Artspace

Lill Colgan & Sab D'Souza

When emotions are put into text, their meaning often mutates and becomes distorted. Conversations mediated by communication technologies are littered with personal associations and contexts. Text messaging becomes a clumsy process of decoding and translating, where another's pace, tone and punctuation are imbued with profound meaning.

For 52 ACTIONS, Lill Colgan and Sab D’Souza present Haha… Unless? a week-long performative encounter sent directly to your phone. Throughout this week, audiences who signed up will experience a series of text-based ‘vignettes’ that unpack the anxious and frustrating ways we attempt to understand each other at a distance.’

Artist bio

Lill Colgan, is an artist from Boorloo (Perth, Western Australia) currently settled on Gadigal land (Sydney, Australia). Their practice explores the ways normative social power shapes embodiment and considers how affects might be unpacked through transformative material play. Colgan graduated with a BFA (1st Class honours) from Curtin University (WA) in 2014. Since then, they’ve shown in multiple exhibitions nationally including Hatched National Graduate Show at PICA; Passing/Parades at SUCCESS ARI; King Single/Expanded Queen at FELTSpace; Of All Others at Firstdraft and The TV Show at Wollongong Art Gallery. Lill has participated in development programs and residencies for Performance Space, Perth Festival, Vitalstatistix, Proximity Festival and Cool Change Contemporary. More recently, Lill has undergone a one-year tenancy at Parramatta Artists Studios.

Sab D’Souza is a video artist and researcher living on Gadigal land (Sydney, Australia) originally from Naarm (Melbourne, Australia). Their work is concerned with emergent practices of digital intimacy, affective encounters, and colonial spectatorship mediated through social media. D’Souza completed a combined BFA & BA from UNSW Art & Design in 2018 and was awarded 1st Class honours in Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney in 2019. Their work has been shown in digital and physical spaces in Australia and overseas. Most notably at ICA (London) in collaboration with The White Pube, SOIL Gallery (Seattle), Chinatown Soup Gallery (NYC) in collaboration with Southasia.art, Firstdraft Gallery (Sydney) and ACMI Online: Queertech.io. They are currently a research assistant at the UTS, studying the impact of peer support and care within young LGBTQI+ communities online.