RUPTURE — V Barratt

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Rupture and its iterative manifestations (Bendigo Art Gallery 2018, Big Anxiety Festival 2019, Liveworks at Performance Space 2022 and The Lab 2023) was born of an interdisciplinary and collaborative process bringing together photo, video and sound artist Jesse Boylan, researcher, writer and performer V. Barratt, digital media artist Linda Dement and trauma-informed psychotherapist Jenna Tuke. In 2023, Rupture collaborated with composer Luke Harrald and the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra in its final iteration, presented by The Lab, Adelaide. The initial concept and impetus came from Jesse Boylan, and was realised through a Going Solo grant in 2018, with the Bendigo Art Gallery.

The work explores – through the politics of vulnerability – how panic and anxiety, often underpinned by personal and collective grief, pain, anger, loss, trauma, has a "palpable extension in the world" (J. Bennett). The work asks us how to stay with the trouble (D. Haraway) of our catastrophic times.

"do we stop in our tracks, 'overwhelmed' turn our faces from a sun that is swallowing us whole, walk blindfolded and alone towards the crumbling ochre cliffs? Or can we find accomplices to walk with us, to make some sense of the catastrophic present, and then use this awareness to resist paralysis, to cast off despair" – Francesca Da Rimini

At the Seams (2023)

With Linda Dement and V. Barratt, re-developed for The Lab in Light Square as part of the ARC-funded Rebooting the Muse project led by Luke Harrald (Elder Conservatorium of Music), featuring a soundtrack performed by an Adelaide Symphony Orchestra octet with surround electronics and immersive projections.

Rupture X Adelaide Symphony Orchestra @ The Lab, Adelaide, 2023.

all the stars unshining (2022)

Liveworks, Carriageworks, NSW.

V Barratt: performance, video, installation elements, sound, text. J Boylan: video, sound, installation elements. L Dement: video, coding, installation elements.

Rupture: all the stars unshining is an affecting video and performance installation, revealing the ways in which the body and the world mimic each other in states of panic and crisis. Created by groundbreaking experimental artists V Barratt, Linda Dement and Jessie Boylan (BoneDirt), Rupture explores how symptoms of environmental and human 'disorder' can be seen as an appropriate response to personal traumas and global disaster. This relationship plays out across multiple screens alongside occasional moments of live performance, placing Barratt's body in direct conversation with extraordinary video footage of landscapes in states of transformation and flux.

all the stars unshining, Liveworks at Carriageworks, 2022.

Rupture: all the stars unshining — performance at Liveworks, Carriageworks, 2022

Rupture: all the stars unshining — installation view at Liveworks, Carriageworks, 2022

Photos by Jacqui Manning.

Big Anxiety Festival (2019)

UNSW Studio 1 and Esme Timbery Creative Practice Lab, UNSW Sydney. Multi-channel sound and synchronised video performance. Video duration: 22:00 minutes.

In our current age of anxiety, we are constantly called to attention by present, imminent and hypothetical environmental and psychological 'ruptures'. Anxiety as a warning system becomes faulty through this constant triggering, hypersensitizing a population – not just at a bodily level, but also at a social and global ecological level – to messages of danger and catastrophe. Quakes reverberate across fleshbodies and geobodies, send ripples through everything at a quantum level. The body in/of the world floods, buckles, trembles, spews, generates toxic pools, fractures.

When anxiety exceeds its own capacity as a productive force, it becomes difficult to stay with the trouble. All systems are telling you to flee. In staying with the trouble can we work together with the dead and dying, can we hold the pain of the earth/body but reconfigure the traumas beneath the surface to move us on from stasis?

Rupture, Big Anxiety Festival, UNSW Sydney, 2019. 7 minute excerpt.

Rupture — performance at Big Anxiety Festival, UNSW Sydney, 2019

Photos by Cynthia Sciberras.

Bendigo Art Gallery (2018)

4-channel video installation (3 landscape, 1 body-focused) and surround sound. 17:45 minute loop. Gasps, truncated sighs, barking exhalations and pulses with manipulated environmental and performance video.

The initial concept and impetus came from Jesse Boylan, and was realised through a Going Solo grant in 2018, with the Bendigo Art Gallery.

Collaborators

Jesse Boylan — photo, video, sound artist
Linda Dement — digital media artist
Jenna Tuke — trauma-informed psychotherapist
Luke Harrald — composer (2023 iteration)
Adelaide Symphony Orchestra (2023)

Media