Tina Stefanou: Dance the War of Proximity

Source: https://www.galleries.unsw.edu.au/exhibition/tina-stefanou-dance-war-proximity Parent: https://www.galleries.unsw.edu.au/

Tina Stefanou is a Greek-Australian artist whose practice spans experimental film, performance, vocalisation, socially engaged research, and sculptural installation. She explores acts of singing as a political potential of aesthetics, using voice and its energetic and material capacities to engage questions of identity, belonging, instrumentality, and power. Devoted to the possibilities of collective voices sounding and sensing together across diverse contexts, settings, and species, Stefanou positions performance as an intermedial terrain; an entanglement of place, body, and action, where speculative worlds can emerge within and beyond institutional spaces.

'Dance the War of Proximity' extends these concerns through a multi-channel video installation developed with ten young performers and three movement artists. Together they articulate a metaphorical nervous system: singing, speaking, vocalising, and moving in responsive relation to one another and to their environments. Filmed across sites of collection, conservation, and surveillance, including botanic gardens, summits, and zoological grounds, the work navigates themes of enclosure, valuation, distribution, symbiosis, chorusing, and the politics of coming of age. It gestures toward alternate modes of making and sensing that momentarily suspend boundaries between performer and environment, self and other, human and more-than-human, labour and leisure. The work reveals the capacity of body-voice to materialise abstract relations and formations of power.

The exhibition also features a new sculptural sound installation in which Stefanou transforms the damaged remnants of an automobile into a resonant embroidery. This work turns a fractured familial object into a durational act of tending—an intimate gesture of love articulated through sound, touch, and time.

When

29 May – 16 August 2026

Where

Address

Cnr Oxford St & Greens Rd Paddington NSW 2021

Hours

Wed to Fri 10am–5pm; Sat to Sun 12–5pm

Phone

+61 2 8936 0888

Acknowledgement\ 'Dance the War of Proximity' was first presented as a series of live performances for the '18th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art: Inner Sanctum', with the support of UNSW Galleries and the Art Gallery of South Australia.

Image: Tina Stefanou, Dance the War of Proximity 2024. Documentation from live performance, filmic event. Courtesy the artist, Naarm/Melbourne. Photo: Wil Normyle and Andrew Kaineder