Acknowledgement of Country

ACCA acknowledges the Wurundjeri Woiwurrung people as sovereign custodians of the land on which we work and welcome visitors, along with the neighbouring Boonwurrung, Bunurong, and wider Kulin Nation. We acknowledge their longstanding and continuing care for Country and we recognise First Peoples art and cultural practice has been thriving here for millennia. We extend our respect to ancestors and Elders past and present, and to all First Nations people.

You Can’t See Speed was developed on the unceded lands of Wurundjeri Woiwurrung, Taungurung, Bunurong and Boonwurrung people, and includes works that were produced across Kaurna Country, South Australia; Amangu, Badymia and Whadjuk Noongar Country, Western Australia; Dabee Country, New South Wales; and Gunai-Kurnai Country, Victoria. We respectfully acknowledge that art and culture has been thriving on these lands, and across the continent now called Australia since time immemorial, and pay our deepest respect to Elders past, present and future.

Australian Centre for Contemporary Art is pleased to present the first major solo exhibition by Tina Stefanou, a Greek-Australian artist who works with experimental forms of performance, film, sound-music, sculpture, ethnographic research and socially engaged practice.

Tina Stefanou: You Can’t See Speed attends to the interconnected and multisensory experience of film beyond vision. The exhibition continues Stefanou’s interest in the voice as medium, from spoken sonic soundscapes to vocal techniques such as humming. It also expands on her methodology of deep, long-term, co-creative collaboration and socially engaged practice involving interspecies-communal-performance making. Her diasporic, working-class ethic and approach to makingchallenges institutions of power and capitalistic logics, embedding the commons — from the planetary to the everyday — within her life and work.

The exhibition centres a collaborative new film commission with blind motorcycle mechanic and rider Matthew Cassar. Concerned with the ideals of collaboration and trust, coinciding with Cassar’s journey of riding dirt bikes in high performance contexts, the work follows Cassar along a surrealist voyage of adrenalin and self-actualisation. Accompanying the film is a large-scale, site-specific stunt ramp emblazoned with totemic, ritualistic symbols and sounds such as evil eyes, crystals, and melismatic singing. Designed to protect from and ward against threats, both imagined and tremendously real.

Alongside the new commission, Stefanou presents a modified configuration of cinematic performance works. Featuring rural and regional collaborators, the films form a complex ecology of multispecies and class realities, and rural poetics, from migrant, farmer, and youth perspectives. Multiple screens are scaffolded by a field of sculptural materials, from wax casted horse-hooves to found agri-materials, which trespass across the galleries shifting them into a metaphorical nervous system made up of all-too-human, animal and machine parts.

Presented across ACCA’s four galleries (and bathrooms), Tina Stefanou: You Can’t See Speed transforms the building into a living instrument, merging its subterranean engines with the intimacy of voice; all within a haptic, tactile labyrinth of sculptures, films, live performances and dirt bikes. Altering perceptions and cultural hierarchies of sight and social access, the exhibition creates an experiential landscape, blurring the boundaries between vision-sound-touch.