Carrie Miller gives us a heads up on some highlights from the forthcoming Cementa 13 weekend, February 1 to 4…
You can begin your day at Cementa 13 with Liam Benson’s Ode to the Glossy Black Cockatoo – a salute to the dawn where Liam will sing a series of acapella songs around the Kandos landscape to welcome the day. He will repeat the process at dusk each day.
You will be welcomed to the town with pamphlets by Ian Millis in his work Welcome to Kandos, a parody of the recent fashion for participatory art and socially engaged practices. The pamphlets – which outline fictional aspects of the town and a history that never existed – demonstrate the way ‘community engagement’ is always manipulated at some level to produce an art world product. Rather than engage with this manipulated engagement, Millis engages with no-one.
The main street of Kandos will include Cigdem Aydemir’s Muslim Hair Drying which sees the artist extending her existing practice of playing with the void between body and dress and raising questions about wearing the veil. She will be occupying the local hairdressers in a Muslim twist on the classic 1960s beauty salon hairdryer.
Take Diego Bonetto’s tour, Wild possibilities, or How To Make Money By Selling You What You Own Already. Get a step ahead of your trendy inner-city neighbours and learn about weeds as ‘wild food’ – used in all today’s world’s best restaurants. Take the opportunity to educate yourself about different species and learn how to turn them into food, craft or cash.
Or join ARTcycle, lead by Gilbert Grace, which will provide zero emission tours of the town by bicycle and include the chance to do some drawing along the way.
While you’re tooling around on your bike, check out Peter Blamey’s Forage, part of his exploration of ‘open electronics’, which repurposes discarded electronic components like computer mother boards to produce unexpected sounds and installations made from these readymade, discarded materials.
Another special tour is part of David Capra’s New Intercessions (Kandos) and Intercessory banner (Kandos). He will be operating bus tours with the Cementa Van, celebrating the fact that he’s finally got his driving license by singing in the van for tour participants. The van will also be hooked up to a projector showing recent video work. And in an extension of his intercessory dance practice that aims to elicit healing – both spiritual and literal – one night Capra will perform an operatic speaking-in-tongues performance with his sausage dog Teena.
After some spiritual healing, catch Fiona Davies, Cane, a work inspired by the artist interrogating the locals about whether they had received the cane at school. She took photographs of the evidence of corporeal punishment on their hands and listened to their individual stories of the experience. Fragments of these stories were made into a video which is presented in the archive section of the Kandos Museum surrounded by memorabilia of local schools and ephemera of the school experience.
Witness John A. Douglas’s Strange Land series of videos and photographs which investigate the historical significance of nearby Glen Davis. Douglas’s retelling of the histories of this mining town features performances by artists Sari T. M. Kivinen and Liam Benson. The work reveals a traumatised and haunted landscape.
For a more calming experience, participate in Sarah Goffman’s Wabi-sabi Tea in Kandos where the artist will invite visitors into a specially designed tea pavilion – an authentic Japanese tea house fused with some special Aussie touches.
And after refreshments, pick up a copy of Vaughan O’Connor’s Live Free, an editioned survival manual which draws on DIY literature by survivalists sold in army surplus stores. It includes information on the local flora and fauna, Australia’s temperamental climate and a dose of 2012 apocalypse paranoia.
Cementa 13, Kandos, February 1-4, 2013.
