sydenham international

About the work

Curated by sydenham international (Consuelo Cavaniglia and Brendan Van Hek), the group exhibition Witness, Collector, Archivist, Narrator features Tiyan Baker, Emma Buswell, Louise Curham with Erik Griswold, Lewis Doherty, Hannah de Feyter, MP Hopkins, Melissa Howe, Alex Kershaw, Clare Peake.

The exhibition revolves around various possible interpretations of the act of documenting. The featured artists consider the impulse to document through capturing, recording, collecting, accumulating, narrating, archiving, witnessing, following, tracing, etc.

Through the exhibition we consider documentation as process or outcome. Propelled by varied motivations the works invite us to think of ephemerality, transience, slippages, transformations, fabulations and translations in the document as an artefact or documenting as a process. How can documentation capture feeling or moment, the complexity and partialities of histories, the entanglements within cultures, communities and families, the misalignment of mark and meaning?

About the artist

sydenham international (SI) is an experimental art space located in Sydney’s inner west, co-directed by Consuelo Cavaniglia and Brendan Van Hek. SI operates around core concerns to generate exchange, build and support community, work intergenerationally, critically engage with what an exhibition and a public facing outcome can be, and use re-presenting as a tactic that allows conversations and ideas to be revisited and reignited by new contexts.

The exhibition curated for Canberra Art Biennial grows from these principles. Witness, Collector, Archivist, Narrator brings together artists at different stages of practice, and places existing works in conversation with new commissioned work, engaging audiences through a range of outcomes – video, installation, sculpture, photography and performance – and connects across a range of communities locally, nationally and internationally.