View from a Body: Symposium on Moving Image Culture and Embodied Affect

James Barth is a Meanjin/Brisbane-based artist whose work explores trans self-representation and embodiment. Her group exhibitions include the 18th Adelaide Biennale: Inner Sanctum (Art Gallery of South Australia, Tartanya/Adelaide, 2024), Embodied Knowledge: Contemporary Queensland Art (Queensland Art Gallery, Meanjin/Brisbane, 2022), New Woman (Museum of Brisbane, 2019), and Assuming Surface (Outer Space, Meanjin/Brisbane, 2018). Her work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra; Monash University Museum of Art, Naarm/Melbourne; Griffith University Art Museum, Meanjin/Brisbane; and V&A, London. Barth is represented by Milani Gallery, Meanjin/Brisbane.

Brasiskis is a Curator of Film and Video at e-flux, where he seeks to bridge the gaps between the appreciation, curation, and study of artists’ moving image through regular screenings and discursive events at e-flux Screening Room, and online programming. He is also a co-curator of The 14th Shanghai Biennale: Cosmos Cinema (Power Station of Art, 2023/2024) and Jonas Mekas and the New York Avant-Garde (Lithuanian National Gallery, 2022). He received his PhD degree in Cinema Studies from New York University in 2022 and teaches moving image art related courses at CUNY and Columbia University (The School of the Arts). His writings are widely published in academic and non-academic books and journals, most recently he is the co-editor of Cinema and the Environment in Eastern Europe(Berghahn Press, 2024) and Jonas Mekas: The Camera Was Always Running (Yale University Press, 2022). Since 2024, Brasiskis is an editor of e-flux Film Notes, a weekly online publication that explores the intersection of contemporary art and cinema through conversations with filmmakers, theoretical reflections, and historical and experimental writings.

Melbourne-based artist Cate Consandine works across a wide range of formal and discursive mediums including sculpture and spatial practice, film and performance. She works with the body as a material for her practice and is particularly interested in the physical expression of emotional and psychological states, centring on the relationships between bodies and their contingent registers. Her work envisions affective embodied perspectives on moving image practices in dialogue with sculpture and situated screen architecture. Acts of cutting, and the resulting fragment or part-object, are often utilised as an editing and performing strategy in the moving image, and as a reductive strategy central to the sculptural process. Meditating upon the peripheral dimensions of the female gaze, her work seeks to locate experience between stillness and movement, or the place where desire is posited—the edge of movement—and particularly fixes on the liminal body; a body on edge in the landscape. Cate Consandine has exhibited locally and internationally including: Buxton Contemporary (Melbourne), Galeri Soemardja (Indonesia), Museum of Contemporary Art (Taiwan), POSCO Art Gallery (South Korea), Sydney Theatre Warf (Sydney), ICA Institute Contemporary Arts (London), The Melbourne Art Fair (Melbourne), LOOP the International Festival & Fair For Video Art (Barcelona), Belfast Exposed (Ireland), Art Gallery of NSW (Sydney), Centre of Contemporary Photography (Melbourne), Heide Museum of Modern Art (Melbourne), Gertrude Contemporary (Melbourne), and The Northern Centre for Contemporary Art (Darwin).

Tristen Harwood (Ngalakgan) is a writer, critic, and editor. He is a Tutor in Critical and Theoretical Studies at the Victorian College of the Arts. He is currently undertaking a PhD at RMIT University, which looks to understand the historical relationship between carceralism and Indigenous art making. Tristen is a contributing editor at MeMo review and a board member of the Plumwood Committee. His most recent book is Variations A More Diverse Picture of Contemporary Art (2023), co-edited and authored with Grace McQuilten and Anthony White. Tristen has published in Art Monthly Australasia, The Age, The Saturday Paper, MeMo Review, ArtReview, Art Guide, Overland, Artlink, Un Magazine, and various exhibition catalogues. 

Laresa Kosloff (b. 1974) makes performative videos, short films, audio works and participatory artworks. Her practice examines various representational strategies, each one linked by an interest in the body and its agency within the everyday. Some of her projects are structured around language, whilst others use slapstick physicality to communicate ideas. An incisive humour is woven throughout all of Kosloff’s work, whether it be in questioning the act of “looking” within the public realm, or drawing out the tensions between received cultural values, individual agency and free will. Laresa is the recipient of the prestigious 2019 Guirguis New Art Prize and the 2023 Nillumbik Art Prize. Recent solo exhibitions include Benalla Art Gallery (2024), IMA, Brisbane (2023) and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne (2021). Her work has been presented in group exhibitions at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, the National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Te Tuhi Art Museum in Aotearoa, Casula Powerhouse and Monash Museum of Art. She is represented by Sutton Gallery and works as a lecturer at RMIT University.

Hayley Millar Baker (b. 1990) is a lens-based artist based in Melbourne, Australia. She is Aboriginal from Gunditjmara, Djabwurrung, and Nira-Bulok Taungurung and has Anglo-Indian and Portuguese-Brazilian heritage. Hayley’s work intricately weaves multifaceted Indigenous feminine narratives, offering poignant reflections on identity, spirituality, and the human psyche, rooted deeply in her personal experiences and cultural identity. Employing her conceptual and abstract artistic vision, Hayley utilises oblique storytelling techniques to challenge conventions and push boundaries in photography, collage, film, and video. Her work resonates with deep emotional intensity, inviting audiences on evocative and non-linear journeys of discovery and interpretation that unfold and evolve over time. Hayley’s work has been prominently featured in major group and solo exhibitions locally and globally, including the National Gallery of Australia (Canberra), MCA Australia (Sydney), Australian War Memorial (Canberra), Nasher Museum of Art Duke University (North Carolina, USA), Art Gallery of South Australia (Adelaide), Melbourne Museum (Melbourne), Fremantle Arts Centre (Fremantle), Heide Museum of Modern Art (Melbourne), Chau Chak Wing Museum (Sydney), Al Hamriyah Studios (Sharjah, UAE), Artspace Sydney (Sydney), UQ Art Museum (Brisbane), Gertrude Contemporary (Melbourne), SAMSTAG Museum (Adelaide), MUMA (Melbourne), ACCA (Melbourne), Salamanca Arts Centre (Hobart), Broken Hill Regional Art Gallery (Broken Hill), Flinders Street Ballroom (Melbourne), Shepparton Art Museum (Shepparton), Ballarat Art Gallery (Ballarat), FUMA Gallery (Adelaide), ACE Open (Adelaide), The Substation (Melbourne), MAMA (Albury), and UNSW Gallery (Sydney). And has received significant commissions from prestigious institutions such as Buxton Contemporary, Rising Festival, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), the National Gallery of Australia, PHOTO2021: International Festival of Photography, the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA Australia), and the International Ballarat Foto Biennale.

Tina Stefanou is a visual artist, performer-vocalist, researcher, and filmmaker from the outer suburbs of Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. Raised in a working-class migrant family from Greece, she has lived, worked and studied in various places including Istanbul, Thassos, Berlin, Sydney, Carnamah, San Roque de Cumbaza and Paris. These experiences inform a filmography that traverses social class and species boundaries, using cinema-voice-performance to explore the social flesh and various forms of life and knowledge-making. Stefanou works across public spaces, site-specific environments, museums, ethnographic fieldwork, socially-engaged contexts, para-pedagogy, and experimental and new music frameworks. Her films and filmic traces delve into territories affected by agribusiness, local-global dynamics, post-industrial degradation, automated farming and resource trade routes, often working with a multispecies cast. Extending from her vocality, Stefanou’s activities are also embodied in live performative actions, writings, ephemeral events, sculptures, installations and workshops. Stefanou has received the Schenberg Fellowship (2020), Marten Bequest Scholarship (2021), Nillumbik Contemporary Art Prize (local category), a CultureLAB program with ACCA and Arts House (2023-24), and in 2024 the 68th Blake Prize (emerging artist category). Stefanou’s work has been exhibited, screened, broadcast, published, and performed internationally and nationally including: National Gallery of Victoria, Gertrude Contemporary, Salt Museum (Istanbul), the Art Gallery of Western Australia, Cementa, Art + Australia, Journal of Sonic Studies and she was recently a featured artist in the 2024 Adelaide Biennale of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia. She is currently a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, VCA, University of Melbourne.