Animal Nation crated by Simon Pericich

BEN LADEN
Humanimal, 2019
One night only durational performance for the opening of Animal Nation, CCTV documentation

For the past 25 years, Ben Laden has trained and worked transformation techniques and sensorial performance. Beginning with several years of training in mime and dance in London during the early 1990s, Ben then went on to work with the Colombian theatre/dark circus company, El Tetro de los Sentidos (The Theatre of the Senses) on two productions; ‘El Hilo de Ariana’ (The Thread of Ariadne) in 94/95 and ‘Oraculos’ (The Oracle) in 1997. The two shows toured widely in Europe involved marathon performance stints in large low-light installation environments. He returned to Australia to work with the company Kaos Theatre and then formed his own company, The Eater Presents in the early 2000s. He returned to Europe during this time to perform in Milan for LIS company on the production, ‘Nei Sensi la Notte’ (Senses in the Night).

Animal Nation curated by Simon Pericich

CHRISTIAN BISHOP
Totemism and Exogamy, 2019
wood, metal, hair and resin
190 x 110 x 125 cm

I ENQUIRE I

Christian Bishop (b 1973) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. Bishop’s work explores identity and landscape as a relationship in continual flux and upheaval. He creates immersive installations, gallery interventions and site activations in the landscape through a practice which encompasses printmaking, sculpture and sound.

Totemism and Exogamy explores the future of ‘nature’ in the Anthropocene. In a geological epoch marked by the impact of human activity on our planet, what does the future of animal, vegetable and mineral look like when all increasingly share elements of the human? From micro plastics in our oceans, to carbon found in the strata of our rock, to the mutation of antibiotic-resistant viral strains, human activity can be traced in all lifeforms on our planet. Inversely, how will these new understandings of the nonhuman affect our understanding of human-ness? What will evolve to survive the Anthropocene? To paraphrase Donna Haraway, how might humans and other species evolve ways to ‘stay with the trouble’ our time presents, and find ways to ‘live and die together’ on a damaged planet?

Bishops’ sculptural forms subvert notions of the natural and the human-made. Wood, metal and resin coalesce, creating forms both defensive, yet vulnerable - evoking both sacred and profane forms. These tentative forms are speculative gestures - the materialisation of futures not yet here, but whose presence looms ghostly on the horizon.

Exogamy is marrying outside of one’s clan; a cross pollination, collaboration with, and the creation of ‘kin’ beyond biological family. Totemism is a system of belief where humans are said to have a mystical relationship between a spirit, sometimes an animal or plant. Totemism and Exogamy asks after the possibilities of both - how might humans and other species collaborate with each other in new types of worlding, in creation of new assemblages, new correspondences, new collaborations and to find new ways to survive or thrive in a time of rapid acceleration?