Critical Path has partnered with The Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab (C-LAB) and the Cultural Division of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Sydney, Australia, to co-organise the 2022-2024 Taiwan and Australia Choreography Exchange Program. This is the 2nd year of the partnership and supports choreographers interrogating technology to undertake a month-long collaboration intensive at The Drill Hall, Rushcutters bay and Bundanon Artist Trust.
“May this 3-year choreographic and digital technology collaboration become an example of how to support artists to interrogate our shared physical futures, because even a ‘digital future’ will also be a physical one.” – M@ (Curator interrogating technology and choreography at Critical Path)
“As a leading research and development choreographic centre, we are delighted to continue working with C-LAB and the Cultural Division of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office with the shared belief that it is only through long-term partnerships that genuine cross-cultural exchanges are nurtured and that artists may build deep collaborative relationships.” – Agnès Michelet-Sullivan (Director and CEO for Critical Path)
The 2023 artist-in-collaboration were:
Photo courtesy of 田子平. Pictured from left:
The artists were mentored by a number of experienced, award winning professionals working at the leading edge of choreographic and digital practises including Eisa Jocson, Stuart Buchanan, Linda Dement, Angela Goh and Su Yu-Hsin, and Dr Josh Harle of Tactical Space Lab, as well as guests including Sarah Aiken, Alice Weber, Solomon Thomas and Travis De Vries. The artists were also invited delegates to LiveWorks 2023 by Performance Space.
This month-long studio intensive included opportunities for art-form peers to visit and engage the artists during their works-in-progress.
This program is hosted by Critical Path’s resident artist and curator interrogating technology and choreography – M@ aka Matt Cornell – who has spent time onsite at C-LAB in Taipei in aid of this multi-year exchange.
Link to C-LAB press release
Link to Cultural Division of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Sydney, Australia press release
More info on the 2023 mentors:
Eisa Jocson: exposes body politics in the service and entertainment industry as seen through the unique socioeconomic lens of the Philippines. She studies how the body moves and what conditions make it move – be it social mobility or movement out of Philippines through migrant work. In all her creations – from pole to macho dancing and hostess to Disney princess studies – capital is the driving force of movement pushing the indentured body into spatial geographies.
Stuart Buchanan: is a cultural programmer, music curator and digital producer. Born and raised in Scotland, he now lives in the Blue Mountains, on the lands of the Darug people. Stuart works as Head of Digital Programming for Sydney Opera House and runs the experimental music label New Weird Australia and its companion series, New Editions. He previously founded and curated the Provenance and Wood And Wire record labels, and has programmed many music events across Sydney.
Linda Dement: has worked in arts computing since the late 1980s. Originally a photographer, her digital practice spans the programmed, performative, textual and virtual dealing with bodies and technologies, code and flesh, dramas of the corporeal and programmed non-human activity.
Riana Head-Toussaint: is an interdisciplinary disabled/crip artist of Afro-Caribbean heritage. Her work often crosses traditional artform boundaries, and exists in online and offline spaces. Her choreographic practice is deeply informed and influenced by her movement language and embodied-experience as a wheelchair-user, and her self-taught/DIY artistic background and production methodologies. She makes both site-responsive, iterative work and more discrete projects; and her work often involves self-performance, film and sound design. She creates works that interrogate entrenched systems, structures and ways of thinking; and advocate for social change. She is also a lawyer, curator and DJ.
Angela Goh and Su Yu-Hsin (regarding their collaboration):
Angela Goh is an artist who works with dance and choreography. Her work is presented in contemporary art contexts and traditional performance spaces. Angela’s Goh’s new work, ‘Pattern Recognition’, will be performed by the artist in the gallery. Angela Goh’s work has recently been presented at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, the Sydney Opera House, Sydney, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, and a range of venues in Asia, Europe and North America including Performance Space New York, Auto Italia, Baltic Circle, Shedhalle, and Taipei Performing Arts Center. Goh’s film ’The Concert’ was commissioned by the Sydney Opera House and presented in 2022.
Su Yu-Hsin (b.1989) is a Taiwanese artist and filmmaker currently based in Berlin. She approaches ecology from the point of view of its close relationship with technology. In her film and video installations, her artistic research reflects on technology, ecology, and the critical infrastructure in which the human and non-human converge. Her analytical and poetic storytelling focuses on map-making, operational photography, and the technical production of geographical knowledge. Su has participated in group exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou-Metz (2021), Museum of Contemporary Art Busan (2021), Taipei Biennial (2020), ZKM Karlsruhe (2020), Kyoto Art Center (2020), UCCA Center for Contemporary Art (2020), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2019), and Junín Contemporary Art Museum (2018). She was a finalist in the 8th Huayu Youth Award (2020) and LOOP Barcelona Discover (2018).
More info on the 2023 artists-in-collaboration:
Roslyn Orlando is a multidisciplinary artist working across live performance, video, text and experimental music. She is interested in the ways new technologies produce language, communication and meaning. Her work explores how these networked systems infiltrate, co-opt and disrupt our ontologies, emotional transmissions and experiences of time, memory, death, desire, friendship and other socially formed cognitions.
Lee Ming-Chieh is an independent choreographer born in 1989 in Taiwan. Her recent artworks are focusing on the phenomenon of “Nomadicity of current generation” that people long for moving and yet search for sense of security in it at the same time. She usually focused on the dynamic of body, objects and things as the main mediums for her research related to memory and time, and further discussed the flowing performativity of body and space.
Dr Rachael Gunn (Bgirl Raygun) is a Lecturer in the Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language and Literature at Macquarie University. She holds a PhD in Cultural Studies, and her primary area of research is the gender politics and performances within breaking (breakdancing) culture. More broadly, she is interested in ‘street’ dance cultures, performances of gender, the construction and creative possibility of the dancing body, and the methodological dynamics between theory and practice.
Tian Zi-Ping works mainly focus on the reflection towards the technical production and media era, and also attempt to achieve the multi-perspective artwork through the creative process. Tian shifts between roles of audio visual technician, visual designer, and executive producer of new media devices at exhibition and theatre.
Press coverage can be found at these links:
- Taiwan In Australia FB page
- Chinese News Australia
- Owl News
To read about year 1 of the partnership (2022), please click to download the wrap up (PDF A2) poster for 2022 or email [email protected] to collect a printed poster for your wall.
And click below to read about the specific Labs of 2022.
Physical Futures Digital Exchange Residency
This exchange is digitally hosted on data servers sit atop unceded lands of displaced first peoples, and the connecting fibre-optic submarine data cable runs through the lands and waters of many displaced first peoples across what recently became known as East Asia, Southeast Asia and Oceania.
Both the Critical Path Drill Hall dance studio and CLAB campus are former military research sites that sit atop lands of displaced first peoples and we acknowledge their ongoing connection and custodianship.
