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The Gertrude Street Projection Festival (GSPF) returns in 2023, weaving together art, community, public spaces and sublime light installations within a nightly setting on Gertrude Street in the inner-north Naarm/Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy, from 27 July to 6 August.
Presented by The Centre for Projection Art, GSPF presents new work by eleven artists-in-residence – Sarah Aiken, Tully Arnot, Chantal Bala, Lilah Benetti, Jamali Bowden and Leitu Bonnici, The ElectroPoetics (Bixiao Zhang), Alana Hunt, The Huxleys and Rose Chong, Tahlia Palmer, Juan Rodriguez Sandoval, Naina Sen, Melody Woodnutt, and Henry Lai-Pyne – alongside community and collaborative projects, events, parties, talks and screenings.
Sarah Aiken, The Zoom Out (Make Your Life Count) (still), 2023, performance, video with audio by Andrew Wilson
Kicking off with the Festival’s Opening Party at Collingwood Yards on Thursday 27 July, 5.30–8.30pm, curated by the newly-formed E.merge Agency, GSPF highlights include:
Naina Sen’s Vortex, in collaboration with Bábbarra Women’s Centre, explores the tangible and intangible spaces suspended between time and place. Experimenting with film, paint, oil and milk, this is a deeply personal work borne out of the ebbs and flows of longing and displacement with being indefinitely separated from her family and her sense of home through the most recent pandemic.
Letters at Play, a moving image animation by Jamali Bowden and Leitu Bonnici, draws from our first introductions to letters and punctuation from our childhood to expand our understanding of what letters are. The poetic captions in this piece take their cues from schoolyard rhymes, found in the likes of clapping games, jump rope, the alphabet song and “I before E except after C” that are used to bring us into the rules of the English language. The work is a playful and inventive approach that explores language and letterforms on all scales, from semantics to typographic construction.
Developed during the Australian bushfires, the ongoing climate crisis, and the early days of the pandemic, Tully Arnot’s Epiphytes uses implied forms of nature to elicit emotional distress at a loss of natural environments while also encouraging a more symbiotic and interconnected way of being in the world.
ElectroPoetics Enlivening Decay by Bixiao Zhang incorporates AI and online archival data as a digital substrate for speculative mattering. The animated work interweaves the historical events of Gertrude Street, highlighting its large-scale demolition or “slum clearance” in the post-war period. The project explores algorithmic assemblage’s potential for exploring unexpected mattering and untold stories as praxis of care.
Sarah Aiken’s The Zoom Out (Make Your Life Count) attempts to shift perspective and soften the focus on the individual, to lose sight of one’s self in the patterns of community, ecology and history. The Zoom Out works with video material from live performance Make Your Life Count, 2022, a work that looks up close at the self and considers authorship and the performance of identity: building, multiplying, destroying and replacing a Sarah who is her own protagonist – a hero in a neoliberal dream, self-actualised at all costs and pitted against all others. The individual is swollen to grotesque importance and reduced to an ineffectual, even invisible impotence.
GSPF X Collingwood College collaboration with Year 5, 6, 7, and 8 students, plus artists Rali Beynon and James Henry, present the animated dreamscape Creature Feature, exploring diverse environments, blending drawing, watercolour and digital animation techniques. Combining imagery of natural and mystical forms, the animated projection developed into a site-specific imaginary biome, travelling into scenes, panning across series of masks and characters until reaching the animated GIFs the students created, which function like DNA or micro-organisms at the heart of this otherworldly space.
