Sweat Season 2020-21
In Honduras there is a celebration that marks the day every year when the sky rains fish. In Phnom Phenn the city sprays itself in water as the river annually changes direction. In Darwin a city slows impossibly down as the crime rate rises, the white tourists flee, and jackfruit and mango start fermenting as the ocean turns venomous.
Sweat Season is an annual celebration of an ancient shift in Darwin/Garrmalang, the Build Up; three months of sweaty, tense, weather culminating in the Wet Season, three months of downpours. In 2020/21 the Sweat Collective, undertook:
Individual research residences,
A collective arts lab,
Creative Developments,
Presentation of new work as part of Sweat Season program in February 2021
Utilising and investigating new ways of being and creating alongside each other in the environmental, cultural, and community melting pot of Darwin, will create new participatory, experimental, durational, cross artform and site specific works that celebrate and interrogate the rituals of the Build Up - new, old, and impossible.
Sweat Season Opening and Book Launch
Haneen Mahmood Martin in collaboration with the Sweat Collective
To kick off Sweat Season we celebrate with a very special exhibition to launch the Sweat Season Art Book. This book holds the interpretations of nine out of the ten Sweat Collective members. The tenth being Haneen Mahmood Martin. Her words are the result of contemplations and collaborations through conversation.
Sweat Season carves out space for the creation of enmeshed experiences specific to the local place, environment and people of Garrmalang/Darwin. We launch the program with a special exhibition sharing the conversations between members of the Sweat Collective.
Exhibition Opening
Date: Thursday 18th Feb
Time: 6pm - 8pm
Location: Empty Shopfront next door to Dom’s Bar & Lounge
FREE EVENT
Ab/ob/jections
Matthew Van Roden
Injected, ejected, rejected, subjected, objected, adjected, interjected, abjected, projected; queer artist Matthew van Roden takes their hand to casting in all its forms. Casting of characters, casting digits and casting words into the air, Ab/ob/jections continues van Roden’s longstanding meditation on bodies and texts. Wax, text and flesh are cycled and recycled, turning and returning in a land where the devil makes work for idle hands.
Exhibition Opening
Date: Friday 19th Feb
Time: 5pm - 8pm
Location: Nan Giese
FREE EVENT
Hail Moon, Full Grace
Matthew Van Roden and Tarzan JungleQueen
In a dark cave shines a light, a prayer, “on earth as it is in heaven”. What more heaven can we know than the Moon? Celestial orb that pulls all the waters of the Earth in her wax and wane. In that cosmic cycle we are all of us drawn up and released. Full and again made new with all the vacillations of energy and rest, fire and nest; the bleeding body knows best.
Date: Wednesday 24th Feb
Time: 6pm - 9pm
Location: WWII Tunnels
FREE EVENT
Petri Chor, 2021
Lee Harrop
Lee Harrop, Petri Chor 2021, (Hand engraved geological core sample from the Yilgarn Craton, Western Australia. Spent diamond encrusted drill bits used in the engraving process of geological core samples, copper wire, tin wire and solder – performance).
The etymology of words tells us about their origin. Petrichor is a term coined by Australia’s CSIRO to describe the unmistakable earthy smell of approaching rain. Derived from the Greek word petra (πέτρα) rock and īchōr (ἰχώρ) the fluid that runs through the veins of gods in Greek mythology. I have hand engraved the word into Australian rock. Like etymology, geology tells us about our planet’s origins – ‘We can read the landscape as a kind of text’ (Prof. M Bjornerud). In Petri Chor rock and words go hand in hand, and for a time, quite literally.
Date: Saturday 27th Feb
Time: 12pm - 1pm
Location: CDU Art Gallery
FREE EVENT
^-+=(-+.>kinetic notation in three dimensions
Jessica Devereux and Amina McConvell
^-+=(-+.>kinetic notation in three dimensions is a participatory performance art installation which fuses improvised dance and drawing through monotone line and form. Prefaced as a durational art experiment and using a visual key and movement within the abstract parameters of a grid. ^-+=(-+.>kinetic notation in three dimensions will unfold languidly over 3-hours at Tracks Studio, where audience members are invited into a relaxed performance in the air conditioning, to rest, observe, participate and/or witness mark-making and movement-making for a little or a long time.
Date: Saturday 27th Feb
Time: 2pm - 5pm
Location: Tracks Dance Studio
FREE EVENT
Sweat Season: Sweaty Duets with The Mango Double
Jenelle Saunders and James Mangohig
You’ll begin surrounded by a special a-cappella arrangement of raw human voices. You may notice a lone dancer embodying the visceral. This leads into a shared duet crafted from The Collective and for the people. Next will come plump bursts of sound, each building to further inspire your newfound movement and uninhibited freedom. A crescendo of ripe beats will take you on your way to embracing the heady, seasonal night. Soak the sweat in.
Date: Saturday 27th Feb
Time: 9pm - 12am
Location: Lucky Bat
FREE EVENT
