Overview

Arahmaiani worked with the local community and artists to stage presentations (somewhere between promotions and protests) of wall banners featuring the names of multinational corporations and brands in Malay-Arabic (Jawi) script in public spaces around Sydney. As evidenced by their gallery recontextualisation, the processes were collaborative, improvisational and transformative.

Aftermath provided a critical and public focus to the complex relationship of performance and installation art, sharing a genealogy, as they do, in early conceptual and post-object art. Aftermath centred on the ‘aftermath' of performance, or conversely, performance as a strategy for creation of material environments - the bleeding back and forth of active models of performance and its post-life.

Over six weeks one of six artists participating from Australia and abroad undertook a performance work in one of the Artspace galleries resulting in the installation Aftermath and collectively creating a dynamic, rolling set of relationships between changing spaces. This program was completed by two discrete performance works by local artists. The project was also accompanied by a set of screenings of international performance documentation in the Artspace Reading Room and a Symposium held at CarriageWorks on Saturday 18 August, 2007.