Database

Tina FiveAsh (b. 1970) is an Australian photo-artist who has been exhibiting for 30 years. Engaging in multiple forms of contemporary photo media, FiveAsh’s work has appeared on billboards, illuminated public advertising spaces, film, television, book and magazine covers, as well as in exhibitions and festivals throughout the world. Winner of the People’s Choice Award at the 2013 Olive Cotton Award for Photographic Portraiture, FiveAsh’s work was most recently selected as a finalist in the prestigious 67th Blake Prize in 2022. Previous awards include Highly Commended at the 2017 Olive Cotton Award and Finalist in the 2016 National Portrait Prize and 64th Blake Prize. In 2015, FiveAsh and Deborah Kelly’s award-winning collaborative public art project, *Hey Hetero!*, was exhibited at the 5th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art in Greece. FiveAsh’s previous international exhibitions include: the 13th Pingyao International Photography Festival, China (2013); *Terra Nullius: Contemporary Art from Australia* and *Die Ideale Ausstellung*, Kunstfest Weimar, Germany (2009). In 2021, FiveAsh was awarded a PhD degree from the Australian National University, Research School of Humanities and the Arts, majoring in Visual Arts. FiveAsh’s work is held in public collections including Artbank, Art Gallery of Ballarat, Whitford Fine Art Gallery, London, and several private international collections.

Toni Robertson (b. 1953) is an artist, art historian, and printmaker from Sydney, Australia. Robertson is known for her political posters and involvement in the Earthworks Poster Collective, which operated out of the ‘Tin Shed’ art workshops at the University of Sydney. In 1974 Robertson joined Earthworks Poster Collective and helped create political artworks and posters that covered a wide array of political issues that included the Australian feminist movement, Indigenous Australian and LGBT rights, environmental and unemployment issues and anti-nuclear concerns. Robertson became a key member of the Sydney Women’s Art Movement along with contemporaries such as Barbara Hall, Frances Phoenix, Beverley Garlick, Jude Adams and Vivienne Binns. Robertson retired from making as a result of health concerns from chemical exposure while teaching at the Tin Shed. Robertson’s work is held in several prominent Australian collections including the Museum of Applied Arts and Science, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia and the National Gallery of Australia.

Tony Albert’s (b. 1981) multidisciplinary practice investigates contemporary legacies of colonialism, prompting audiences to contemplate the human condition. Drawing on both personal and collective histories, Albert explores the ways in which optimism might be utilised to overcome adversity. His work poses important questions such as how do we remember, give justice to, and rewrite complex and traumatic histories? Albert’s technique and imagery are distinctly contemporary, displacing traditional Aboriginal aesthetics with an urban conceptuality. Appropriating textual references from sources as diverse as popular music, film, fiction, and art history, Albert plays with the tension arising from the visibility, and in-turn, the invisibility of Aboriginal people across the news media, literature, and the visual world. Albert has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include *Conversations with Margaret Preston*, Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney (2021); *Duty of Care*, Canberra Glassworks, Canberra (2020); *Wonderland*, Sullivan+Strumpf (2019); *Native Home*, Sullivan+Strumpf (2019); *Encounters*, Art Basel Hong Kong, Hong Kong (2019) *Confessions*, Contemporary Art Tasmania, Hobart (2019); *Visible*, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2018) and *Unity*, Sullivan+Strumpf (2018). Recent selected group exhibitions include *Occurrent Affair*, University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane (2021); *NIRIN: 22nd Biennale of Sydney*, Sydney (2020); *The National 2019: New Australian Art*, Carriageworks, Sydney (2019); *Dark Mofo*, Museum of Old and New Art, Tasmania (2019); *I am Visible *commission, Enlighten Festival Canberra, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2019); *Just Not Australian*, Artspace, Sydney (2019); *Weapons for the Soldier*, Hazelhurst Arts Centre, Sydney and touring (2018); *Continental Drift*, Cairns Regional Art Gallery, Cairns (2018); *Defying Empire: 3rd National Indigenous Art Triennial*, National Gallery of Australia (2017); and *When Silence Falls*, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2016). Albert’s work is represented in major national collections including the National Gallery of Australia; the Australian War Memorial, Canberra; the Art Gallery of New South Wales; the Art Gallery of Western Australia and Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.

Self-described Queer-Aboriginal artist Troy-Anthony Baylis (b. 1976) is a descendant of the Jawoyn people from the Northern Territory and is also of Irish ancestry. Baylis is an artist, curator and writer, and formerly Course Coordinator of Aboriginal Cultures, Comparative Indigenous Studies and Indigenous Philosophy at the University of South Australia, Adelaide, where he also lives. He has presented 24 solo exhibitions and numerous group exhibitions, performances and publications since 1993. His PhD research "Deadly Mimicry: Indigeneity and Drag in Contemporary Artistic Representation", is concerned with analysis, cultural interpretation and ethics of the self as subject.

Tyza Hart (b. 1990) combines self-portraiture with gestures of minimalist abstraction. Bodily experiences are foregrounded, but not always figuratively represented. Their installations, painting, ceramics, sculpture, video, and poems evoke ways of doing personhood outside prescriptive categories. These artworks extend from experiences of embodiment that felt simultaneously intense and dispersed, limitless and non-existent. Hart has held solo exhibitions at the Museum of Brisbane, Carpark, the Institute of Modern Art, and Wreckers Upstairs, Brisbane, FirstDraft, Sydney and Gympie Regional Art Gallery. Their artwork has featured in shows at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Incinerator Gallery and West Space, Melbourne, Gallery of Modern Art, Griffith University Art Museum, UQ Art Museum, QUT Art Museum, Metro Arts, and OuterSpace, Brisbane, National Art School, Artspace, Carriageworks, and Verge Gallery, Sydney.

Virginia Barratt (b. 1959) is a trans-media artist, researcher, writer and performer living on Kaurna Yarta, Adelaide, so-called Australia. Virginia is writing a PhD at Western Sydney University in the Writing and Society Centre, and their doctoral research focuses on panic, affect and deterritorialization, explored through performance, experimental poetics and vocalities. As a founding member of the cyberfeminist collective VNS Matrix, still active through occasional collaborations, Barratt has been instrumental in developing critiques around gender and technology over three decades. Barratt’s most recent works have been performed in Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne, Byron Bay, Sydney, Helsingør, San Francisco, Toronto, London, Performing Arts Forum (PAF) and the Sorbonne in France, Humbolt University and Kunsthaus KuLe in Berlin. Barratt has been widely published, including in: *AXON*, *Cordite Poetry Review*, *Writing from Below*, *TEXT Journal*, *Banquet Press*, *Cordite*, *Overland*, *Plinth Journal*, *Artlink* and *Offshoot: Contemporary Lifewriting Methodologies and Practice in Australasia*. Barratt subscribes to the DIWO (Doing it With Others) approach to art making and privileges co-creation as a productive and resistant modality. Among others accomplices, Virginia collaborates in an ongoing capacity with Linda Dement and Jessie Boylan as boneDirt, with Francesca da Rimini as In Her Interior and as Swamp Writing with Ashley Haywood and Nick Taylor.

Vivienne Binns OAM (b. 1940) is a pioneer of feminist, collaborative and community-based practice in Australia. Binns’ first exhibition, at Watters Gallery in 1967, was widely criticised for its provocative and sexually explicit imagery. After the Watters exhibition, Binns embarked on a range of ephemeral, cross-disciplinary and collaborative projects that precipitated her role as a leading figure in the development of community-based practices in Australia. Her career is characterised by a succession of firsts, including as a founding member of the Sydney Women’s Art Movement in 1974, and her participation in *An Exhibition of Homosexual and Lesbian Artists* at Watters Gallery in 1978, the earliest undertaking of its kind in Australia. Binns’ landmark work, *Mothers’ memories, others’ memories*, involved collaborating with participants at the University of New South Wales and then at Blacktown, a western suburb of Sydney, to record matrilineal histories at a time when women’s experiences were seldom valued or documented. Her subsequent work, *Tower of Babel*, continued her collaborative, feminist and community-based approach to production. Binns returned to painting in the 1980s but remained deeply involved with community projects. Over the following years, she worked as an educator, teaching painting, drawing and art theory at Sydney University, Charles Sturt University (Albury), and the Australian National University. She developed a reputation as a generous mentor to artists including Geoff Newton, Dionisia Salas, Trevelyan Clay, Liang Luscomb and Charlie Sofo. In 2021 Binns was the recipient of the Australia Council Award for Visual Arts, in 1985 she was given the Ros Bower Memorial Award for visionary contribution to community arts and in 1983 she was awarded the Order of Australia Medal for Services to Art and Craft. Binns’ most recent work in painting and assemblage is a way of processing her prior community and feminist practice as well as an extension of her concerns in the materials and methods of surfacing in painting. Her abiding interests are the function of art making as a human activity, which occurs in all social groups, and the manifestations of this throughout these communities. This is especially visible in Binns’ use of patterning and surface treatments, which connect historical art movements to domestic or familiar imagery. Binns has continued to exhibit regularly with her dealers: Watters Gallery, Sydney (until 1995), Bellas Gallery (now Milani Gallery), Brisbane and Sutton Gallery, Melbourne. Selected Binns' solo exhibitions include *Vivienne Binns: On and Through the Surface*, co-presented by Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2022); *It Is What It Is What It Is*, Sutton Gallery, Melbourne, (2018); *New Work*, Milani Gallery, Brisbane (2014); *Vivienne Binns – Art and Life*, Latrobe University Museum of Art (2012); *Everything New is Old Again*, Sutton Gallery (2008); *A Symphony of Uncertainties: In Memory of Unknown Artists and Scenes of Popular Reverie*, Helen Maxwell Gallery, Canberra (2007); *Vivienne Binns*, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart (2006); and *Vivienne Binns: Twenty First Century Paintings*, The Cross Art Projects, Sydney (2004). Selected group exhibitions include *QUEER: Stories from the NGV Collection*, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2022); *Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now*, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2020); *Unfinished Business: Perspectives on Art & Feminism*, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne (2018); *Painting, More Painting*, ACCA (2016); *Painting Amongst Other Things*, Drill Hall Gallery, ANU SOAD Gallery, ANCA Gallery (2018); *Pop to Popism*, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2015); *Lurid Beauty*, National Gallery of Victoria (2015); *Temperament Spectrum*, Sutton Gallery (2012); *Stick it!: Collage in Australian Art*, National Gallery of Victoria (2010); and *Cross Currents: Focus on Contemporary Australian Art*, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney (2007).

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.