'Lick' was created for the 2024 Venice Biennale in a collaboration between Deakin University's Public Art Commission and the European Cultural Centre. This audiovisual installation was created by an interdisciplinary team working across theatre, dance, sculpture and design, in response to a curatorial provocation which examined Venice's role in food production and its unique resilience in the face of rampant consumerism.
'Lick': single channel video (3, 40), audio mp3 and wax object
CONCEPT AND CREATION
Kate Hunter, Katie Lee, Luigi Vescio and Annette Wagner
SOUND DESIGN
Kate Hunter
WAX MODELLING
Giorgio Benotto Awai
VENUE
Palazzo Mora, Venice, Italy; April-November 2024
In 1960 in South Australia, aeronautical engineers fired ten intermediate range ballistic missiles into the ‘uninhabited’ Great Sandy Desert from Woomera Rocket Range.
Part of the Blue Streak program aimed at developing Britain’s military resources into a credible nuclear deterrent threat, the rockets were loaded with inert 3000 kilotonne warheads. Fast forward to 2023, and Australians are living in a place and time in which notions of global safety have never been more unstable.
Part poem, part sound experiment, part visual art work, Near Sighted considers the ways in which the passage of time colours our perspectives of events, histories and identities. In an innovative cross-disciplinary investigation in which texts and sounds and images are composed and contained within tiny painted worlds, Near Sighted is an immersive audience experience, bringing to life myriad watercolour cutouts combined with a textured sound scape which draws from archival footage, field recordings, and personal stories to unfold the failures of the rocket program and the misgivings of those who came after.
Presented at fortyfivedownstairs, Melbourne, Australia,
October 3-14, 2023.
CONCEPT, CREATION: Kate Hunter
DRAMATURG: Emilie Collyer
VOICES: Josephine Lange and Kate Hunter
FABRICATION, COMPUTER PROCESSING: Jem Savage
AUDIO MIXING: Leo Dale
IMAGES courtesy of Leo Dale
The Symphony Series is part audio/video installation, part vocal manipulation, part crowd-sourced conversation.
This suite of one-person audio-visual experiences has been presented at locations across Melbourne. 'Sky Symphony', at La Mama HQ (2023), is a meditation on the sky as inspiration for an experience of restful reflection in a busy city landscape. 'Sea Symphony', at Theatre Works (2024) celebrates the sea as a place of joy but also fear for some, as a home for creatures, as a place of safe harbour or stormy wildness, as harbinger of climate change, and as a great body of salt water that stretches around the earth and which connects us all. 'Sea Symphony' was commissioned by the Rawcus ensemble and supported by a grant from the City of Port Phillip.
CONCEPT
Kate Hunter and Rea Dennis
FABRICATION AND TECHNICAL DESIGN
Jem Savage
AUDIO RECORDINGS
Rea Dennis and Kate Hunter
SOUND DESIGN
Kate Hunter
VOICED BY
Jane Bartier, Rea Dennis, Kate Hunter, Magda Miranda, Jem Murphy, Morgan Rose, and members of the Rawcus ensemble.
IMAGES courtesy of Darren Gill
