The SUBSTATION reveals 2018 Season One Program

The SUBSTATION ApokalypsisIn their 2018 Season One Program, The SUBSTATION houses a rich array of contemporary and experimental arts with an inspired line up of international luminaries including Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Charlemagne Palestine, Moor Mother and Rasheedah Phillips alongside local artists Shireen Taweel, ONO and Lawrence English amongst others.

Launching the 2018 program are two American visionaries – musician and poet Camae Ayewa Aka Moor Mother and writer/activist Rasheedah Phillips, who in their Australian premiere performance will deliver a collage of Afrofuturist noise, punk and poetry that speaks to the violence, trauma and radical political struggles of black history.

The Moor Mother sound is deliberately abrasive; a noisy torrent of free jazz, hip-hop, poetry and punk or, in her own words, ‘project-housing bop, slaveship punk, witch rap‘ collaged into experimental noise poems.

In another program highlight, legendary genre, gender and conformity defier, English singer-songwriter, musician, poet, performance and visual artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge performs with Edley ODowd. In this one of concert, caustic electronics, percussion and voice collide in an exploration of transcendence, identity and much more as part of Midsumma Festival.

In an Australian exclusive, The SUBSTATION presents an exhibition of works across art forms by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, curated by Lawrence English. Loyalty Does Not End With Death is a survey exhibition of Genesis’s artworks and traces the development of their pandrogyne project as well as their interests in identity and transcendence. Genesis has exhibited worldwide over the past 46 years, including the recent retrospectives at the Andy Warhol Museum and the Rubin Museum of Art.

Acclaimed American musician, Charlemagne Palestine steps outside The SUBSTATION to deliver a powerful performance for organ and voice on the historic organ of the Holy Trinity Anglican Church, Williamstown where he will work with the architecture of the space to explore harmony, overtones and the very resonance of music itself in his trademark trance style.

One of the world’s most distinctive guitarists, Norwegian experimental musician Kim Myhr has been described as somewhere between American folk strumming and 60s avant-garde orchestral soundmass. In his first visit to Australia, he performs two concerts as part of the Melbourne International Jazz Festival.

The first sees him joined by trailblazing trumpeter and sound artist, Peter Knight whilst his second outing sees him take to the stage with the Australian Art Orchestra, performing the world premiere of a new piece created especially for the shape-shifting 10-piece orchestra.

In another Festival collaboration, three Next Wave works inhabit the venue. Commissioned by The SUBSTATION, Lady Example features Alice Dixon, Caroline Meaden and William McBride (This Is What’s Happening, Blowin’ Up and Fallen O’er) and an ensemble of artists, who present a demented and exquisite stocktake of history to propose a feminine future. Theatre makers Charles Purcell and Zak Pidd bring Apokalypsis to the stage – a high octane, searing indictment of society’s inability to work together.

The third work is from local visual artist Shireen Taweel. Tracing Transcendence, another The SUBSTATION commission, is a meditation on the distance between deserts and the worn tracks on the road to prayer. Taweel’s creative practice continues a long tradition that involves the act of marking and piercing copper, a process intimately connected to her contemporary experience of being a migrant of Muslim and Lebanese heritage living in Australia.

The SUBSTATION’s program of multidisciplinary arts extends to the first survey exhibition of its kind to occur in Melbourne, Hyphenated – an exposition of contemporary Asian-Australian artists living locally, curated by Phuong Ngo and Tammy Wong Hulbert .

You’re Standing In It – Resident Artist Amanda Carr’s exploration of the relationship between the observer and environment through an unlikely symbiosis of theatrical staging and liquid mechanics on The SUBSTATION billboards.

The music line-up continues with sound artist Lawrence English’s evening of intense sonic affect Cruel Optimism, with Thembi Soddell, ONO presents an evening of international and local guests exploring the undercurrents of music today and techno reigns as BUNKER returns to The SUBSTATION with two international guests to be announced shortly and support by an array of Melbourne’s best.

2018 also marks the beginning of The SUBSTATION Commissioning Program offering mid-career local independent artists with a career defining opportunity to develop, create and present a significant body of work from concept to presentation over an extended period of time in close collaboration with The SUBSTATION.

Local Indigenous visual artist Steven Rhall, composers Marita Dyson and Stuart Flanagan collectively known as The Orbweavers along with projection, installation and digital media artist Yandell Walton and designer, composer and instrument builder Alisdair Macindoe are the inaugural recipients of the program.

For more information, and full program, visit: www.thesubstation.org.au for details.

Image: Apokalypsis (supplied)