Dance the War of Proximity

Tina Stefanou is a Greek-Australian artist whose practice spans experimental film, performance, vocalisation, socially engaged research, and sculptural installation. She explores acts of singing as a political potential of aesthetics, using voice and its energetic and material capacities to engage questions of identity, belonging, instrumentality, and power. 'Dance the War of Proximity' is a multi-channel video installation developed with ten young performers and three movement artists. Filmed across sites of collection, conservation, and surveillance including botanic gardens, summits, and zoological grounds, the work navigates themes of enclosure, valuation, distribution, symbiosis, chorusing, and the politics of coming of age. It gestures toward alternate modes of making and sensing that momentarily suspend boundaries between performer and environment, self and other, human and more-than-human, labour and leisure. The exhibition also features a new sculptural sound installation in which Stefanou transforms the damaged remnants of an automobile into a resonant embroidery, turning a fractured familial object into a durational act of tending articulated through sound, touch, and time.