Perimeter Editions x Bianca Hester | Sydney Book Launch
To celebrate the recent release of Bianca Hester's Groundwork (Perimeter Editions 069), come along to the Sydney book launch on Saturday April 30. Held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the publication will be launched with a response from Dr Astrid Lorange (Senior Lecturer at UNSW Art & Design, co-editor of Rosa Press, and one-half of the critical art collective Snack Syndicate), with celebratory light refreshments to follow.
The launch will be preceded by the event Reading walking lithic bodies (more details below), in association with the exhibition MCA Collection: Perspectives on place.
EVENT DETAILS
Museum of Contemporary Art
140 George St, The Rocks NSW
Seminar Room, Level 2
Saturday April 30, 11.30am–12.45pm
This is a free event, but bookings are required – make yours here.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Groundwork, a major new book by Sydney-based artist Bianca Hester, finds its footing in the volcanic terrain of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland (Aotearoa New Zealand). An expanded sculptural project that grew out of a series of research residencies in 2015, Groundwork is both social and geological in scope. Focused on a series of sites across the city where human activity, geology and ecology have converged in fraught and revealing ways, the book maps connections between the landscapes of Te Kōpuke Mount St John and Te Tokaroa Meola Reef; Ihumātao and Takapuna; Waterview and Matukutūruru Wiri Mountain. Through collaborative and consultative processes with local people, this work encompasses walking, sculptural production, exhibition, archival research and writing between 2015 and 2020. Engaging with landscape as a nexus of geologic materialities, nonhuman durations, land expropriation, extractive activities and ecological transformations, the book proposes ways to apprehend the complex sedimentations of a city.
Writes Hester: In 2015, my feet made contact with ground materialised from millennia of lava flows, once liquefied, now solidified as the dominant geology of Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Emerging from the body of an aircraft, I stepped onto the international airport’s thin asphalt tarmac, which was as generic as any I’d seen. The standard airport aesthetic obscured any signs of the absolute specificity of this place...
Reading walking lithic bodies: a walking-based performance
Reading walking lithic bodies is a new walking-based performance that combines listening, walking, and tactile engagement. Moving between five locations from Warrane Circular Quay through Tallawoladah The Rocks towards Observatory Hill – on Gadigal Land Sydney – this work involves fragments spoken in response to the material conditions of the walk, alongside sculptural objects, images and texts. The work considers the entanglement of social and environmental forces in each location – and the way colonial inheritance, environmental crisis, evolution and extinction bind them together.
Readings by Bianca Hester, performed with Clare Cooper and Astrid Lorange
Dramaturgy by Sarah Rodigari
Poster-scripts designed by Paul Mylechrane, Public Office
Screen printing by Trent Walter, Negative Press
This performance has been developed in association with the exhibition MCA Collection: Perspectives on place.
Bookings required – full details here.
