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
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
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.
13 October 2021
The Spirit of 21 is streaming on 15 and 16 October.
Check out the website by @ianhobbs_media with designer @huy____ and film editing @bobk_o
I will make an appearance with a short film made while barricading myself into my studio - see the Open Mic on Friday 15th at 3pm.
https://cementa.com.au/spirit.php
Still from 'Literary Purdah' 2021
Still from 'Literary Purdah' 2021
Collaboration with Oskar Backent (editor), Ian Hobbs and Robyn Backen 2020-21
19 August 2021
Birds and Language Conference (online) 19-20 Aug 2021
This website contains works for a pop-up exhibition of site-specific artworks intended initially for the new SCA campus to accompany the Birds and Language Conference (19 — 20 August 2021), The University of Sydney. These works would have been displayed alongside vitrines of taxidermy birds and other bird artefacts once used as pedagogical tools for students learning to become science teachers. Many of the works critique systems that order, classify and categorise nature to exploitative ends.
POP-UP Exhibition Squarespace website
Cryptovoxels | (view instructions on YouTube)
Conference Programme (pdf, 350KB)
Speaker bios and abstracts (pdf, 500KB) Virtual pop-up event
Organised by Madeleine Kelly (madeleine.kelly@sydney.edu.au)
25 January 2021
In January 2021 I was fortunate to spend 3 weeks working with Barbara Campbell in the letter press workshop at the Fisher Library. Became total absorbed in the obsessive selecting of individual letters to create a drawing. "Clean it up!" Print
Left: The set up with black frame called the "chase", and the objects on the side and top are the "quoins". Right: the completed print "For Eduardo"
Working space
Close up of the
"Precipice" series in the rack
Fisher Library is the home to a printing workshop housing an Albion letterpress printer, affectionately known as the Piscator Press. The Albion printing press was purchased by the library in the early 1960s and it was the passion of former University Librarian, Harrrison Bryan. The workshop also houses a second, smaller printing press. A 3D printer is also available for use in the library. https://library.sydney.edu.au/collections/rare-books/events/printer-in-residence/
