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In this final episode of Regional Assembly's Conversations with the Assembly, Zahid Rafiq reads 'Frog In The Mouth' from his upcoming debut book, The World With Its Mouth Open. Introduction by Abdul Halik Azeez.
Conversations with the Assembly (Series 2) is a podcast that delves deep with practitioners from Regional Assembly—an online artist studio connecting creative practitioners living and working in regional and remote locations in Asia, the Pacific and First Nations unceded territories across Australia. Each episode will foreground distinct voices and amplify, challenge and entwine the many threads of discourse and dialogue that unfold during Regional Assembly.
To read more about the Regional Assembly click here: https://regionalarts.com.au/programs/regionalassembly
To read more about Regional Arts Australia click here: https://regionalarts.com.au/about/about-regional-arts-australia
The Regional Assembly is a Regional Arts Australia program delivered through the Regional Arts Fund. The Regional Arts Fund supports cultural development in regional, remote and rural communities in Australia. The program is managed by Regional Arts Australia on behalf of the Australian Government.
Join Jade Dewi Tyass Tunggal and Jacky Cheng in discussion with Alana Hunt for the sixth episode of our second series of Conversations with the Assembly.
Jade Dewi Tyas Tunggal is a Javanese Australian dancer, choreographer and creative collaborator. Born in Darkinjung country NSW her work has been made and shared nationally and internationally. She has ancestry of Australian Scottish Viking convict-settlers, kinship ties with Borobudur Temple 800AD and is a direct descendant of Yogyakarta’s first Sultan 1755, Kangjeng Hamengku Buwana.
Jacky Cheng was born in Malaysia of Chinese heritage, and now resides in Yawuru Country, Broome, WA. Her practice is fundamentally about identity and awareness through cultural activities and memories of home, country, and relationships. Her awareness was amplified through her diasporic identity as a Chinese descendant in foreign borders as she continues to question her notion of 'home' and 'belonging' - 'here and there' and the 'in between'.
Alana Hunt coordinates Regional Assembly. She also makes art and writes, finding ways for this material to move affectively through the public sphere and the social space between people. She has worked with journalists, filmmakers, human rights defenders and lawyers on works that unfold over many years, with gradual yet accumulating resonance. The iterative memorial Cups of nun chai (2010-20) was serialised in 86 editions of Kashmir Reader (2016–17). In late 2023, Hunt completed Surveilling a Crime Scene (2023) a film that examines the materialisation of non-indigenous life on Miriwoong Country in the town of Kununurra and its surrounds. Hunt has exhibited nationally and internationally and is the recipient of a number of awards, most recently the 2023 STILL: National Still Life Award judged by Max Delany at Yarrila Arts and Museum, Coffs Harbour.
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Jade Dewi Tyass Tunggal: I was homesick for the bush, for the beach, and I was realising the treasures of learning, for me to come back home. That was a big incentive, and that was around 2000, I think I had a paranoia about the Y2K bug. And I was surviving as a dancer in New York city—getting really cold—and I was like “I’ve gotta back to an Australian Summer”.
Jacky Cheng: It’s very interesting because it’s almost like, you and I, we’re both traversing the in between terrain. Wanting to go back to Yogyakarta, and learn, because you’re missing home and the bush here in Australia, but also wanting that tradition. But it’s the same thing for me. When I came to Australia and I did all the things that I thought—I was looking West, and I was so excited to be amongst it, because I wasn’t reflecting on myself as being of Asian identity, or being a person of colour. And then I realised I didn’t quite fit in, and when I went back home to Malaysia for the first time I realised, “Oh, this is really who I am!”. So I was finding that terrain and trying to realise what it really truly means in terms of encapsulating that idea of our identity. So it’s very refreshing to hear that from you as well Jade.
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Conversations with the Assembly (Series 2) is a podcast that delves deep with practitioners from Regional Assembly—an online artist studio connecting creative practitioners living and working in regional and remote locations in Asia, the Pacific and First Nations unceded territories across Australia. Each episode will foreground distinct voices and amplify, challenge and entwine the many threads of discourse and dialogue that unfold during Regional Assembly.
To read more about the Regional Assembly click here: https://regionalarts.com.au/programs/regionalassembly
To read more about Regional Arts Australia click here: https://regionalarts.com.au/about/about-regional-arts-australia
The Regional Assembly is a Regional Arts Australia program delivered through the Regional Arts Fund. The Regional Arts Fund supports cultural development in regional, remote and rural communities in Australia. The program is managed by Regional Arts Australia on behalf of the Australian Government.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Regional Arts Australia.
Join Abdul Halik Azeez and Alana Hunt in discussion for the fifth episode of our second series of Conversations with the Assembly.
Abdul Halik Azeez’s work examines technologies of power as mediated through contemporary culture, narratives of progress, lived experiences and new media processes. His multidisciplinary practice predominantly draws from post-war transformations impacting Sri Lanka such as gentrification, economic crises, tourism, and renewed ultranationalist politics. Collaboration plays a key role in Azeez’s work. In 2019, he co-founded The Packet, a collective of emerging artists from Sri Lanka which has worked extensively with publications and digital interventions including artist books, browser based art and site specific installations.
Alana Hunt coordinates Regional Assembly. She also makes art and writes, finding ways for this material to move affectively through the public sphere and the social space between people. She has worked with journalists, filmmakers, human rights defenders and lawyers on works that unfold over many years, with gradual yet accumulating resonance. The iterative memorial Cups of nun chai (2010-20) was serialised in 86 editions of Kashmir Reader (2016–17). In late 2023, Hunt completed Surveilling a Crime Scene (2023) a film that examines the materialisation of non-indigenous life on Miriwoong Country in the town of Kununurra and its surrounds. Hunt has exhibited nationally and internationally and is the recipient of a number of awards, most recently the 2023 STILL: National Still Life Award judged by Max Delany at Yarrila Arts and Museum, Coffs Harbour.
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Halik: One other thing that struck me in one of the conversations that I was reading was how you said you were less confident when it comes to exhibition making and presenting your work in exhibitions. And that’s something I can also strongly relate to. Sometimes you begin to localise your work in the end product, the object that comes out of it. Whether it’s the video, or the photographs that are made, or the writing that’s done. You start to think it’s perhaps the presenting of these objects and you obsess about the perfect way to present it given the constrained space or resources.
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Conversations with the Assembly (Series 2) is a podcast that delves deep with practitioners from Regional Assembly—an online artist studio connecting creative practitioners living and working in regional and remote locations in Asia, the Pacific and First Nations unceded territories across Australia. Each episode will foreground distinct voices and amplify, challenge and entwine the many threads of discourse and dialogue that unfold during Regional Assembly.
To read more about the Regional Assembly click here: https://regionalarts.com.au/programs/regionalassembly
To read more about Regional Arts Australia click here: https://regionalarts.com.au/about/about-regional-arts-australia
The Regional Assembly is a Regional Arts Australia program delivered through the Regional Arts Fund. The Regional Arts Fund supports cultural development in regional, remote and rural communities in Australia. The program is managed by Regional Arts Australia on behalf of the Australian Government.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Regional Arts Australia.
Kate Just is a queer American/Australian artist of Polish, Irish, Scottish and German descent who lives and works on Dja Dja Wurrung Country in Victoria. Just is best known for her inventive and political use of knitting. In addition to her solo practice, Just often works socially and collaboratively within communities to create large scale, public art projects that tackle significant social issues including LGBTQIA rights, sexual harassment and violence against women. Her work creates space for viewers to closely reflect on their own relationship to art, feminism, care and social justice.
Infused with a sharp feminist take, in this conversation with Alana Hunt that took place in January 2024, Kate reflects on recent bodies of work including Protest Signs (2022), Self Care Action (2023) and Fifty Rules for Making Art (2023-24); community and activism in regional Victoria; adopting family, and moving with grief. Follow Kate on instagram @katejustknits
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She said, “you have to come home, you have to”. So I went, with this feeling of resistance. And when I got home my Mum was sitting on the couch doing two things which I had never seen her do—smoking and knitting…and I’m thinking “who is this person, who is smoking and knitting?!” I’ve never seen her do either. She was a high powered CEO. And so I just sat next to her and we didn’t really talk much at all. And I just watched her, and I picked it up and started doing it. It was a very profound moment, where I felt like nothing needs to be said, but the world is kind of falling a part, and somehow we are doing this action that connects things back together, and makes something new. And I also had this feeling, while I was sitting next to her silently, you could go to any place in the world and you would find this history of women teaching other women to work with craft. And it would go all the way from the beginning of time, to now.And it’s the medium that contains so many women’s stories, unknown, that may never be known. It would just only ever be in their house, this thing they made. But that is so powerful and so continuous.
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Conversations with the Assembly (Series 2) is a podcast that delves deep with practitioners from Regional Assembly—an online artist studio connecting creative practitioners living and working in regional and remote locations in Asia, the Pacific and First Nations unceded territories across Australia. Each episode will foreground distinct voices and amplify, challenge and entwine the many threads of discourse and dialogue that unfold during Regional Assembly.
To read more about the Regional Assembly click here: https://regionalarts.com.au/programs/regionalassembly
To read more about Regional Arts Australia click here: https://regionalarts.com.au/about/about-regional-arts-australia
The Regional Assembly is a Regional Arts Australia program delivered through the Regional Arts Fund. The Regional Arts Fund supports cultural development in regional, remote and rural communities in Australia. The program is managed by Regional Arts Australia on behalf of the Australian Government.
In the latest episode of Regional Assembly's Conversations with the Assembly Selena de Carvalho and Arie Syarifuddin join forces in a soul-moving conversation about the potential of big and long and radical creative acts seeding from very humble grounds—from lutruwita to Jatiwangi!
Selena de Carvalho (PhD) is an inter-disciplinary artist, designer, maker and risk taker of settler, refugee and migrant heritage based in lutruwrita/Tasmania- ‘Australia’. Selena purposefully connects creativity in a (post) activist context amplifying the ecological imagination through practicing relational ethos. Selena views her creative work as a cultural response – ability. Throughout this practice she seeks out materials and environments that have weathered various forms of frontline disturbance, with-nessing, witnessing and interpreting global warming and its local affects.
Arie Syarifuddin (1985, Indonesia) is also known as Alghorie. Affiliated as an artist, curator, cultural producer, designer, and director of artist in residency department to the artist initiative; Jatiwangi Art Factory in the village of Jatiwangi in West Java, which is Indonesia’s biggest roof-tile manufacturing centre. Established in 2005, Jatiwangi art Factory (JaF) is a community that embraces contemporary arts and cultural practices as parts of the local life discourse in a rural area. Redesigning; hacking; giving values and dignity to the ordinary things; negotiation between fiction, dreams, reality, everyday life; and the intersection of historical reading is the most inclination of Arie’s works.
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Arie Syarifuddin: Jatiwangi itself is like the industrial area of clay roof tiles for 600 years, nothing for the young people to stay there. If there was not the Jatiwangi Art Factory I could go to the big city to look for many possibilities, but since then, I have the ability to stay in my place and play.
Selena De Carvalho: I had another look through the website at the one history of the Jatawangi Art Factory is really interesting. From that humble beginning of let’s host music and have ten families as our family partners to know very deeply, to now having many many villages that are also in that constellation. When you talk about having an art space and it allowing you to stay where you live and have a creative outlet, career, network, global network, local network, there’s something beautiful in that place based way of making and being and living. That’s super exciting for me to hear about.
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Conversations with the Assembly (Series 2) is a podcast that delves deep with practitioners from Regional Assembly—an online artist studio connecting creative practitioners living and working in regional and remote locations in Asia, the Pacific and First Nations unceded territories across Australia. Each episode will foreground distinct voices and amplify, challenge and entwine the many threads of discourse and dialogue that unfold during Regional Assembly.
To read more about the Regional Assembly click here: https://regionalarts.com.au/programs/regionalassembly
To read more about Regional Arts Australia click here: https://regionalarts.com.au/about/about-regional-arts-australia
The Regional Assembly is a Regional Arts Australia program delivered through the Regional Arts Fund. The Regional Arts Fund supports cultural development in regional, remote and rural communities in Australia. The program is managed by Regional Arts Australia on behalf of the Australian Government.
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