VNS Matrix

Bio

VNS MATRIX is an artist collective founded in Adelaide, Australia, in 1991, by Virginia Barratt, Francesca da Rimini, Julianne Pierce and Josephine Starrs. Their work includes gallery installations, public artworks, events, lectures, performances, and posters distributed through physical and online spaces. Taking their point of departure in a sexualised and socially provocative relationship between women and technology, their works subversively question discourses of domination and control in the expanding cyber space. They are credited as being the first artists to use the term cyberfeminism to describe their practice and are generally regarded as the founders of the international cyberfeminist movement. Their highly influential 1992 text and artwork A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century has been presented as a 6m x 3m billboard, a 2m x 1m lightbox, as a poster, and distributed as postcards. It has been translated into numerous languages including French, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Finnish and Japanese. During the 1990s, VNS Matrix was invited to exhibit widely overseas with their work shown in Helsinki, France, Amsterdam, Toronto, San Francisco, and New York. Australian galleries also recognised the work of VNS Matrix with exhibitions at Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide (1993), Artspace, Sydney (1994), Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (1995), and Casula Powerhouse, Sydney (1997). The work of VNS Matrix has been written about extensively in newspapers, journals and magazines such as Art+Text, WIRED, The Australian, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Advertiser, Flash Art, Artlink, Eyeline, Dazed and Confused, and Broadsheet. They are studied in universities across the world and are written about in scholarly, art, and popular culture publications. In 2016, VNS Matrix celebrated their 25th anniversary with the performance of a new text A Tender Hex for the Anthropocene at the opening night of Fem Flix 2016: Australian Feminist screen culture from the 90s at Sydney College of the Art gallery. Since then, their work has continued to be exhibited in major group exhibitions at Rhizome, New Museum, New York; Fundacja Nośna, Poland; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; UTS Gallery, Sydney; Griffith University Art Museum, Brisbane; Institute of Contemporary Art, London; Migros Gallery, Zurich; and De La Warr Pavilion, UK. In 2022 they exhibited their first NFT (Non Fungible Token) as part of the Wetware Cyberfeminism Index curated by Mindy Seu on Feral File, New York.

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