Their Sea is Always Hungry is a solo exhibition by Australian-Balinese artist Leyla Stevens. Encompassing new works in video and installation, the exhibition explores the spectral trace of Indonesia’s 1965–66 anti-communist killings and the hidden histories that contest its position as an island paradise.
Their Sea is Always Hungry uses speculative and documentary modes of filmmaking to consider the impact of the silenced history of Indonesia’s 1965–66 mass violence in which a reported 80,000 people died in Bali alone. In counterpoint, the exhibition features a feminist retelling of the 1970s cult surf film, Morning of the Earth, which sold a vision of Bali as an exotic surfer paradise, particularly within the Australian imagination.
About the artist
Leyla Stevens is an Australian-Balinese artist and researcher who works predominantly with moving image. Working within modes of representation that shift between documentary and speculative fictions, her work deals with a notion of counter histories and alternative genealogies. Stevens holds an MFA by Research from Sydney College of the Arts and since graduating in 2011 her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally. Past exhibitions and selections include: the 2018 John Fries Award at UNSW Galleries; BEAUT 19, Triennale of Unwhere, Brisbane, 2019; Of Love and Decomposition, Firstdraft, 2016; the 2014 NSW Visual Arts Fellowship (Emerging) at Artspace; and SafARI, 2014. She is currently undertaking doctoral research at the University of Technology Sydney, which has been supported in part by an Australian Postgraduate Award.
Exhibition publication
The Their Sea is Always Hungry publication is presented as a foldout poster with an essay by Alia Swatika and translation by Elly Kent, and a list of works.
Design by Daryl Prondoso
Spectra: The Art and Consequence of Collaboration presents eight Australian artists whose practices are characterised by a deep and innovative engagement with science.
The exhibition explores the increasing convergence of art and science, and considers how each area can inform the other. The potency of crossdisciplinary collaboration lies in its ability to spark new ideas, provide critical perspectives on some of the great questions of our time, and develop new forms of expression that speak to the sophisticated technological era in which we live.
Produced by ANAT
Curated by Experimenta
Curator: Jonathan Parsons
Associate Curator: Nicky Pastore
What do outer space capsules, submarines, and office buildings have in common? Each was conceived as a closed system: partial reconstructions of the world in time and in space.
Featuring an archive of 41 historical living prototypes from 1927 to the present – an unexplored genealogy of closed resource regeneration systems – Closed Worlds documents a disciplinary transformation and the rise of a new environmental consensus.
Curated by Lydia Kallipoliti
Graphic and Exhibition Design by Pentagram / Natasha Jen
Virtual Reality Experience by Amber Bartosh
Catalogue Essay by Francesca Hughes
Originally commissioned by the Storefront for Art and Architecture
Supported by the UTS School of Architecture
Exhibition publication
Closed Worlds features a publication featuring an essay by Francesca Hughes, Head of School, UTS School of Architecture.
Design by Daryl Prondoso.
After Technology asks what becomes of love, the body, culture, family, community, nature, identity and communication after technology?
After Technology explores the bind of progress, charting the anxieties, opportunities and costs of emerging technologies. The centrality of the body in the works shown here is not accidental; there is a frail boundary between us and the technologies we build, and these artists underscore the human heart that beats at the centre of the technological corpus.
The exhibition takes a local perspective on the question of technology, considering how Australian artists have registered the rise of technologies since the 1990s; from the emerging science of genetic testing and the effect of military technologies on civilian life, to the bleed between life online and IRL created by technologies of representation and information.
Curators: Stella Rosa McDonald and Eleanor Zeichner
Exhibition publication
The publication for After Technology is presented as a foldout poster with an essay by curators Stella Rosa McDonald and Eleanor Zeichner, and a list of works.
Design by Daryl Prondoso.
