LIVE DREAMS: Destroy

Bringing artists and audiences together in new, dynamic and responsive ways, Live Dreams is a series of curated performance events across three nights; DESTROY, RECLAIM, REVEL.

This innovative platform allows the artists to present ideas- and works-in-progress, so you can see first hand into the creative process, getting a glimpse into current developments in experimental art, and engage in a conversation about their next steps.

LIVE DREAMS: DESTROY ARTISTS 

Maissa Alameddine
Gabriela Imrichova
Jennifer Greer Holmes
Bianca Willoughby
Bunny Cadag
Janie Gibson

LIVE DREAMS: DESTROY brings together six striking works-in-progress by experimental artists from Victoria, Adelaide, Sydney, Philippines and Newcastle. The artists of Live Dreams: DESTROY seek to radically destabilise the present in a bold re-visioning of the future. Some of these works seek to overthrow colonial and patriarchal systems and present counter narratives to the dominant culture. Others re-map the body and ecology as sites of knowledge, and reinstate cultural, corporal and ancestral heritage. Across an evening of performances, presentations and provocations, Live Dreams: DESTROY interrogates the potential for art to dismantle in order to incite eruption and reckoning.

In an arresting dialogue between the artist and her Areeshi ancestral plant, Maissa Alameddine explores the burden of inheritance and transfer of heritage in the complexity of the migrant experience. Gabriela Imrichova disrupts colonial modes of being in the world to propose counter-intuitive offerings around our notions of progress, hope and linear temporality. Several works in Live Dreams: DESTROY draw on the body as site of knowledge and disruption: Jennifer Greer Holmes powerfully draws on lecture, karaoke and moving-image to collide personal experience W social narratives about PTSD and body-trauma. Via an autobiographical, trans feminine homage to Julia Serano and 60s French pop singer Gillian Hills, established interdisciplinary artist Bianca Willoughby draws parallels between the denial of cultural and ancestral heritage and the denial and reclamation of the trans body. Fusing the corporeal and the ecological, Bunny Cadag offers transgender perspectives on environment and nature, and seeks to re-evolve dominant culture understandings of nature and nurture. And through irreverent comedy, audience participation, rosary beads and a bag of dildos, Janie Gibson dismantles historicised narratives of sexual taboo and repression to open space for possibility, pleasure, power and sex-positivity. 

The first of three streams in the Live Dreams series, Live Dreams: DESTROY interrogates the dismantling of the status quo and all that we might leave behind.