ISEA June 2024
23 June 2024
On the Precipice of Forgetting
The Digital Gallery, City of Canada Bay June 2024
20 June 2024
Inscribed Echo Wall at the Temple of Heavens
Reenactment at the the Echo Wall (referencing Whitlam's viisit in 1973
This is a black-and-white photograph of the Australian Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam during his historic visit to China between 31 October and 4 November 1973. Dressed in a long coat, Whitlam has his ear to part of the circular Echo Wall in the Temple of Heaven in Beijing. Further along the wall, others are doing the same. Among a small crowd watching Whitlam is Australia’s first ambassador to China, Stephen Fitzgerald, dressed in a coat and tie. Beside him, with her arms crossed, is a Chinese interpreter. https://www.naa.gov.au/students-and-teachers/learning-resources/learning-resource-themes/government-and-democracy/prime-ministers-and-politicians/gough-whitlam-visiting-echo-wall-diplomatic-trip-china
Chatting | 6 April
06 April 2023
Performance Week 7 | John Tonkin & Robyn Backen
Chatting | John Tonkin & Robyn Backen at Old Teachers College, SCA - Performance evening
Cementa Online Studio Tour
22 January 2023
As part of the Cementa, Studio Tour in January, alongside other selected works, Robyn will present a glimpse of a virtual world tour. Inviting the audience to experience the magic of her whispering wall research, created over eight years, is the result of a slowly evolving project.
https://vimeo.com/user33556218
Seminar DeTox – Clean it up!: Place-based Artistic Practice | Wed 4 May 5-7pm
04 May 2022
Not for Export lecture performance documentation, video still Daniel Peltz
The Sydney Environment Institute, in partnership with the Sydney College of the Arts, invites you to a seminar that explores place-based artistic practice.
Artist Daniel Peltz is the FASS, University of Sydney 2022 International Gilbert Fellow and will introduce the most recent developments of his multi-layered project DeTox / Clean it up!. Working in a small glass-factory town in Rejmyre, Sweden, this long-term project considers the problem of industrial waste contamination from the perspective of the social; how do we, as a community, clean our abandoned, soiled selves and the ground beneath our feet?
Join us for an online immersive discussion unravelling questions like, how do we find the value of the place where we are living, and ourselves within that place, when both of these things have been systematically devalued? What role can art play in this process?
Speakers
Robyn Backen (Chair) is a Sydney based artist and a Senior Lecturer at SCA, University of Sydney. Over the past two decades, her artworks have evolved from a deep intrigue into communication and telephonic systems. Drawing upon new and defunct technology research, she builds works that investigate pattern systems referencing language, nature, and remembering. Robyn’s work is not bound by medium or scale, with large public commissions contrasting against smaller sound and light works.
Daniel Peltz is an artist and Professor of Time and Space Arts with a specialization in Site and Situation Specific Practices at the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts Helsinki. Through public projects, performances and media installations, Peltz’ artworks explore complex social systems, attempting to provoke ruptures in the socio/cultural fabric through which new ways of being may emerge and be considered. To accomplish these goals, he uses a range of intervention, ethnographic and performance strategies. His projects often take the form of existing social systems to directly engage non-art audiences in the language of critical art practice.
Marco Marcon was born in Italy and migrated to Australia in 1985. Marcon has worked as editor of Praxis M, the former Western Australian journal of contemporary art, and lecturer at several universities. In 1998 he co-founded SPACED (formerly known as IASKA), an organisation he has been directing ever since. Marcon has a substantial publication record comprising many dozens of articles and essays that have appeared in magazines, journals, art catalogues and books.
https://sei.sydney.edu.au/events/detox-clean-it-up-place-based-artistic-practice/
LINK to unedited Seminar Presentation | not for public disribution
At the Edge: Personal Reflections on Stasis and Process Within Lockdown
22 December 2021
Literary Purdah
Drawing upon personal experiences of Sydney’s 2021 Covid-19 lockdown, Robyn Backen traces elegant lines between vanished plans, future possibilities and the moments and matter in between.