20:20

20:20 brought together twenty contemporary Australian artists, commissioned at the beginning of the pandemic to create work for our major Summer exhibition. Never before had we had every space in our museum, inside and out presenting new work.

The twenty works in 20:20 shared visions of a changed world, a more just society, critiques of environmental policy, and the fight for racial justice. 20:20 witnessed our current calamity and seeks insight, kindness and hope.
The twenty resulting artist projects provided an active picture that moved from celebrating intimate moments of day-to-day life, to the actions of artists determined to forge ahead with work whilst so much had shut down around them, and out to artists’ perspectives on the globally felt issues of economic injustice, the Black Lives Matter movement, and climate emergency.

There was discord here and there was community. There was social engagement alongside introspection. Sadness could be witnessed and hope shared.

Featured Artists:
Aida Azin, Archie Moore, Ashlee Laing, Biljana Jančić, Dale Harding, Lisa Sammut, Luke Parker, Mary Jane Griggs, Matthew Griffin, Newell Harry, Nicole Foreshew, Rita Wenberg, Robert Hirschmann, Shan Turner-Carroll, Shireen Taweel, Susie Losch, Tané Andrews, Tarik Ahlip, Tiyan Baker, and Zoë Marni Robertson.

"Waking up, I realise my dreams are trying to find ways, through metaphor, to communicate dissonant parts of my ego. Dreams have the ability to help us process emotions, by encoding and constructing memories of our every day and expectations within it.

In Help Yourself, my making process is driven by the urge to visually represent and make sense of the abstract intentions lurking in my dream state.

That happens in daily life,
To learn a lesson, it becomes engrained in you
Do you get it, do you get it yet?

I revisited old paintings to create a non-linear narrative, one that jumps back and forth. Individually, these objects and paintings tell several fragmented stories. Together, they create a material backdrop for contradictory feelings of authenticity, shame, exhaustion, and idealisation.

The task of decoding the metaphors littering my dreams, allows for a self-reflective space for me to reconcile my relationship to care.

My third-culture kid syndrome can’t work out if I make myself obliged to be supportive and to show that my connection to my heritage is authentic. Or if my diasporic upbringing renders my ancestry as a novelty. Is the act of proving myself counter-intuitive to the project of decoloniality? Or is learning to live with a problem a form of care?"
-Aida Azin

Aida Azin is a multidisciplinary artist living on Wurundjeri land. She uses her painting practice as a platform to promote the importance of self-representation on cultural perspectives within the visual arts. The themes presented in Aida’s art practice often reflect her experience as a Filipino-Iranian first-generation born woman in so-called ‘Australia’.

In 2019 Aida exhibited solo shows; Lonely God at Seventh Gallery, Melbourne and Brown Pillars at Firstdraft, Sydney. She joined the youth-focused project Living and Breathing (‘the LAB’) and initiated the Filipinx/@ arts project Saluhan collective. In September 2020, Aida will be exhibiting new work in ACE Open’s 2020 South Australian Artist Survey.

"A common talking point you hear on social media platforms and political post threads is how destructive Communism was; that it has killed millions of people, but I think the other big 'C's are giving them a run for their money: Colonialism, Christianity and Capitalism. Communism and Muslims did not have a decimating effect on Aboriginal peoples here in Australia. In fact, The Communist Party of Australia were the only political party supporting Aboriginal Rights back in the day and Fred Paterson, our only-ever elected Communist MP, was a strong anti-racism advocate. The Muslim Macassans came for trade not dominance or invasion - a stark contrast with those who landed at Port Jackson on the 26th of January 1788.

I see Colonialism, Christianity and Capitalism as arms of the same beast that changed the lives of Aboriginal peoples forever. This beast also brought with it: contagions, confinement, ”civilisation", the Crown, chauvinism and conflict.

Deuteronomy 7

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When the LORD your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations--the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you--

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and when the LORD your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy."

-Archie Moore

Archie Moore (b. 1970, Toowoomba, l. Brisbane. Kamilaroi) works across media in portrayals of self and national histories. His ongoing interests include key signifiers of identity – skin, language, smell, home, flags – as well as the borders of intercultural understanding and misunderstanding, including the wider concerns of racism. Uncertainty is an ongoing theme pertaining to his paternity and Kamilaroi heritage.

"Untitled (Personal Tabloid) is a new series of paintings that articulate and compare specific events from my history with particular circumstances in the individual accounts of notable artists. Through the use of text, these works create self-exposing, one-liners that echo newspaper headlines, tabloid journalism and the myriad of clickbait headlines ricocheting across the internet. Each painting time stamps a particular time and place within the personal narratives that I have constructed as well as those of notable artists, as well as noting subtle traces of socio-political history and context.

The text often arrives as some kind of tumbling real world manifestation of an internal dialogue, an ongoing private discussion centered on success, disappointments, belief and doubt."
-Ashlee Laing

Ashlee Laing is interested in the politics of belonging and in finding new ways to challenge existing social borders and cultural boundaries. A central concern of Laing’s work is a personal response to dominant authorities and cultures that contradict his ideal of an inclusively diverse society, one that respects not only fundamental rights and freedoms but also the social, cultural and sexual identities of individuals. Laing’s art is instantaneous, direct and without apology. Primarily known for his photographic and video installations, Laing also paints, draws, stages performances and invites public participation in his work. At times humorous and at times confronting, Laing elicits responses from his viewers. By encouraging the audience to engage with politically loaded topics, he creates dynamic spaces open to dialogues. Laing’s artistic practice provides a powerful and often challenging commentary on what it means to look for a safe place to belong within contemporary society.

"Storage is a compression of stuff but also symbolically a compression of time. In storage spaces obsolescence and potential are heaped together and indistinguishable from one another. These spaces therefore present a compression of the past and the future within an inert present. This condition has been heightened during the lockdowns where the sense of time and space being compressed has formed a dominant aspect of experience. This project is a response to this psychological framework and will involve the central premise of relocating the things in storage around the museum into the gallery spaces. The commissioned project will consist of a monumental construction assembled from all the logistical stuff that exists in the museum storage and back of house. This project will reverse the order of what is made visible and offered up for aesthetic consideration in the museum."
-Biljana Jančić

Listen to Biljana Jančić as she discusses her installation Accumliations, commissioned for 20:20.

Biljana Jančić is an artist living on Country of the Wangal people of the Eora Nation (Inner West Sydney). She works primarily with site-specific installation that is underpinned by an analysis of forces, structures and atmospheres that come to shape experiences of particular spaces. The resulting works operate as punctures that highlight, amplify or distort existing spatial dynamics. Jančić’s projects have been regularly commissioned and exhibited in a wide range of independent and institutional contemporary art spaces. She studied at the Sydney College of Arts, USYD where she completed a PhD in 2013.

"My uncle Milton and his uncle Steve have described to me how they had figured out ways to harvest and apply botanical resins and saps in their practises of woodworking, in and around Woorabinda, Central Queensland.

We all share an inherited reverence for the plants of our homelands, and this reverence is the same for the plant life wherever we are visitors, or if we are living in diaspora.

Around the built environments where we live, there are moments for raising the spirit and for reverence. These moments can be sought in the gardens and parks and along roadsides. The everyday home may be a place of cultural significance, if practices are continued

Institutions are not the kinds of places that contain my reverence. I am uplifted by the stories of plants life around me and in the everyday.

Botanical resin has been sprayed on to glass by breath."
-D Harding

D Harding (b. 1982, Moranbah. l. Brisbane.) works in a wide variety of media to explore the visual and social languages of his communities as cultural continuum. A descendant of the Bidjara, Ghungalu and Garingbal peoples, Harding draws upon and maintains the spiritual and philosophical sensibilities of their cultural inheritance within the framework of contemporary art internationally. Harding has exhibited in local, national, and international contexts. Their work can also be found in collections throughout Australia and overseas. In July 2019, Harding was awarded a Doctorate of Visual Arts from Griffith University.

"I just don’t think that way (2020) is a time-based installation where earthly objects, collage and moving image combine to explore thoughts on otherness and nonhuman perspectives. Drawing on the natural world, including mineral elements, plant life and astral forms, the work arranges and transforms found and shaped materials to reveal a symbolic exchange or magical relation between disparate things.

In this work, I am interested in movement, and its ability to communicate nonverbally through gesture. By bringing inanimate or imaginary objects into being, I just don’t think that way equates motion and emotion as the same. With a focus on the otherworldly, the work aims to create an atmosphere that facilitates self-reflection, bringing the human condition and natural forces into a comprehensible relationship.

This work was developed while on a two-month residency in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland in 2019, supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund."

-Lisa Sammut

Listen to Lisa Sammut as she discusses her installation I just don't think that way, commissioned for 20:20.

Lisa Sammut’s practice encompasses sculpture, light, video and installation. She has exhibited widely in Australia, undertaking several recent large-scale projects including HIGH LOOM, Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, Sydney (2019) and A monumental echo, presented at both Firstdraft, Sydney (2018) and Fremantle Arts Centre, Perth (2019). In 2018, Sammut was a finalist in the John Fries Award at UNSW Galleries, a resident at Parramatta Artist Studios and completed her MFA by Research at UNSW Art & Design. In 2019, Sammut attended residency programs in Iceland and France including a video and installation art mentorship with conceptual artist Laure Prouvost.

"Things fall apart is a fragment of a poem by the Irish early-modernist poet, WB Yeats. Rendered in neon, the text becomes a sign, a reminder of our inherent fragility, and the temporal nature of the existence of all things.

Accompanying this text work are two ‘drawings’, made almost 20 years apart and identical, except for the obvious effect of time on the older version. The works are made onto posters, released as a limited edition inserted in a book, by the Cuban/American artist Felix Gonzales-Torres. The posters feature a black and white image of two birds in flight against a grey sky. My intervention onto them was made by stitching metallic thread through the paper, a series of expanding circles that evoke ripples, soundwaves, or targets.

In these works, recurrences, change and impermanence are all represented."
-Luke Parker

Luke Parker received a BA (Communications) from the University of Technology in 1996. Since then, his work has been included in exhibitions at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Victoria, Geelong Gallery, Gertrude Contemporary, the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Monash Gallery of Art, Carriageworks, Artspace, the National Art School Gallery, Campbelltown Arts Centre, and Penrith Regional Gallery. He has made works for many artist-run galleries, received development grants from the Australia Council (2003, 2018), and undertaken residencies at ACME in London in 2003, and in 2018 at the Cité internationale des arts, Paris. His work is held in the collections of the AGNSW and the NGV.

'The two series of paintings for MAMA come after formal study into the Modernist canon of attitudes about abstract painting. My conclusion is that there were countless painters working away but only some became known as artists that are now known to a huge audience through the power of the written word and the structure of the art world with many inherent biases and self-interests.

This work is about painting and the absorption of the process. I work without any obligation to describe or represent or prove a point. The act of painting is a process of thinking, of rapid decision making, to build a surface and to know when it's completed. The thinking comes from a deep, personal place where there can be no obligation to another. The obligation is to one's self to carry through to the end, that's the idea and that's the content."
-Mary Jane Griggs

For over 32 years Mary Jane Griggs has lived and worked as an artist and art teacher in Albury. She has witnessed and participated in the growth of the visual arts and professional cultural sector on both sides of the Murray. Griggs has exhibited at and supported local, regional and artist run galleries with numerous solo presentations and group exhibitions. Through her position with TAFE NSW she has taught visual art to many people of the region. Formal art training here has evolved from night classes to Degree level providing a local pathway to a creative working life. The balance for her is between painting, continually learning and teaching.

"From the Alps
To the sea
Long and brown
And mighty
River red
Gum rise high
Riverbed
Lullaby

In Echuca
My folks settled down
They're on both sides
Of the Murray now"

-Matthew Griffin in Borderline

Listen to Matthew Griffin as he discusses his work Borderline commissioned for 20:20.

Matthew Griffin is an Australian artist currently living and working in Sydney. He was born in Bendigo, Victoria, in 1976. Matthew Griffin’s practice engages a range of media including video, installation, sculpture, photography, collage and photomontage. Recurring themes in his work include body-object relations, the makeshift and haphazard as sculptural qualities, the contemporary ubiquity of cameras and the resulting difficulty of producing meaningful images in the post-internet age. In recent projects Griffin has examined the way humour functions in both a visual and narrative form, and the ethical dilemmas associated with the production of contemporary art.

"I’ve always been more interested in what artists bring into their homes and studios rather than what comes out of them as ‘work’. The things they collect and live with, or the small threads and fragments accrued in notebooks that drive and influence their work but are rarely given focus.

Consisting of a single vitrine, two photo-books, a few objects and a single print—a blown up Christian ‘propaganda’ pamphlet found defaced in a humble church on Kiriwina island PNG—this ensemble presents a modest display of my own personal ‘fragments’. Book I contains monochrome photographs and anecdotes transcribed from travel journals and covers various contexts I’ve lived and worked; while Book II consists of colour photographs, documenting the objects I’ve gathered (as images), inspired by their material use and inventiveness.

Initially, I envisioned the viewer to have intimate access to the books: to sit down, relax and reflect on the photographs and anecdotes in relation to the objects. Sadly, given COVID-19, such intimacy was not possible. Hence the concealed presentation, which I now see as a metaphor for the distance we currently endure. In another sense the compilation and display of these items is as much about granting them status as ‘relics’, filled with personal memories and a will to give them exposure: a plastic cushion woven by grandmother; a child’s toy purchased from a street vendor at Mumbai Central Station; or a vintage postcard purchased from a general store on Hiva Oa, the island Gauguin spent his final years."
-Newell Harry

Newell Harry is a Sydney-based artist of South African-Mauritian descent. He holds a DCA University of Wollongong (2020) and an MFA from the UNSW, Sydney (2004). Notable exhibitions include: OCEANS, Dubrovnik Museum of Modern Art, Dubrovnik (2018); Tidalectics, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA 21) Augarten, Vienna (2017); The 56th Venice Biennale: All the Worlds Futures, Venice (2015); (Untitled): 12th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul (2011); Rendezvous 11, South African National Gallery, Cape Town & Institut d’Art Contemporain, Villebanne, France (2011 & 2012), and The 17th Biennale of Sydney: The Beauty of Distance, Songs of Survival in a Precarious Age (2010).

"The pandemic and climate catastrophe during 2020 has unlocked the door to our silenced history and unearths our nation's dark past. These times have highlighted the urgency to cultivate Aboriginal cultural knowledge and the way we see the world and how we care for Country.

Nothing is more powerful or more ngayirr (sacred) than the relationship between the garraba, marrin (body, the human body) and dhaagun (earth, dirt, ashes, land, soil). Banhirra (stones to make fire), 2020; Guriin (charocal), 2020; and Mirrul (white clay), 2020 explore earth materials, minerals and clay. The works seeks to investigate concepts of place, tracing personal connections to kin and the material knowledge required to retrieve and revive the body. The works feature a combination of broad contemporary uses of minerals through documenting passages related to my sacred homelands - Wiradjuri Country."

-Nicole Foreshew

Nicole Foreshew is an Aboriginal artist, writer and curator, a member of the Wiradjuri nation, Central West NSW, Australia, who works across a range of mediums, from photomedia, design to sculpture, film and video.

In 2019, Foreshew presented Minyambul-yiri- yimbang (because it is a sacred thing) a solo instituational exhibition, at Goulburn Regional Gallery Notable group exhibitions include Primavera 2017, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney; Maamungun Compatriots, a group exhibition with works by Michael Riley at Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi in 2012; Shadowlife, Bendigo Art Gallery, curated by Natalie King and Djon Mundine, 2013; Wiradjuri Ngurambanggu, Murray Art Museum Albury, 2015; Shimmer at the JamFactory, part of Tarnanthi – the inaugural Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art, South Australia 2015; and Hereby Make Protest, Carriageworks, 2014.

Foreshew developed a major public commission Born in Darkness Before Dawn, 2013 for Place Projections, Eora Journey, a City of Sydney arts initiative, curated by Hetti Perkins; participated in the Darling Fonderie studios international artists residency, in partnership with the Canadian Council for the Arts; and curated Primavera 2015, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia.

"I went through a lot of bad times. My doctor told me draw what happened to me. So I start painting, which helps me. When I am painting I am in a different world.

I love painting gumtrees, and the river."

-Rita Wenberg

Lavington based artist Rita Wenberg, is a Bundjalung and Gumbaynggirr woman. Wenberg was forcibly removed from her parents before she was three years old and put into a mission before being sent to the Cootamundra Girls School to be trained as a domestic servant. Wenberg’s paintings often share her childhood experiences and the impacts of the forcible removal of First Nations children from their families. Wenberg paints as a way to deal with the memories of what she endured during this time.

Wenberg recently presented a solo exhibition of paintings, Not a myth, at Burraja gallery, Gateway Island.

"In recent times with State border closures and an internal emotional upheaval of relocating studio/life I have continued to search and explore, through drawing, the uprooted nature of an internal landscape."
-Robert Hirschmann

Listen to Robert Hirschmann as he discusses his series of work commissioned for 20:20.

Robert Hirschmann was born in Narembeen, WA in 1968. Hirschmann graduated from the National Art School Sydney in 1990, with a Diploma in Fine Arts, specialising in painting.

Hirschmann has had 21 solo exhibitions to date. Robert has been represented by King Street Gallery, Sydney since 1991. Hirschmann has won both the National Art Award in South Australia and the Gruner Landscape Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Hirschmann’s pieces can be found in numerous collections including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Benalla Regional Art Gallery, Wangaratta Exhibitions Gallery and Campbelltown Bicentennial City Art Gallery, National Art School and both national and international corporate and private collections.

"These night visions emerge as apparitions found at the edges of the garden, between dusk and dawn, as though of an alternate dream world. During the period of Covid isolation, I spent several months making wearable sculptures and photographing members of my family on the property I grew up on. More than simply adornment or even protection, each sculpture is an apparatus, designed to interact with the body.

The wearables were produced from materials found on the property, including objects from my past such as old sportswear, dance costumes, curtains, carpets, knives and flowers. The process of inventing, wearing and performing for the camera reveals a central part of my childhood growing up in rural NSW, where boredom was a constant threat and entertainment found its outlets in Easter hat parades, dance eisteddfods, nativity scenes and home-made music videos.

Edge of the Garden both un-earths a family history, at the same time re-earthing that history to my familial (and familiar) environment anew. Boxing gloves become terrariums, and crutches turn into limbs. The resulting imagery lives in the realm of the uncanny, existing between places and times; between vision and blindness, real and imagined, unease and rest. Like animals in
headlights, or indeed backyard nocturnal critters exposed by torchlight, my family are re-posed as strange spirits of the unconscious, shape shifters in transition, jewels in the night."
-Shan Turner-Carroll

Listen to Shan Turner-Carroll as he discusses his work Edge of the Garden commissioned for 20:20.

Shan Turner-Carroll is a regionally based Australian artist of Anglo Burmese
descent. His practice responds to both site and situation specificity, and
integrates mediums including photography, sculpture, installation, and
performance.

The subjects his works have related to include both human and non-human nature, alternative forms of social exchange and interactions between art, artist and viewer. Looking towards the multiplicity of connections between body and landscape, site-specificity is key to his work. Not only in making, but also in how an embodied methodology of making emerges upon each site and location

Turner-Carroll has exhibited in Australia, New York, Japan, China, New
Zealand, Iceland, Hong Kong and Myanmar.

"Bathe in Light is the English translation for Hammam Al-Nouri. Within the hammam for centuries local members living in Tripoli's medina in Lebanon, including my family, literally bathed in both water and light. The light softly penetrated the candle lit ambience of the stone structure through the ornately formed glass inlays in the hammam's dome ceiling. These botanical designs of the glass inlays are reflected in the engraving and in particular the pierced base of the artwork.

The hammam was part of the social infrastructure emphasised in the period of the Golden Age, introducing heightened attention and responsibility focused on the physical body through public daily practices of cleansing. The religious based practice of cleansing also ensured that the community was healthy and resilient to the spread of disease and illness. The artwork which sits upon a column of hand- made soap, is informed by the processes of purification and
cleansing, such as the ancient remedies of olive oil soap making, a practice found in Tripoli since millennia.

At present it has become a civil duty and in the public's best interest to maintain personal hygiene in order to reduce the community spread of disease. The act of bathing the body to remain clean has once again shifted from the private to the public space. Today the social relevance of the practice of bathing which has been long lasting and engrained across cultures, sheds light on the collective and universal practices required for a collective wellbeing."
-Shireen Taweel

Shireen Taweel is a multimedia installation artist whose work broaches issues
of the construction of cultural heritage, knowledge and identity through
language and the constantly shifting public space of the social and political
axiom. Her artistic practice draws from the personal experiences of being
Lebanese Australian living between cultures, and how the physical spaces
within her community reflect a complex cultural landscape of transformation
expressed through hybridity and plurality.

"I recently spent some time observing the masses of tetrapods at Gyeongpodae beach, in Gangwon-do province, South Korea. Each concrete tetrapod is a three-legged unit, in a roughly pyramid form that stacks in a loose, modular pattern with other tetrapods to create sea walls. En masse, they appear as giant installations of readymade sculptures.

I set about to re-create their forms, which appear simple but have a geometric complexity. In doing this I also came to realise just how much concrete is in each tetrapod. There is a tension here in the amount of heavy material used to protect coastlines from environmental degradation.

The forms of the tetrapods remain beguiling but I have chosen to fill them with air, moving in and out of each sculpture’s walls. They become much lighter objects and have also been made with only recycled and reused inflatable fabrics. As they move against each other, inflating and deflating, they behave like the waves that break upon tetrapods on coastlines around the globe. They become the storm surge."
-Susie Losch

Susie Losch is an artist living in northeast Victoria, practicing and exhibiting for over twenty-five years.Primarily working as a sculptor, Losch’s practice draws on the histories of the materials employed in making whilst allowing for their potentials and possibilities to be realised. Processes of assemblage, casting and a playful acknowledgment of moments of serendipity each contribute to a collection of works that are alive with the workings of the studio.
Currently Losch is working with air as a transformative matter. The series of inflatable works being developed consider traditions of formal minimalist sculpture and the environmental impacts of unrestrained material consumption.

"Comprised of three distinctive elements, a high polished stainless steel armature, a living leaf, and a vessel of water. Take a Deep Breath, 2020 continues my investigation into the interrelationships of the artificial and the natural, the human and the environment.

Referencing historical scientific apparatus and support structures built around ageing trees, where metal armatures fuse with the bark – limiting the natural growth but still proving restraint and bearing weight – the metallic armature extends itself grandly into the room, the austerity of the form is at counterpoint to the organic material it holds, a monstera leaf.

I’ve chosen the monstera leaf because in many ways it represents 'every leaf,' it speaks to the symbolic, to design and form. The leaf is suspended a few centimetres above water, and as it is the silence between the notes which make the music, the space between the base of the leaf and the surface of the water informs the work.

I wanted to capture an idea of 'dynamically static' – a motionless moment perfectly poised between two states, life and death. The delicate sculptural unity of the piece models a system, one of balance and the offering of nutrients, the void between the leaf and water appears sustainable, yet unfortunately with time, is terminal."
-Tané Andrews

Listen to Tané Andrews as he discusses his work Take a Deep Breath commissioned for 20:20.

Tané Andrews (b.1986) is an artist based in Sydney, Australia.

His practice explores transience, transformations, and hybridisations within the natural world. Working with perishable organic materials including; flowers, living cocoons, wood, and water, as well as more durable products such as pearls, marble and bronze. In 2007 he completed a Bachelor of Arts (Art) at Curtin University, Perth.

Solo exhibitions include: Lying in Wait, Wellington St Projects Sydney (2016); The Collector, Venn Gallery Perth (2015) and Silent Distortions, Venn Gallery Perth (2014). Notable group exhibitions include: Perspectives; Ginza Museum of Modern Art Tokyo (2004) and DeMonstrable, curated by SymbioticA Director Oron Catts, Lawrence Wilson Gallery Perth (2015). In 2015 he was awarded a residency at Artspace, Sydney and in 2017 he was the recipient of the 4A Beijing Studio Program.

"These works are part of an ongoing inquiry linking poetics and ontology with material research. The starting points in this instance - the intelligence of water, and the idea of various states of being as novel experiences of time."
-Tarik Ahlip

Tarik Ahlip is an artist practicing and living on Dharug land. He has a background as a practicing architect, and concerns related to civic ideals and socialised relations with the natural world remain dominant in his current practice. While his practice focuses on sculptural form, language and poetics are both the origin and engine of these explorations.

He is currently making new works for 20:20 and the CreateNSW and Artspace Visual Arts Fellowship, as well as a short film for a West Space solo commission due to open in July 2021, based on a short piece of verse called 'slake’.

"In the very early days of the George Floyd protests, like many other people, I watched the crisis unfold on social media with increasing horror. In the midst of my dismayed scrolling, I came across a set of screenshotted tweets: in the early hours of June 1st, cell phone service in Washington D.C. had been shut down and thousands of protesters were missing. Final dispatches before communications ceased show a conflagration next to the Washington Monument and Army helicopters flying down Sunset Boulevard. More screenshotted tweets rebutted these claims, however, unnervingly, the rebuttals were all identically worded, mass tweeted from dozens of accounts, and more screenshots still showed those users denying ever sending them. The implication was as terrifying as it was (and still is) believable: the US government was killing protestors in Washington D.C and covering it up.

In fact, none of this was true. Before too long, the tweets were revealed to be part of an elaborate hoax. #DCBlackout and the claims of missing protestors and shutdown cell phone service allegedly started from a Twitter account with only 3 followers. Within hours the hashtag had been shared tens of millions of times on Twitter. The claims, and the counter claims, were found to be entirely false, and research by disinformation experts suggests that the hoax was orchestrated by an unknown, well funded and well organised entity.

Dark forces on social media exploit genuine crises to generate fear and confusion, helped by the work of bots. In #DCBlackout, those forces understood the beliefs and fears of the Left, mimicking Leftist Twitter prose to spread their claims. A Game About Fear takes these circumstances as the point of departure. In this installation, I worked with a coder to train a bot using thousands of tweets containing the DC Blackout hashtag. The result is chilling - almost perfect imitations of Leftist rallying cries, pleas for help and demands for justice and democracy. What is the value of your voice when it can be counterfeited, mass-produced and weaponised against you? A Game About Fear is a warning about the inauthenticity of language as it passes through the many complex and sinister layers of our contemporary, online context."
-Tiyan Baker

Tiyan Baker is an early career Malaysian Bidayuh/Anglo-Australian artist who makes video and installation art. Baker's practice engages with sites of contemporary cultural crises. Her work often uses field research, documentary techniques and found artefacts to question established discourses and reveal bias, frailty and failure. Originally from the Larrakia lands known as Darwin, Baker currently lives and works on the Gadigal and Wangal lands known as Sydney.

"The work begins in a journey taken, on the train between Melbourne and Sydney, through Albury (the border). At that particular point in time, the fires were raging through the summer, it felt like the world was choking. It was just us. But the world is choking.

At a protest rally organised against the aforementioned urgency, I became aware of the Minotaur in the Hyde Park fountain and his (Asterion, the Minotaur's) creation myth... more importantly, his mother, Pasiphaë. Pasiphaë was once a Phoenecian sun goddess, but was demoted by the Minoans, and then discredited with this alleged act of bestiality. Thus, tracing the European notion of man's mastery over nature through foundational mythologies (and medieval interpretations that were the foundation of our nation-state) I mean to explore this antagonistic relationship with our life support system. This is examined through our instinct toward and against "the animal" (as adored on the internet, as more species become extinct).

The installation itself will comprise of a feature-length poetic video work as well as a large embroidered banner (riffing on protest banners and medieval standards), depicting men frolicking with snails in (obscure) reference to or changing attitudes towards credit, our unquestioning acceptance of the mechanisms that extract our labour and the "resources" of the earth."
-Zoë Marni Robertson

Listen to Zoë Marni Robertson as she discusses her installation commissioned for 20:20.

Through prose poetic writing and performance, disparate research and personal connections are synthesised into a lived experience of the political. These renderings usually find purchase in video and/or painting. Materials are gathered out of waste (small attempts at sustainability). Where waste is unavoidable and other ethical concerns (such as the exploitation of labour) are inherent in the process (the machines/tools and materials), these preoccupations are addressed as part of the work. By couching life and work in the material processes that make a life and work possible, the countless otherwise autonomous processes that mediate existence are made legible, toward a rationalisation that is much less limited than the strictly economic.