast shadows simultaneously engage with the history of the shadow in Art, and hint towards cognitive alternatives and sites of transformation.

In 2004 Sandrasegar completed a Doctorate of Philosophy across the Victorian College of the Arts and the Australian Centre at the University of Melbourne.  The content of the exegesis was to formalize a visual practice centred on the creative space of shadows into a theoretical tool.  She proposed that the shadow subject could be re-examined and liberated from its historical representations and to be employed as both a positive and salient visual device for representing the ideas being examined in post-colonial and hybridity studies.

Sandrasegar has been represented in group and solo exhibitions since 1996, and is the recipient of several fellowships and prizes. In particular, national showcases for emerging artists: Primavera, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, NEW04, Australian Centre of Contemporary Art, Melbourne. As well as the Auckland Triennial and SCAPE: New Zealand Community Art & Industry Biennial in New Zealand and the Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art 05, Gallery of Modern Art Queensland. Last year her work was shown in the Incheon Women Artists Biennale in Korea, and Slash: Paper Under the Knife, Museum of Arts and Design, New York.

Sangeeta was in residency at Hotel Penaga from October to December 2012.

Links to Sangeeta’s work
http://sangeetasandrasegar.photoshelter.com/
http://sangeetasandrasegar.blogspot.com

You Ask Me About That Country
You Ask Me About That Country

Jumaadi

admin Hotel Penaga, Resident Artist , ,
Jumaadi

Jumaadi, an artist of Indonesian origin but practicing in Australia, completed a three month residency at Hotel Penaga in 2012 with a stunning performance of wayang kulit, the traditional shadow play of Southeast Asia.  This one, though, stretched tradition in a new direction, being based on a Chinese folk tale about the Moon Cake, a timely performance as the festival is just around the corner at the next full moon on 30th September, when children parade through neighbourhoods carrying candle lit lanterns in animal and fantasy shapes. Jumaadi’s wayang was produced with the help of the curator of the Penang State Museum, Puan Haryani Muhamad. Developed with students from KDU and with the puppets made by one of the museum’s janitorial staff, and the gamelan music was provided by museum staff, it was a wonderful collaboration of talent from all directions.

Marcia Ong & Hilary Schwartz

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Marcia Ong & Hilary Schwartz

Born and raised in Singapore, Marcia Ong is a filmmaker whose experience covers almost every aspect of the filmmaking process. Her short film, Kristy, has won awards at Kids First! Children’s Film Festival and Pittsburgh International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. It has screened internationally in Amsterdam, Melbourne, Seoul, Paris, Berlin, Brussels and Singapore. In 2010, Marcia completed her latest film, Standing Still, which premiered at the 33rd Mill Valley Film Festival. Marcia Ong recently shot a feature documentary titled Ten Eleven O Two, directed by Mackenzie Mathis and Jellyfish, an independent short film set in Borneo directed by Rosie Haber.

Coded within the domestic spaces, scenes, and objects that I create are traces of intimacy. Susan Stewart identifies narrative in On Longing as a structure of desire that is suspended in impossibility. My own experiences of displacement, nostalgia for intimacy and longing for an imagined home and family, as well as a larger queer narrative of dislocation and isolation, lead me to the subject of domesticity and the making of a “home”. While queerness is not easily read in all of my pieces, it is coded throughout. Coding originates from within a context of marginalization, but moves beyond this in its role as a language of identity and a signifier of shared experience.

Hilary Schwartz is a sculptor engaged with concepts of domesticity, displacement, temporality, and queer desire. She received her MFA in 2009 from San Francisco Art Institute and her BFA from California College of the Arts. She has exhibited internationally. Most recently, her work has been seen in Etiquette at the Substation Gallery in Singapore, Feeding Ghosts at Kitsch Gallery in San Francisco, and Domestic Materials at PLAySPACE Gallery in San Francisco. Hilary’s work has been featured online on KQED, Art Practical, and SFGate. She is currently a fulltime lecturer at Lasalle College of the Arts in Singapore. Hilary recently conducted a workshop entitled Play with Your Food at Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts.

Hilary and Martha collaborated on a series of video pieces reflecting upon living together in Singapore. They undertook a short one-month residency in Hotel Penaga in June 2012.

Lina Limosani

admin Asialink, Performances, Resident Artist ,
Lina Limosani

lina

Australian dancer and choreographer Lina Limosani undertook an Asialink residency at Rimbun Dahan in 2008, during which time she developed and presented the full-length contemporary dance work A Delicate Situation. Lina returned in 2012 for a short redevelopment of the work, with Australian dancer Carol Wellman-Kelly.

About the Artist

Lina Limosani graduated from the Victorian College of the Arts in 1999 and became a member of the Australian Dance Theatre (ADT) from 2000-2005. In 2003 she was awarded the Emerging Artist award by the Adelaide Critics Circle for her works in ADT’s in-house choreographic seasons of Ignition. In 2004 Lina was nominated for a Green Room Award for her performance in The Age of Unbeauty at the Melbourne Festival. She also featured in Anton’s dance film When You’re Alone, which was a finalist in the 2004 Reel Dance International Dance on Screen Awards.

After leaving ADT Lina worked with artists including Narelle Benjamin, Lucy Guerin and Gideon Obarzanek. She has since maintained a performance career both in Australia and New Zealand, and gone on to create her own works independently. Lina’s works are known for their fast, aggressive movement style, as well as their humour, and use of speech and theatre.

Below: Suhaili Micheline rehearsing for the redevelopment of ‘A Delicate Situation’ in the studio at Rimbun Dahan.

Residency in 2012

Australian choreographer Lina Limosani has returned to Rimbun Dahan on a short redevelopment of the work A Delicate Situation, which she created at Rimbun Dahan in 2008.

Accompanied by Australian dancer Carol Wellman-Kelly, and reconnecting with Malaysian dance Suhaili Micheline Ahmad Kamil who was involved in the original work, Lina reformed A Delicate Situation to confront different cultural approaches to death, dying and the afterlife.

The original work investigated Malaysian superstition through the story of the pontianak, a female vampire ghost believed to have died at childbirth. The redeveloped version is also set in Malaysia, but is the story of a Western woman’s struggle to come to terms with death surrounded by a culture saturated in legend, myth and superstition.

“What I found compelling [with the pontianak] is the seemingly universal necessity for humans to personify death,” says Lina. “This tendency became central to A Delicate Situation and it was through the character of Death that I invite the viewer to be deeply drawn into the work. Death, its personification in the lore surrounding it, and the fear that accompanies it remain fundamental in A Delicate Situation.”

The finished work will premier in the inSPACE program at the Adelaide Festival Centre in August 2012. Lina Limosani and Carol Wellman-Kelly’s residencies at Rimbun Dahan in May 2012 are supported by Arts SA.

govt-sa-arts-sa

Below: Lina Limosani, Carol Wellman-Kelly and Suhaili Micheline learning the classical Malay dance tari inai from Malaysian dancer Hasmizan Abdul Hamid from ASWARA.

Residency in 2008

Lina was resident at Rimbun Dahan from September to December 2008, with the support of a performing arts grant from Asialink. During her stay, she created a new contemporary dance work for performance in December 2008. She collaborated with physical theatre artist Al Seed and costume designer Eve Lambert who were resident at Rimbun Dahan for short periods.

Lina Limosani worked with four accomplished local dancers — Elaine Pedley, Suhaili Ahmad Kamil, Low Shee Hoe and Rathimalar Govindarajoo — to create A Delicate Situation, a full-length performance with a strong visual and emotional impact, which was performed at Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre in December 2008.

Ashly Nandong

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Ashly Nandong

ashly-performing-close-up

Ashly Nandong is a thirty-year old artist from Kuching, Sarawak who joins us for three months as short-stay artist-in-residence at Rimbun Dahan.

Ahsly completed a Bachelor’s degree in Mechatronics and Robotics Engineering at Swinburne University, in Victoria, Australia in 2009, returning to Malaysia in early 2011. However, it was his informal art education and exposure to traditional dance and music during his formative adolescent years that marked him for quite a different life direction. Eventually, and inevitably it seemed, what placed him firmly on this different road was his continued active involvement in the performance and visual arts, while living in Melbourne. Having been taught the sapeh lute as a teenager under different gurus, the traditional Dayak dance of the Orang Ulu and Iban people, and now as painter, Ashly crosses from performance to visual arts and back with ease.

A strong sense of his Iban cultural heritage is what binds; one medium of expression inspires the other in a non-hierarchy. Traditional motifs and metaphors make for meaningful markers and anchor him along the way in his berjalai, an ancient Iban custom of roaming or journeying in search of greener pastures of knowledge and hopefully the ‘wisdom’ that comes from hands-on experience.

At Rimbun Dahan, Ashly is given a much-needed time for contemplation in an important  part of his berjalai; an introspective time to connect with his creative aspirations in response to his current ‘spiritual’ situation. Ashly is presently working on a painting depicting the Tree of Life, a motif found in Iban symbolism and in religions, mythologies and philosophies throughout many different cultures, in varying permutations.

A unifying principle that unites all cultures and religions is something Ashly gravitates towards, being very keen to understand deeper the creative force that at core animates all living entities with spirit. The living tree, rooted in earth but with branches reaching upwards for the heavens is aptly symbolic of Ashly’s current station of berjalai at Rimbun Dahan, a place of lofty trees and sounds of ancient cicadas and birdsong.

Rebecca Stevens

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Rebecca Stevens

Bec_portrait

Bec Stevens undertook a three month residency at Rimbun Dahan in 2012, in association with Asialink. Bec is a Hobart-based visual artist whose work is underpinned by studies in Architecture and Horticulture. She graduated from the University of Tasmania’s: School of Art in 2003 and School of Architecture and Design in 1999.

Her practice is site-responsive and inter-disciplinary, using a range of mediums as tools to respond to the social and historical nuances of constructed environments. More specifically she is interested in, and responds to public spaces that are left-over, in-between states or unplanned, often resulting in works that reflect on processes of development or entropy.

Bec frequently uses plant material within works, and during her time at Rimbun Dahan she intends to respond directly to the garden of indigenous Southeast Asian species. She is interested in the garden as an island of biodiversity in the context of the surrounding area of Kuala Lumpur, particularly in light of the rare and endangered species it holds; and in the social customs and specific relationships to botanic species. Alongside this she is interested in the rates of change, growth and decay in the region, in terms of the inherent maintenance required for living in a place that sits in close proximity to the equator, and she intends to use this as impetus for developing work.

Bec Stevens recent projects and exhibitions include: ‘STOP. REST. PLAY.’ (2011) commissioned as an activity of the CWA CBD Branch; ‘Lookout’ at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (2010) and ‘Canopy’ (2008) commissioned for the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens. She has received funding from Arts Tasmania for numerous projects and in 2009 was the recipient of a New Work Grant through the Australia Council for the Arts. In 2010 she completed a Studio Residency at Contemporary Art Spaces Tasmania and she is currently the recipient of the Curatorial Mentorship through Contemporary Art Spaces Tasmania. She is an active member of the CWA CBD Branch, see www.cwa-cbdbranch.com.

Jonathan Nichols

admin Resident Artist, Yearlong Visual Arts Residency
Jonathan Nichols

Australian Artist for the Malaysia-Australia Visual Artists’ Residency 2012

jonathan_nicholsAbout the artist

Jonathan Nichols lives in Melbourne, where he works as an artist, and sometimes as a curator and writer. He has maintained a studio-based painting practice since graduating from the School of Art at the Australian National University in 1988 and completing postgraduate studies at the University of NSW in 1989. He has exhibited widely in Australia, including at private art galleries, public museums and artist-run spaces.

About the art

Although the process of his paintings begins by sourcing and selecting digital images that are first collaged on the computer screen, Nichols’ work takes a painterly form that is fundamentally connected to manual ability and his own creative desires—establishing a clear aesthetic distance from more technologically complex methods of production. He is interested in painterly ground rules and ideas as well as the potential for new motifs and chance associations.

Using the computer technology in this way allows Nichols a certain level of introspective inquiry that then independently affects the look and feel of each finished painting.

Nichols is interested in the possibilities that connect and run between people. His subjects found in various digital media or other research material or in person generally maintain their anonymity, however. His paintings have been described as conveying ‘the experience of seeing someone at a distance’, which is recorded ‘as a sort of touch or feeling of proximity’. Jonathan Nichols uses the human figure as a point of correlation or orientation – the figure becomes both cipher and affect.

jonathan's-studio-1

Residency plans

At Rimbun Dahan, drawing from his experience in Malaysia, Nichols plans to research and develop new figurative motifs which would be sourced from street scenes and popular media; thinking about culture and history, everyday society and forms of portraiture. He is interested in figurative studies (or visual storytelling) that can bridge or define cultural traditions and aesthetics, for example those associated with the Malay, Chinese, Indian and indigenous people. Nichols is keen to spend time discovering how these interconnect with his own knowledge of Western painterly traditions; to learn what is held in common between artists and what is not.

For more information visit http://www.jonathan-nichols.blogspot.com/