One Night Only, Free Admission

Enclosed shoes required. Warm clothing recommended.

In RE:ACT Barbara Campbell has been working with Art School students to reactivate ACT 3, a Performance Art festival that coincided with the opening of the National Gallery of Australia in 1982.RE:ACT is not a re-creation or re-enactment of the original performances but rather a re-activation through poetic re-imagining. The quest of RE:ACT is: How to regard the ephemeral?

ACT 3 included works by Aleks Danko and Jude Walton; Graeme Davis; Joan Grounds; Lyndal Jones; Jill Orr; Mike Parr; and Stelarc.

 

  KELSEY MUTANDADZI re-vitalises JILL ORR’s concept of the body’s ‘unobstructed strength’.

SARAH NATHAN-TRUESDALE re-articulates JOAN GROUNDS by focusing on the mouth as a site of language and consumption.

TOM BUCKLAND revives STELARC’S faith in the transhuman.

REBECCA SELLECK re-formulates LYNDAL JONES’ texts and typewriters.

JANET RANKEN redefines ALEKS DANKO and JUDE WALTON’S collaborative blindness.

ANTON POON re-animates the body of GRAEME DAVIS’ ghostly presence.

 

Barbara Campbell’s own trajectory as a performance artist began in 1982 when she finished art school in Brisbane. Her experience as a young audience member at ACT 3, Canberra literally gave her the courage to be an artist. Since then Barbara has performed in Australia, Europe and the USA, in museums, galleries, public buildings, photographs, on film, video, radio, and the internet, in silence and with words, still and moving. See her internet project at 1001.net.au.

 

“Act 3 Canberra: Ten Australian Performance Artists (directed by Ingo Kleinert) took place around the campus of the Canberra School of Art and a little further afield. As such, Canberra was full of interstate and international visitors in town for a big weekend of art. I had travelled from Brisbane as a young artist and co-ordinator of the Institute of Modern Art. It was my first time in Canberra and my first encounter with performance art on this scale. I had already begun to make performances and had worked with visiting performance artists to Brisbane, but Act 3 gave me the sense of something big: performance was not just a sideshow; it held its own; it could be my future. The catalogue for Act 3 (edited by Sylvia Kleinert) was a dossier of individual leaflets, the text and image content tailored to each of the ten participating artists. Each leaflet is enigmatic in its own way, barely hinting at what might happen in the actual works to come. I’ve consulted my copy of the catalogue many times over the last thirty years, trying to connect the now dog-eared papers with what I remember seeing.” Barbara Campbell