Following are links to performance and exhibition videos, ephemera, selected reviews, catalogs, unpublished sketches, zines + more
Here you will find soundworks including live gig recordings, installation soundtracks + original compositions
2020
Fine Print: Issue 22: INTERIORS
Virginia Barratt: labour body
INTERIORS is a specially commissioned edition of fine print magazine focused on short-form film and sonic works that unpack some of these prescient concerns. Through visual and aural language, INTERIORS is a collective response comprised of a vast array of individual approaches to art making whilst in isolation.
INTERIORS features contributions by Roy Ananda (SA), Virginia Barratt (SA), Alycia Bennett & Florian Cinco (AUS/PHL), Alison Currie (SA), Brian Fuata (NSW), Dominic Guerrera (SA), Ray Harris (SA), Cynthia Schwertsik (SA), Kate Power (SA), and Inneke Taalman (SA).
2019
Refresh Art Tech, 205 Hudson, Hunter College and the Knockdown Centre, New York, 2019
REFRESH is a collaborative + politically engaged platform in Art, Science, and Technology. As a collective we begin with inclusion as a starting point for pursuing sustainable artistic and curatorial practices.
Virginia Barratt and Francesca da Rimini, collaborating as In Her Interior, presented an installation Her eyes were as black as coal at 205 Hudson Gallery, an experimental writing workshop Mxtrx Class at the Knockdown Centre, a performance This Platform Life and an artist talk at Hunter College Masters Program.
Refresh Art Tech comprised a two-day conference, an exhibition Refiguring the Future and a workshop and performance component.Tracing how science and technology have shaped the world around us Refresh Art Tech brings forth critical perspectives that offer ways of living differently in relation to land, self, and others that we must take seriously in our current political moment. Participants expand the work science does, taking up other methodologies such as story-telling and speculation, to challenge structural injustices and engage technology by posing new questions and experiments.
find images and video documentation on the gallery page.
RUPTURE (V Barratt, J Boylan, L Dement), Big Anxiety Festival, Esme Timbery CPL, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 2019
I left oscillating between these states, unable to answer the question posed by the artists in their program note: “By considering panic as both urgency and agency, can we begin to see ways of engaging with our catastrophic times?” But I keep worrying at it; Rupture has that kind of power. Keith Gallasch, RealTime
RUPTURE is a collaboration between Virginia Barratt, Jessie Boylan, Linda Dement and Jenna Tukes. Through performance, multi-channel sound, synched video, RUPTURE investigates the ways in which the body and the world mimic each other in modes of panic and crisis. Through a performance of vocalities and gestures sited within a multi-channel video and sound installation, this work interprets how symptoms of environmental and human ‘disorder’ can be seen as an appropriate response to personal traumas and global catastrophe.
find images and video documentation on the gallery page.
2018
RUPTURE (V Barratt, J Boylan, L Dement, J Tukes), Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria, 2018
It is [here] that Barratt immediately captivates, for the sounds early on in the soundtrack (gasps, truncated sighs, barking exhalations and pulses) are laced with a panicky horror-sublime. Her gaze (upon what, when or where?) draws us in, but deflects. Like a Rorschach blot or a kaleidoscope, her shimmering image is sometimes doubled upon itself, even tripled, these ghostly echoes of her body glitching and pulsing. Her multiple limbs extend like those of the goddess Kali, destroyer of evil, in a twitchy sequence of movements that speak to me of distress, but also of transcendence, of connection to the natural world.
An immersive 6 channel video and surround sound installation. The installation is on a 13-minute loop and features breath, environmental field recordings and synthesized sound with manipulated environmental and performance video.
Xenoblood (with Fracesca da Rimini and Alice Nillson), Sister Gallery, 2018
Xenoblood is a multi-platform artwork comprising an online multi-user environment (LambdaMOO), performing avatars, experimental hypertext fiction, and a XenZine workshop (pronounced zeenzeen). The subject is the construction of intentional familiars beyond blood and the nuclear family, in a rather anarchic exploration of Xeno kin(d)ship, queerness and the ties that bind, beyond blood and biological determinism.
While the Xenoblood project is very speculative in its scope, the group are methodologically and politically committed to praxis, that is, the ‘practical application of a theory’ through iterative processes of action/reflection
2015
Haunting: (with Amy Ireland), First Draft, Sydney, 2015
It is a strange and potent experience to encounter these two feminisms, past and present, in dialogue. The performance space, meanwhile, evokes the uncertain space of a radical technological future, with a neon green X marked on the floor across which the women slowly travel, each on her own axis, alternately facing toward and away from us.
Zines: click to download
selected reviews
anna on cementa
sydney video thing – head talking
xenovideo
BABS documentation + video
2016
Somatechnics: The Darkening + Detonation (gallery and link to paper)De-tonation, Virginia Barratt, Eve Klein, AnA Wojak, Somatechnics Conference, Byron Bay, December 2016
Dead End (here)
B.A.B.S., Virginia Barratt, Amy Ireland, Francesca da Rimini, performance, BC Institute, 20th Biennale of Sydney (gallery)
For the 20th Biennale of Sydney, BC Institute created an evolving archive of performance art told from a multiplicity of perspectives. Through participatory performance, re-enactment and lectures, ‘Making History’ examined how feminist methodologies and alternative historiographical approaches can be used to reimagine past acts and events in the here-and-now. Participants included Amy Ireland, Anne Marsh, Eugene Choi, Francesca da Rimini, Mike Parr, Richard Bell, Salote Tawale with Get to Work, Sunday School, and Virginia Barratt.
Thanks to the revival of interest in enigmatic performance artist Barbara Cleveland, a growing catalogue of her works throughout the 1970s is surfacing. It is now well known that Cleveland’s practice was driven by questions of time, myth, and memory fused with an interrogation of the limits of gender and class and their inscription on the body. The incantatory nature of her surviving texts can be read as a proto-ritual for a complex act of self-dissolution. Virginia Barratt, Francesca da Rimini and Amy Ireland pick up the threads of Cleveland’s work beyond the date of her alleged disappearance, weaving a trans-temporal mesh of performative feminist texts. Their intervention involves a re-performance of a long lost script, designed to be executed, as Cleveland would have urged, upon and among the bodies of many.
VNS Matrix, performance (25th anniversary of the Cyberfeminist Manifesto for 21st Century), Femflix, Sydney College of the Arts, August, 2016
Paper Presentation, “!panic! ictic Vocalities” Conversations on Writing, Berlin Colloquium: Writing as Research, Presented by Cultural Studies, The University of Edinburgh School of Architecture and Writing and Society Research Centre, Institute for Cultural History and Theory,Humboldt University, Berlin, 8th July 2016
Paper Presentation, “!panic! ictic Vocalities” Lire Pour Faire International Colloquium, Université Paris 3, Sorbonne Nouvelle, 30th June – 1st July 2016
“panic vocalities”, lecture, Elsewhere and Otherwise, Performing Arts Forum, St. Erme, France, June 23rd-29th 2016
lecture soundtrack
Panelist: ‘Artist-run initiatives: DIY change agents?’ “Ephemeral Traces” Public Program, Univerity of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane, 9th April 2016
Performative reading “!panic! ictic vocalities”, Innovation and Aesthetics in Contemporary Australian Poetry and Poetics Conference, Alley Cat Books, San Francisco April 2016
2015
Barratt V and da Rimini F, headline speakers, “Hexing the Alien” The Cyborg, Disruption Network Lab, Berlin, 30th May 2015
video documentation
photos
Barratt V, D’ath F, Sommer D, Spellfish N, this poem is not a panic, performance, Kunsthaus KuLe, Berlin, 9th July, 2016
photos
Barratt V, Spellfish N, !panic! ictic sonologies, performance, Performing Arts Forum, St. Erme, France
video documentation
soundtrack
Barratt V and Boyd A, “the dead end”, Unnamed laneway, Brisbane, April 2016 as part of “Ephemeral Traces” Public Program, University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane, April 2016
video documentation
Barratt and Boyd website
Barratt V and Ireland A, “X”, Hauntings, First Draft, Woolloomooloo, September 2015
realtime arts review
Cryptocrystalline: Technomancy (divination) GOLD: Performative reading, Cementa 15, Kandos, NSW 13th April 2015