Key Artists
Gretel Taylor Artist/Curator
Gretel performs site-responsive dance works and curates place-based art experiences. Her focus on place has illumined her art and performance practice through lenses of ecology, history and decolonisation. Her practice-led PhD investigated relationships to place in Australia through site-specific performance and an improvisational practice of ‘locating’.
Recent work includes performing in We were children, Blayne Welsh's verbatim theatre work, developed with survivors of Kinchela Boys Home, Carriageworks 2023. She collaborated with Gülsen Özer on From Where I Stand for Invisible Winds, curated by Tammy Wong Hulbert, Marnie Badham & Pia Johnson at Climarte Gallery. Solo performance Restless won Best Site-specific Work for Immerse public art program, 2021. She is an internationally recognised researcher/writer on dance, performance, art and place.
Curatorial projects include Live Actions @ Burrinja Climate Change Biennale, 2023; Falling into Place, Hastings 2022; Dancing Place: Corhanwarrabul, 2020; Poetics of Home, City of Melbourne & Dance (Lens), 2020; Force of Nature, 2018.
Gülsen Özer Artist/Assistant Curator
Gülsen Özer is a multidisciplinary artist, choreographer, curator, facilitator, and project manager working in performance, sound, visual and conceptual art, installation and public art. Özer engages in dynamic collaborative work processes that often involve community engagement. Her practice extends from the studio into the public realm and consistently interrogates power dynamics.
Özer has created contemporary art works in museums and galleries (including TarraWarra, Arts House, MOMA, Bunjil Place) and performance spaces (Malthouse Theatre, Dancehouse, Theatreworks) as well as large-scale community events (Ausdance); participatory installations, site-specific, and public art works.
Özer uses the power of live performance and object and installation design to facilitate a re-enchantment of embodiment, relationships, and presence.
Two short films, Cascade and Split Rock, created with Vanessa White and Ania Reynolds, have received international acclaim.
Tammy Wong Hulbert 黄雪慧 Artist
Dr Tammy Wong Hulbert is an artist, curator and academic at RMIT University School of Art, lecturing in Masters of Arts (Arts Management) specialising in curating. Being Australian born Chinese has influenced Tammy's ongoing specialisation in contemporary Asian art. Tammy's art and curating focuses on inclusive cities, enacted through site-specific collaborations with marginalised communities, to represent their perspectives. Recent projects include Becoming Home: Stories of Chinese-Australians, Artspace Realm (2022) and To the fallen trees... The Big Anxiety Festival, One Tree Hill, 2021. She was awarded an Australian Council of University of Art and Design (ACUADS) for Innovative Research (2021). Tammy's art practice stems from her interest in expressing the multi-layered and fragmented space between cultures as a result of living in a super-diverse, postcolonial society.
As a curator she has worked with a wide range of Asian and Australian contemporary artists in Sydney, Melbourne, Beijing, Shanghai, Suzhou and Hong Kong, in galleries, museums and public spaces, most recently curating Closer Together, RMIT Gallery, Melbourne, 2023 & Pao Galleries, Hong Kong Arts Centre, 2024, a cross-cultural exhibition of contemporary art by Hong Kong and Australian artists.
Laki Sideris Artist/Photographer
Laki Sideris is a Melbourne-based award-winning photographer and filmmaker, originally from Lefkada, Greece. He has a strong interest in exploring the relationship between people and their environment using a documentary approach.
Laki has exhibited widely including being two times featured artist at the Head On Photo Festival in Sydney, as well as being awarded first and third prizes. He has exhibited in group and solo shows across Australia, including a solo show at the Centre of Contemporary Photography in Melbourne, and being the inaugural featured artist on their Billboard Arts Program. He has been a finalist in many photography awards including the Moran Contemporary Photography Prize (four times) and the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography Award. In 2021 he was a finalist in the Martin Kantor Portrait Prize for Ballarat Foto Biennale.
Lately he has been working with Gretel Taylor in creating place-specific performative works in video and still formats, evolving a collaborative process that is kinaesthetic and immersive. See here for examples.