Articulating a profoundly individual terrain through which she has mapped and defined a way of being in, and around, sound, The Substation, presents Marina Rosenfeld’s Material Issue in her first survey exhibition in the Southern Hemisphere.
For over 30 years, Rosenfeld’s hybrid practice has traced the emergence and expansion of sound as a strategy of relational and social practice, from her experimental orchestras of the 1990s and early 2000s to her longstanding engagement with the material culture of turntablism.
Surveying works predominantly from the past five years, Material Issue explores the material implications of Rosenfeld’s practice, interrogating where new positions might emerge within staged or constructed situations. The exhibition offers an atmosphere of possibility, where sound and its attendant technologies enable both collective action and intimate reflection.
Curated by Lawrence English, Material Issue features large-format video installation, photographic and textile works – a portal into a discreet realm where tactility, materiality and richly embodied sound coexist with the traces and residues of yesterday’s parties.
Marina Rosenfeld is an artist, composer and musician based in Brooklyn, New York. Working across the disciplinary boundaries of music, performance and improvisation, video, sculpture and other visual forms, her works have interrogated the fundamental conditions of sound and music since the 1990s.
Her exhibition and performance history includes solo works for the the Park Avenue Armory, the Museum of Modern Art, Kunsthall Portikus, the Serralves Museum, the 2023 Biennale Son and the 2024 Gwangju Biennial, the Montréal, Whitney and PERFORMA Biennials, the radio program of Documenta 14, and festivals and institutions throughout Europe, North and South America, Asia and Australia.
As a turntablist working with a palette of original dub plates, Rosenfeld has also performed and recorded improvised music since the late 1990s and created live scores for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company as well as choreographers Ralph Lemon and Maria Hassabi.
She is the recipient of a 2011 Grants to Artists award from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, the 2024 Alpert Award in Visual Art, and was a 2024 Artist in Residence at La Becque, Switzerland; EMPAC Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, New York; and the Emily Harvey Foundation in Venice, Italy. Her recordings are mainly on Room40, Shelter Press, 901Editions and most recently on INFO Unltd.
Material Issue
The Substation, 1 Market Street, Newport
Exhibition: 20 February – 2 May 2026
Free entry
For more information, visit: www.thesubstation.org.au for details.
Image: Marina Rosenfeld – photo courtesy of the artist