Grind Grind Grind, Release. An Exhibition as a Massage

The 2026 edition of 'Artefact' departs from the question: how can an exhibition function as a massage? Bringing together the work of more than 20 national and international visual artists, the exhibition explores concepts such as the desiring body, longing and belonging. And just like a good massage, this exhibition seeks out the tension points. Not to dance around it, but to gently yet firmly acknowledge their existence, and work through it. What does it mean to long for? What does it mean to belong; to feel at home in your body, a community, a (self-chosen) family, a landscape? How do highly personal questions touch the political and social? What needs to be said? Where is the tension? What can offer release?

An open-hearted exhibition that welcomes you, challenges you, and invites you to find the release to your grind: may you wake up refreshed!

Composition for Mouths (Songs My Mother Taught Me) I & II

Exploring ideas of cultural memory and 'inherited music, Oliver Beer asked singers to recall the earliest songs they remembered from childhood, incorporating the melodies into new compositional forms. Joining their lips in a tight seal to create a single mouth cavity, the singers explore the resonant frequencies of each other's faces as acoustic vessels. They blend their voices to create rhythmic microtonal harmonic interactions known as "beats' whilst combining adapted forms of their remembered music.

In Composition for Mouths (Songs My Mother Taught Me) I, a tenor singing an Aboriginal Australian song learned from his aunts as a child is juxtaposed with another singer's earliest musical memory, the children's hymn, 'Two Little Eyes to Look to God'. In Composition for Mouths (Songs My Mother Taught Me) II, two sopranos merge an Indian classical raga and a melody by twelfth-century composer Hildegard van Bingen.