Arc Biennial of Art 2009

Program – Sunday at Fort Lytton

10.00–11.00am
Elizabeth Woods — morning tea performance in Conference Centre

10.00am–4.00pm
Isabel and Alfrerdo Aquilizan Installation in the Fort
Elizabeth Woods — twin projection video in Autoclave room
Quarantine — exhibition by Zoe Porter, David Spooner and Eric Rossi in Conference Centre

10.30am, 11.30am, 12,30pm and 2.15pm
Performance by Aleks Danko, Jude Walton and collaborators in the Fort linked to regular volunteer tours

3.00–4.00pm
Elizabeth Woods — afternoon tea performance in Conference Centre

Program – Saturday at Fort Lytton

4.00–5.00pm
Elizabeth Woods — afternoon tea performance in Conference Centre

4.00–10.00pm
Elizabeth Woods — twin projection video in Autoclave room
Quarantine — exhibition by Zoe Porter, David Spooner and Eric Rossi in Conference Centre

5.00–6.40pm
Fort Lytton Museums opened
Music on the grass
First session of sausage sizzle and drinks (non alcoholic)

5.00–6.00pm
Special guided tour by actors in uniform of Fort and artist installations

6.45pm
Audience march to Amphitheatre for Pat Hoffie performance

7.00–7.20pm
Pat Hoffie Troop Drill performance in Amphitheatre

7.20–8.00pm
Self directed night tours of Fort lit by kerosene lamps
Installations in Fort by Megan Cope, Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan and Aleks Danko and Jude Walton

7.30–8.30pm
Second session of Sausage Sizzle and drinks (alcoholic and non alcoholic)

8.00–9.40pm
Music on the grass
Music performed by Bessy-Lo

Corner of Lytton Rd and South Street, Lytton, Queensland.
UBD Map 142 Q9

Download a map of Fort Lytton

For more information

Telephone (07) 3215 0850
info@artworkers.org

Saturday 14 November – free entry
Exhibition hours 5 – 8.30pm

Sunday 15 November – normal Fort Lytton
Sunday entry fees apply.
Exhibition/performances 10 – 4pm

A free shuttle bus will run to and from Wynnum North Railway station (Cleveland Line).

NEW INTERPRETATIONS OF PAST LIVES

New Interpretations of past lives is a program that takes place over a weekend at Fort Lytton, a former Fort and quarantine site built in the 1880s and now a national park. The artists in this program question the nature of the audience for contemporary art and encourage the participation of the audience in the experience of the site and the development of the works. Past lives are never far away from the experience of the works and history is experienced in new ways.

FORT LYTTON, NOVEMBER 14/15

Fort Lytton has various levels of history available. For the casual visitor who simply explores the existent building there are traces of what the building was used for and sometimes names of rooms that indicate their use.  Some of the most interesting traces are in the marks and stains on the walls and elements like swallows nests attest to the way nature takes back man made buildings.

Passage investigates the the idea of time and memory, place and history, processes and transitions. The essence of Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan’s project is to explore the idea of looking in detail in order to understand the larger history of place and to implicate the viewer in the project and in history itself. The museum uses objects used at the site and carefully preserved in another building and old photographs to understand the place. Passage employs a scientific methodology not normally used to understand such a place.

Passage takes place both on web and insitu at Fort Lytton.  An interactive website will allow participants to view in detail the traces of the fort and to contribute an imaginary text to match an image. At Fort Lytton the artists have designed a viewing installation replete with magnifying instruments in various rooms of the building, which again will invite people to leave their texts, stories and tales. The writing component of the piece is perhaps the pivotal aspect of the work. It opens up the possibility to democratise the artwork by expanding the authoring of it. The texts made on site, together with those posted online, in turn will become part of the installation and possibly take a future form as a published text,in other words, another kind of historical text.

FORT LYTTON,   NOVEMBER 14

Mirrabooka is a soundscape and projection work that recognizes and fortifies indigenous peoples contribution to WWII and also the war fought by Aboriginals at the beginning of colonisation. The work is a way of acknowledging the physical boundaries  (and understanding of war) that existed for Aboriginal people and reinforcing an Aboriginal presence/absence that will be subtle and audible from a distance.

FORT LYTTON,   SAT/SUN NOVEMBER 14/ 15

Elizabeth Woods, Fortification

Elizabeth Woods re-addresses the function of Fort Lytton as a Quarantine Station by researching its influence on Brisbane’s multicultural communities.  She explores an expanded notion of contemporary art in public space that works within the arena of personal and cultural communication in order to create, via participation, a sense of ownership and insight for its participants.

Her initial research will establish relationships and create a dialogue between museum volunteers and the ethnic communities and their families who have passed through the Quarantine station of Fort Lytton. Stories and recipes will be made into cakes and recorded. The intention of this element of the project is to utilise the newly found relationships and to build upon them to create a new art audience. The artist will then ask the community to nominate a suitable recipe and cook, who will invite the artist into their home to make the cake. The event will be documented via video, which will then be shown as two large, two-channel video pieces on the weekend of November 14 and 15th in the autoclave (Quarantine building) room/site.  Images of wheat fields, sugar cane, cows, chickens, etc. – all elements that are quarantined and necessary resources to make cakes – will be included in the video.

The artist will also make cakes using the donated recipes which will be displayed and then served by the artist (ie artist as service provider) over the weekend in the form of morning and afternoon tea and then to the invited guests (the participating communities) and to the  viewing public on the night of the 14th  when a range of other performative works will be taking place. Finally, the project will result in a publication which is part cookbook and part catalogue

FORT LYTTON, SUNDAY NOVEMBER 15

Alex Danko and Jude Walton, Detail from Fort Lytton Museum

This project delineates a way of interacting in the world that is participatory on a local level, undertaking a process that is archaeological — an excavation and revealing of what exists by lifting things out of their ‘mere existence’ and altering people’s perception of the ordinary and known.  Times present and past are collapsed to create an historical, fictive palimpsest and within this the viewer is implicated in how she or he responds to the information, scenarios, objects, sounds, etc.

The project is an exploration of communications systems particularly as they relate to early war time communication methodologies and is in two parts. Part one is a prelude to the work at Fort Lytton and involves a full day performance of army buglers who play the standard bugle calls from reveille to lights out in various parts of King George Square, the full army choir singing and a Russian men’s choir appearing in different parts of the city.  This is also linked with a Morse code signalling sculpture where people can write a message and it is projected in morse code. Part two involves a series of performances inside and outside the fort at Fort Lytton that coincide with the Sunday tours that take place by volunteers from 10 – 4 on a Sunday

FORT LYTTON, NOVEMBER 14

Pat Hoffie, Troop Drill

Troop Drill provides a very satisfactory, safe and quick method of moving large groups of people from one point to another. Furthermore it is a satisfactory method of warming up before more concentrated work is commenced.

For the past two decades, one aspect of Brisbane based artist Pat Hoffie’s work has engaged with notions of labour, or work. In Troop Drill, she draws from the military history of Fort Lytton to explore the parallels between the drilling and training of soldiers and the way audiences for contemporary art are controlled and mobilized. The work also looks at the ways in which notions of work segue and mutate in meaning from generation to generation.

As the birthplace of Queensland’s military history, Fort Lytton provided the main training grounds for the volunteer Queensland army, many of whom rode from as far north as Augathella to be part of the annual Easter encampment, an event marked by “tales of camp revelry, daring and fellowship” where up to two thousand horses participated.

The artist creates a type of parallel event relating the present to the past and explores how traces of history survive in the everyday like spectres, emerging and disappearing throughout subsequent generations. She experiments with the idea of the audience as a fundamental part of ‘the work’, by redeploying their role as volunteers. They will be asked to enlist prior to the date of the event and their roles in the set up of the site and managing the event will become part of the night-time project.

The event will take place within the amphitheatre of Fort Lytton, flanked by the sentinel-like oil refineries that stand on either bank of the Brisbane River. Immersed in projected images drawn from historical and contemporary sources, night riders will engage in a performance that draws from skills that have been passed on unchanged from the time the fort was built in 1881.