Exhale by Black Birds Q&A

05/31/18 • 38 min

Both interdisciplinary and intercultural, Exhale is about Indigeneity, accountability and trauma. It explores the relationships and boundaries forged between Indigenous cultures on foreign lands; negotiations between environmental and urban lifestyles; and the ability to heal through storytelling. Exhale is the creation of Black Birds – a Sydney collective fast gaining kudos for energetic, uplifting performances that astutely dissect the female Black and Brown experience in Australia. Incorporating art forms including spoken word, movement, dance, song and story, Black Birds’ work is at once intimate and unexpected, challenging and empowering.

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Legless Inheritance

There could be thousands of pictures of you online: photographic ‘selfies’ contrived to capture your best angles and features. How many really show how you feel about yourself and your body? You’re invited to hear a collection of the audio portraits of strangers, who reveal the stories and the secrets of their bodies. As an additional option, you can step into a private booth, undress and confess – contributing your own self-portrait to the growing archive at Arts House from 8 - 17 June, 2018.

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salt. by Selina Thompson Q&A

Two artists got on a cargo ship and retraced one of the routes of the Transatlantic Slave Triangle – from the UK to Ghana to Jamaica, and back. Their memories, their questions and their grief took them along the bottom of the Atlantic and through the realm of an imaginary past. It was a long journey backwards, in order to go forwards. This show is what they brought back. salt. is about grief, ancestry, home, forgetting and colonialism. It’s about where colonial history exists in the everyday, the politics of grief, and what happens inside Selina’s head whenever someone asks ‘Where are you from?’ and won’t take Birmingham or her mum’s uterus for an answer. It’s about being part of a diaspora. salt. creates a space for us to talk about all of these things, to see where we fit and to think about the changing and healing that is still to come