An exhibition of live performance and installation exploring healing through the body and costume.
HOSSEI’s performances, installations and sculptural works combine his experiences as an educator and carer, with an abiding interest in costume, spectacle, ritual and choral performance. HOSSEI repurposes industrial and household items, building and hardware supplies, deadstock textiles, and other readily available materials as wearable costumes and accessories. Working collaboratively with seamstresses, HOSSEI embues his costumes with 'talismanic' properties; singing into bags so that the wearer can carry music with them, or placing lucky charms or blessings in the stitches of clothing to underscore their reparative potential.
Through live performance, sculpture and installation HOSSEI explores the extraordinary potential of everyday things to act as vessels for joy and healing. Acting as both exaggerations and extensions of the body, HOSSEI’s costumes are animated through euphoric live performances. As fantastical sculptures, his costumes live on through riotous installations that affirm the potential of the spirit and endow everyday things with a new materiality and purpose. The exhibition's title, O, is at once a mouth shape, a body held, and a portal to the otherworldly.
Conceived as an extended catalogue of his practice, ho55ei ~ BLESSSENSE bags and accessories will be exclusively available for purchase in the gallery during the exhibition. O follows an extended period of material research, collaborative experimentation and play, developed through HOSSEI's 2022-23 UTS Artist in Residence program.
About the artist
HOSSEI (b. 1985, Tehran) is a multidisciplinary Australian artist with Persian, Turkish and Russian ancestry. Across performance, voice and choral performance, his practice addresses his heritage, fantasies and feelings, and notions of togetherness and healing. He adopts themes of secrecy, the unconscious, theatricality and mysticism to create surreal scenarios through real and imagined characters. Recently his work has addressed his mother as a subject, entering her psyche and telling her life experiences and stories.
HOSSEI holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours) of Fine Arts at Sydney College of the Arts. HOSSEI was selected for Primavera 2014: Young Australian Artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. his work has been included in programs for Parramatta Artist Studios’, Artspace, SCA and Dark Mofo. He was a Parramatta Artist Studios resident (2014-2015), an Artspace resident artist (2016), and a PAS Open Digital Resident (2021-2022). HOSSEI will present a new commission in 2023 for West Space gallery at Collingwood Yards, Melbourne. HOSSEI is the recipient of 2022 UTS Artist in Residence where he will work with the faculty of Design, Architecture and Building for 12 months. The residency culminates in public presentation of new work at UTS in 2023.
Exhibition publication
O is accompanied by a publication with an essay by Associate Professor Timo Rissanen and an interview between the HOSSEI and Claire Finneran. These reflections on HOSSEI 's practice are interleaved with reproductions of the artist's drawings and colour documentation of featured costumes and sculptural objects.
Design by Daryl Prondoso
Gallery directions
UTS Gallery
Level 4, Peter Johnson Building (Building 6)
702 Harris St, Ultimo,
University of Technology, Sydney
The 2021 - 2022 UTS Artist in Residence program is generously supported by the UTS Faculty of Engineering and IT, the Faculty of Design, Architecture and the Built Environment and is administered by UTS Gallery & Art Collection. This project is supported by City of Sydney's Quick Response Grant.
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Banner image: HOSSEI, O, 2022. Photo: Jacquie Manning.
Related event
Performance: O 2.0
Saturday 29 April
2pm - 4pm
Join us for the final live performance by HOSSEI
