Imagine seeing images frozen in time of your ancestors in museums, taken by people documenting an ‘exotic’ sighting. Who has the power over their image?

Co-commissioned by Chunky Move and Next Wave, Ngioka Bunda-Heath’s (Wakka Wakka, Ngugi, Birrpai) new dance work and photographic exhibition explores the idea of shifting the gaze and refocusing the colonial lens that has publicly framed her ancestors.

Extending on her 2019 YIRRAMBOI Festival work, Blood Quantum, about her mother’s story, Birrpai turns to Ngioka’s father’s heritage; to her great-grandmother captured by the camera of a ‘culturalist’. She puts a First Nation perspective on colonial photography alongside contemporary dance that has taken her to stages around the world.

“Ngioka Bunda-Heath’s solo Blood Quantum, beginning with the dancer’s strongly weighted plunging to the earth over and over, was poignant and challenging. Video and voice told the tragedy of children being taken from their mother as Bunda-Heath’s movement gradually intensified to thrashing despair. ” – Kim Dunphy

Curated by independent dancer and choreographer, Leah Landau for Chunky Move, Activators 4 comprises Conversation Series and First Chapter of a Novel. The project is entirely online at www.activators4.com. 

Conversation Series invites six Australian-based artists to discuss absence, text and performance, with a conversation partner of their choosing. The artists (Amaara Raheem, Amrita Hepi, Daniel Jenatsch, Megan Payne, Tim Darbyshire and Rhiannon Newton) can speak to someone who is relatively unknown to them; someone they may have met in passing, at a residency or a festival; perhaps someone they have never met but are curious about; someone that may not come from the quote unquote art background. Leah has collated the many texts and other references referred to in (or evoked by) the conversations into a Reading List, for those who’d like to dive deeper.

And as kind of sister project, artist Brian Fuata has created AN EMAIL PERFORMANCE OF A FIRST CHAPTER OF A FICTIONAL NOVEL AS PROPOSITION (or a minor text in six parts), using the six artist conversations as material to create ‘the first chapter of a novel’. Brian’s Email Performance is a lesson in performative velocity, the ‘when-hits-what-hits-how-hits-who’.

BONANZA! is a playful blend of dance/ film/ digital animation/ artist dialogue, filmed in Alpha60’s Chapter House.  Created by Harrison Hall, Sam Mcgilp and Justin Kane, BONANZA! is ArtxDialogue with guests NAXS Corp (Taiwan) and Lu Yang (China).  An uneasy meeting of nostalgic-futurism, BONANZA! is a lament for our physical bodies and an exaltation of digital reincarnation.

Movement experiments – human, insect and mechanical bodies. This video artwork is a movement experiment between Prue Lang’s choreography, artist Mathieu Briand’s androids and a Phasmid (stick insect). The work explores the body/androids/artificial movement/intelligence on the one side and the body/human instinct/natural movement/nature on the other. Through the creative process, Lang and Briand have observed, responded to and manipulated the complex relationships between these concepts, approaching the distinctions between physical presence vs. artificial presence with curiosity.

Activators 1 unfolds as an offering of art discourse in the format of art event. Developed as a dialogue and presented in three parts, Friedlander and Grogan craft pragmatic tasks that attend to a sharing of curiosity and potentiality, rather than the staging or display of a ‘complete outcome’. Each of the three parts acknowledges and reveals how the artists’ actions/thoughts are imbued with embodied knowledge – choreography, material fabrication, spatial comprehension – as are all actions/thoughts already happening within the site.