Following are links to performance and exhibition videos, ephemera, selected reviews, catalogs, unpublished sketches, zines + more
Here you will find soundworks including live gig recordings, installation soundtracks + original compositions
I also work with these ongoing collaborations:
VNS Matrix
In Her Interior (F da Rimini and V Barratt)
Bone Dirt (J Boylan, L Dement, V Barratt, J Tukes)
2020
Fine Print: Issue 22: INTERIORS
Virginia Barratt: labour body
INTERIORS is a specially commissioned edition of fine print magazine focused on short-form film and sonic works that unpack some of these prescient concerns. Through visual and aural language, INTERIORS is a collective response comprised of a vast array of individual approaches to art making whilst in isolation.
INTERIORS features contributions by Roy Ananda (SA), Virginia Barratt (SA), Alycia Bennett & Florian Cinco (AUS/PHL), Alison Currie (SA), Brian Fuata (NSW), Dominic Guerrera (SA), Ray Harris (SA), Cynthia Schwertsik (SA), Kate Power (SA), and Inneke Taalman (SA).
2019
Refresh Art Tech, 205 Hudson, Hunter College and the Knockdown Centre, New York, 2019
REFRESH is a collaborative + politically engaged platform in Art, Science, and Technology. As a collective we begin with inclusion as a starting point for pursuing sustainable artistic and curatorial practices.
Virginia Barratt and Francesca da Rimini, collaborating as In Her Interior, presented an installation Her eyes were as black as coal at 205 Hudson Gallery, an experimental writing workshop Mxtrx Class at the Knockdown Centre, a performance This Platform Life and an artist talk at Hunter College Masters Program.
Refresh Art Tech comprised a two-day conference, an exhibition Refiguring the Future and a workshop and performance component.Tracing how science and technology have shaped the world around us Refresh Art Tech brings forth critical perspectives that offer ways of living differently in relation to land, self, and others that we must take seriously in our current political moment. Participants expand the work science does, taking up other methodologies such as story-telling and speculation, to challenge structural injustices and engage technology by posing new questions and experiments.
find images and video documentation on the gallery page.
RUPTURE (V Barratt, J Boylan, L Dement), Big Anxiety Festival, Esme Timbery CPL, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 2019
I left oscillating between these states, unable to answer the question posed by the artists in their program note: “By considering panic as both urgency and agency, can we begin to see ways of engaging with our catastrophic times?” But I keep worrying at it; Rupture has that kind of power. Keith Gallasch, RealTime
RUPTURE is a collaboration between Virginia Barratt, Jessie Boylan, Linda Dement and Jenna Tukes. Through performance, multi-channel sound, synched video, RUPTURE investigates the ways in which the body and the world mimic each other in modes of panic and crisis. Through a performance of vocalities and gestures sited within a multi-channel video and sound installation, this work interprets how symptoms of environmental and human ‘disorder’ can be seen as an appropriate response to personal traumas and global catastrophe.
find images and video documentation on the gallery page.
2018
RUPTURE (V Barratt, J Boylan, L Dement, J Tukes), Bendigo Art Gallery, Victoria, 2018
It is [here] that Barratt immediately captivates, for the sounds early on in the soundtrack (gasps, truncated sighs, barking exhalations and pulses) are laced with a panicky horror-sublime. Her gaze (upon what, when or where?) draws us in, but deflects. Like a Rorschach blot or a kaleidoscope, her shimmering image is sometimes doubled upon itself, even tripled, these ghostly echoes of her body glitching and pulsing. Her multiple limbs extend like those of the goddess Kali, destroyer of evil, in a twitchy sequence of movements that speak to me of distress, but also of transcendence, of connection to the natural world.
An immersive 6 channel video and surround sound installation. The installation is on a 13-minute loop and features breath, environmental field recordings and synthesized sound with manipulated environmental and performance video.
Xenoblood (with Fracesca da Rimini and Alice Nillson), Sister Gallery, 2018
Xenoblood is a multi-platform artwork comprising an online multi-user environment (LambdaMOO), performing avatars, experimental hypertext fiction, and a XenZine workshop (pronounced zeenzeen). The subject is the construction of intentional familiars beyond blood and the nuclear family, in a rather anarchic exploration of Xeno kin(d)ship, queerness and the ties that bind, beyond blood and biological determinism.
While the Xenoblood project is very speculative in its scope, the group are methodologically and politically committed to praxis, that is, the ‘practical application of a theory’ through iterative processes of action/reflection
2015
Haunting: (with Amy Ireland), First Draft, Sydney, 2015
It is a strange and potent experience to encounter these two feminisms, past and present, in dialogue. The performance space, meanwhile, evokes the uncertain space of a radical technological future, with a neon green X marked on the floor across which the women slowly travel, each on her own axis, alternately facing toward and away from us.
2016
Somatechnics: The Darkening with Francesca da Rimini and Quinn Eades;
De-tonation with Eve Klein and AnA Wojak,
Somatechnics Conference, Byron Bay, December 2016
Go to the gallery for images of these 2 performances
Barratt V and Boyd A, “the dead end”, Unnamed laneway, Brisbane, April 2016 as part of “Ephemeral Traces” Public Program, University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane, 2016
A large white box stands in a narrow graffiti covered back alley. The alley is a dead end. The box is sealed on all sides except for a small aperture at the front, a peep hole. The audience can view the action in the box through this opening only. Set into the box are two viewing chutes. Each is a different viewing device playing looped films. One shows two skeletons working manically in a laboratory, the other (viewed through a large lens) shows a seated skeleton with petals falling upwards all over it. A pair of ear buds hanging from the box near by plays an audio recording of multiple layers of dialogue; two skeletons discussing the nature of death from a personal, existential perspective. From another small tube protruding from the box at knee height, grains of rice tumble into a bowl.
2015
Cryptocrystalline: Technomancy (divination) GOLD: Performative reading, Cementa 15, Kandos, NSW 13th April 2015
Barratt V and da Rimini F, headline speakers, “Hexing the Alien” The Cyborg, Disruption Network Lab, Berlin, 30th May 2015
Keynote: Hexing the Alien with Francesca Da Rimini /Doll Yoko (artist and cyberfeminist, AU), and Virginia Barratt (artist, performer and cyberfeminist, AU), moderated by Magdalena Freudenschuss (gender theory researcher, DE) From VNS Matrix, Gashgirl, Doll Yoko, to aliens, cyborgs, provisional subjects and “monster mash”, Francesca Da Rimini and Virginia Barratt reflect on what “cybernetic organisms” mean today, when we experience hybrid conditions of being, our blood and flesh intertwined with big data, intrusive technospaces, and increasing domains of surveillance. As Donna Haraway stated years ago in her Cyborg Manifesto, the cyborg was described as a subject of political reflection and agency on the development of culture and society, where technology, and its strict relation with the body, assumed a crucial role. This perspective was an input for imagining new situated subjectivities mediated by technology, inspiring many theorists, feminists, artists, hackers and critical thinkers. But what does it mean to speak about the cyborg as situated subjectivity today? If as Antonio Caronia wrote, we are all aliens and precarious, becoming the simulacra of the contemporary, can our body still be a metaphor of the possible? Which new practices and interventions can be imagined as agency towards power structures?
Zines: click to download
