Artist name
This is a great place to add a tagline.
ENTANGLED WORLDS
Venue: Collingwood Yards,
35 Johnston St, Collingwood
Dates: 2 — 5 October 2025
Nightly: 6:30pm — 10:30 PM
FREE
Curated by Yandell Walton
Entangled Worlds is co-produced with Collingwood Yards. It is presented in Melbourne Fringe and supported by the City of Yarra.
The Residency program was supported by Fed Square and the City of Yarra.
ABOUT THE PROJECT
Projections, performances and provocations—step into a world beyond the human.
Entangled Worlds is a site-wide activation of Collingwood Yards, transforming the precinct over four nights into a living, breathing network of projection installations & performances. Exploring our entanglement with other species, technologies, and ecologies, it invites audiences to experience Collingwood Yards as they’ve never seen it before.
Featuring large-scale site-specific projection works from the Centre for Projection Art Residency program and curated moving image installations and activations, the exhibition explores the rich terrain of multispecies entanglement. Entangled Worlds becomes a portal into expanded ways of sensing, knowing, and being, inviting audiences to reconsider what connection means in an age of climate crisis and accelerating technology.
Entangled Worlds is free and open to all. Come wander, wonder, and reconnect.
CURATORIAL STATEMENT
My curatorial approach is grounded in lived and embodied encounters with forest ecosystems, from early experiences in the Daintree on Kuku Yalanji Country to field research in the Amazon and other biodiverse environments. These places have been more than sites of observation; they have been collaborators, shaping my understanding of the complex, reciprocal processes that bind species, landscapes, and technologies. In these ecosystems, nothing exists in isolation. As theorists such as Donna Haraway and Karen Barad suggest, all beings and materials are constituted through relations, constantly in the process of influencing, adapting, and transforming one another.
The eight artists in the 2025 Centre for Projection Art Residency program respond to this entangled condition through diverse and experimental practices. Their works engage with themes of multispecies entanglement, ecological memory, posthuman presence, and technological symbiosis, blurring the distinctions between organism and environment, nature and machine. In doing so, they align with Barad’s notion of “intra-action,” where meaning and matter emerge through mutual co-constitution, rather than from discrete, pre-existing entities.
Together, their works form an open-ended dialogue, one that resists hierarchy and instead embraces mutual responsiveness, feedback loops, and shared agency. Across the residency, the projects will shift and evolve, culminating in three distinct outcomes: an initial presentation for Now or Never Festival at Fed Square; a refined, screen-based work introducing sound; and a final, site-responsive installation for Collingwood Yards.
.jpg)
Ariel Ruby
Madonna dell'Arco, 2025
Ariel Ruby is an Australian-Italian artist exploring deep connections to places she has called home and those she can imagine. Her work creates vibrant, immersive worlds filled with glittering objects, rich narratives, and emotional memory. Drawing inspiration from folklore, storytelling, and ritual, she merges traditional techniques with contemporary themes. Working across sculptural and digital mediums, she favours practical effects over digital manipulation, using cloud tanks, dioramas, stop motion, and time-lapse to craft evocative visual experiences.
Madonna dell’Arco explores my ancestral connection to Marianism and the mysteries of the Black Madonnas of Southern Italy, focusing on the Madonna dell’Arco - her healing powers, and votive rituals associated with her devotion. Legend says that on the Monday after Easter in 1450, two boys played near a niche where a painting of the Madonna stood. After losing, one boy became enraged, cursed the image, and threw a ball at her face. Blood flowed from her left cheek, and when he tried to run, his feet refused to move. The crowd cried out: Miracolo!
Ben Joseph Andrews and Emma Roberts
Movements I-III, 2025
Ben Joseph Andrews and Emma Roberts are a new media artist duo based on Wathaurong Country, regional Victoria. Their immersive, audience-led installations integrate emerging technology to expand perceptions, reawaken curiosity, and interrogate the liminal space between the physical and the digital. Their work has been presented at Sundance, Adelaide Festival, ACMI, MIT, Science Gallery Michigan, Venice Film Festival, and the Experimenta Triennial (2025–27), positioning them at the forefront of experimental digital art in Australia and beyond.
https://www.benjosephandrews.com/
https://www.pernicketysplit.com/
Drawing on the visual language of 19th-century chronophotographer Étienne-Jules Marey, Movements I-III reclaims and recontextualises the movement study, not as scientific dissection, but as intimate self-portraiture. Ben, who lives with a vestibular disability, reperforms Marey’s human locomotion studies, recorded in mo-cap (a technology itself descended from Marey’s work). But the traces left behind fracture and blur, warped by the real-time kinetic and atmospheric conditions of our environment at time of recording. We want to express the body as a collective, porous entity, shaped by the ever-moving world around it, and to explore a language for movement complexity within a framework of radical vestibular accessibility.
Jen Valender
Clearfell, 2025
Jen Valender was born in Aotearoa New Zealand and is based in Naarm Melbourne. She holds a Master of Fine Arts (Research) (2021) from the Victorian College of the Arts, as well as Bachelor degrees in Fine Art, Sociology and Anthropology. Valender has exhibited, performed and screened work widely both locally and internationally. Selected projects and exhibitions include: Saatchi Gallery (London); MONA (Hobart); Arsenale Nord (Venice); Heide Museum of Modern Art (Melbourne); Forum des images (Paris); Shepparton Art Museum (Victoria); WIRWIR Gallery (Berlin); Spier Light Art Festival (Stellenbosch); Ian Potter Museum of Art (Melbourne); Australian Centre for the Moving Image (Melbourne); and Adelaide Festival Centre (South Australia). Valender is a PhD candidate at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.
Shot on a digital cine camera and then captured on 16mm, this work channels a history of broadcast and transmission. At its core is an Aeolian harp-sculpture, made from an antique ABC TV satellite tripod—once a receiver of moving image signals, now transducing wind into harmonic frequencies. The materials reference the site’s history as a clearfell logging tramway: harp bow horsehair and a brass amplifier echo horse-drawn harnesses, steel fittings recall log trolleys and salvaged wood evokes felled forests of the Otways. The film documents harpist Genevieve Fry activating the sculpture, shifting between her own harp and the wind-driven form.
J. Rosenbaum
Slopocene Icons, 2025
J. Rosenbaum is a Melbourne-based artist and researcher working across 3D modelling, AI, and extended reality. Their practice merges classical aesthetics with new media to explore posthuman and postgender concepts. With a PhD from RMIT University, J examines AI’s perceptions of gender and bias, particularly towards gender minorities. Their work has been exhibited globally, presented at international conferences, and granted the Midsumma Australia Post Art Prize. J's practice envisions a future that acknowledges and includes gender diversity.
Slopocene Icons interrogates AI slop on social media and juxtaposes it with classical sculpture to draw a connection between AI as an emerging fascist aesthetic. The algorithmic gaze of generative AI echoes the fascinations of 20th‑century dictators with classical statuary as an idealised form of humanity. By bringing together AI slop and classical imagery, Slopocene Icons stages a cautionary narrative. It asks us to examine how generative AI, marketed as neutral and creative, encodes, amplifies, and aestheticises authoritarian ideals, enforcing narrow visions of beauty, gender, and humanity under the guise of progress.
Max Brading
Enforcement Yearning, 2025
Body Building, 2025
Max Brading is a multidisciplinary artist investigating the intersections of technology, environment, and cyborg experience. Their practice unravels the entangled systems shaping contemporary life, remixing and reconfiguring their elements into new forms. Grounded in experimental technology, Max blends technical knowledge with performance and collaborative exploration, examining the relationships we form through techno mediation. Their work invites audiences to reconsider their interactions with the technological systems that surround them.
Enforcement Yearning is a two channel work inspired by Donna Harraways Companion Species manifesto, where she expands upon her concept of 'cyborg' being and locates dogs as companions in class and labour. My work takes the simple banality of a game of fetch and explores it through the lens of the cyborg being and companions species, digitally entangling the physical act through electroshock stimulation and infrared cameras, forming a loop that challenges agency and individuality within technologically mediated systems. I read somewhere on the internet that dogs see vision in a similar spectrum to infared, I'm not sure if this is true.
My second work, Body Building, is made using a custom trained AI model from an old photographic work of mine that blended bodies into abstract forms using Photoshop. The work extracts the body as material and reconstitutes it into alienated and abstracted forms of digital flesh, a common theme across all my works.
Melania Jack
Flock Mend, 2025
Melania Jack is an interdisciplinary artist based in Gimuy (Cairns), working with sound, video collage, projection and performance. Their practice explores themes of gender, labor, technology with a recent focus towards posthuman, environmental and non-human ethics. Combining traditional photography and film techniques with video collage, Jack builds layered visual narratives that invite multiple readings and open up new ways of engaging with these themes.
https://www.ironingmaidens.com.au/
This movement and digital collage work imagines a speculative present where human and more-than-human life coexist in interconnected reciprocity. Influenced by biomimicry, anticolonial thought, and ecological embodiment, the work expresses a deep yearning for re-integration with the natural world. Through flocking, ripples, and sensory attunement, humans merge with their environment, connected and transformed. Movement becomes a tool for listening, re-learning, and repair. This is a vision of nourishment, of presence, of flocking and mending, not to escape collapse, but to emerge through it with grace.
Sound - Patty Preece
Movement Director - Tara Jade Samaya
Director of Photography - Pippa Samaya
Dancers - Micheal Smith and Damian Meredith
Studio provided by Dancenorth Townsville
Rebecca Najdowski
Another Nature, 2025
Rebecca Najdowski is a Naarm/Melbourne-based artist whose work explores how nature and the climate crisis are mediated through photographic technologies. In her practice, she uses the materiality of analogue and digital processes to alter habitual ways of seeing and relating to more-than-human nature. Her experimental techniques include direct exposure of photographic materials to natural phenomena, finding creative potential in glitched 3D scans of flora, and regenerating environmental datasets into AI imagery, exposing hidden interconnections between natural and digital systems. https://rebeccanajdowski.com/
Another Nature explores global bushfire/wildfire and its effects through more-than-human sensing. This work imagines how plants, animals, insects, and machines might perceive environmental change. I wanted to move beyond conventional climate crisis representations by using technologies that envision a world typically invisible to human perception like infrared, microscopy, and satellite imagery. I adopt these scientific imaging techniques to reveal a strange and vivid dimension of the climate crisis, inviting possibilities for deeper environmental understanding through non-human perceptions.
Research Assistant – Alex Thorne
Microscopy – Chaitali Dekiwadia and Louisa Huang, RMIT University Microscopy and Microanalysis Facility.
Developed with the support of RMIT University Career Reignite Funding.
Shirin Shakhesi
Echoes Between, 2025
Shirin Shakhesi is an Iranian-Australian multidisciplinary artist working at the intersection of animation and moving image. Her practice explores the dynamic interplay between environment, identity, and emotional states, drawing on personal transitions and cultural narratives. Through movement and transformation, she creates poetic visual landscapes that blur the line between reality and perception. Her work reflects on change and impermanence, offering immersive experiences that invite audiences into fluid, shifting worlds.
https://shirinshakhesi.wixsite.com/2020
Echoes Between reflects on the dialogue between urban and environmental spaces. Translucent frames hold shifting projections that blur city and nature, while live music performance creates an evolving soundscape in conversation with the visuals. The work unfolds as a layered environment where sound, image, body, and structure entangle, dissolving boundaries between built and organic worlds. It becomes a sensory work, where the complexity of coexistence can be felt rather than explained, an experience of reflection and connection.
Lead Artist & Visuals – Shirin Shakhesi
Co-Producer & Music Performance – Aryo Hall
Sound Engineering, Recording & Music Performance – Justin Marshall
Interactivity & System Design – d duàn 段耀钦
Developed with the support of the VCA50 Grant (Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne).
ACTIVATIONS
FRIDAY 3 OCTOBER, 6:30 — 10:30 PM
Harrison Hall x Mat Spisbah x Nikki Tarling x Luca Dante
Soft-Plastic reimagines the invisible and unseen, those malleable, synthetic materials that quietly wrap our daily lives, existing everywhere yet barely noticed. Like shadows made tangible, they bend and shape themselves around our world's form. Four artists use sound, movement and video to explore these hidden presences through an experiment, constantly shifting blurrily between foreground and background.
Sarah Aiken
Sarah Aiken is a Naarm based artist, performer and choreographer from Bellingen NSW. Her work investigates assemblage, authorship, scale and self - pursuing an ongoing interest in how we situate ourselves in relationship to technology, ecology and society. Recent work Body Corp premiered at Northcote Town Hall 2024 and Greenroom Award winning Make Your Life Count premiered at Arts House, Melbourne in 2022 before touring nationally. Sarah has been artist in residence at HIAP (Finland), Dancenorth (Townsville) and Centre for Projection Art and is a grateful recipient of the Creators Fund and the Chloe Munro Fellowship. www.sarahaiken.net
Fractured images, bent and distorted light - bodies lose their edges, overlap, coexist, slip between forms, a shifting ecology of parts assembled & reassembled - finding patterns of unintentional coordination & multi-species, multiform, multi-temporal collaboration. A live choreography for projection and mirrors, Body Corp #6 exposes the temporary relationships between parts, and material yearnings for connection, longing & belonging- a constant state of being together yet apart, transforming & reforming, creating monstrous or mythical wholes & superhuman or more than human forms.
About Harrison Hall
About Luca Dante
Harrison Hall’s work situates contemporary performance and dance in experiential art environments. His recent works traverse states of flux within digital and live worlds, working to increase the embodied experience in mixed digital and live performance contexts. His hybrid choreographic works have premiered at Sydney Opera House, ACMI, CTM festival (Berlin), ACC (Korea), Zerospace (New York) and many others, working with a range of local and international artists. His awards include a Green Room Award, MIFF selection and recently the Expand Lab Moving Image Commision.
www.harrisonhall.com.au
Luca Dante is a multidisciplinary 3D motion graphics artist based in Naarm (Melbourne). His works emphasise otherworldly design and transhuman concepts, through mixing themes of science fiction and distortion of the human body. Having worked as a Graphics Designer earlier in his career, Luca brings a honed aesthetic to his work in motion graphics, and is currently employed by Art Centre Melbourne.
About Mat Spisbah
Mat Spisbah is an artist and organiser focusing on new media and sound work. He has a long history within Australia’s DIY music communities, as well as experimental performance works, exhibitions and projects across Australia and Asia. His practice blends sound, code, the internet and community. As a key member of the digital art group Pseudo, Spisbah has collaborated with Alex Zhang Hungtai, Brian Fuata, Harrison Hall, Sam McGilp and Henry Lai-Pyne on new media performance works that push the boundaries of digital art.
About Nikki Tarling
Nikki Tarling is a professional contemporary dancer based in Naarm, Melbourne. Since graduating from WAAPA in 2016 Nikki has worked with companies such as Tasdance, Chunky Move and Stephanie Lake Company, as well as established choreographers Jo Lloyd and Melanie Lane. Nikki has extensive experience as a performer, taking part in an array of contemporary dance festivals such as Perth/Melbourne International Arts Festival and Melbournes inaugural Rising Festival. Nikki is also enthusiastic about sharing her practice and movement insights with fellow professional artists, as well as movement hobbyists.
Jen Valender x Geneveive Fry
Jen Valender's Clearfell documents harpist Genevieve Fry activating a sculpture, shifting between her own harp and the wind-driven form. On Friday, Fry will perform in a live duet with Valender's projected image.
Shirin Shakhesi x Aryo Hall x Justin Marshall
Shirin Shakhesi activates the site through an immersive projection environment that layers translucent fabrics with interactive moving images. The work comes alive through live sound improvisation by multi-instrumentalist artists Aryo Hall and Justin Marshall, whose performances entangle with the shifting projections. Interactivity and system design are led by d duàn 段耀钦, extending the installation into a responsive, evolving environment.
.png)
.png){kind=logo}
