Akhil Ahamat, 'Unchained Melody', 2020
, installation view, 2020 NSW VAEF, Artspace, Sydney. Photo: Document

Akil Ahamat works across video, sound, performance and installation to consider the physical and social isolation of online experience and its effects in configuring contemporary subjectivity. Exploring the forms and techniques evident in Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) roleplay videos, Ahamat employs installation elements and audio technology as the interface between himself and the audience. Within the public context of the gallery, this displaced virtual intimacy becomes a gently disarming platform for the artist to discuss the formation of his own subjectivity refracted through film, literature and fashion.

Ahamat has most recently produced online works for Bleed: Biennial Live Event in the Everyday Digital, Arts House and Campbelltown Arts Centre, and Collective Trace, PACT, Erskineville, 2020 and exhibited physically at Slow Burn, Parramatta Artists’ Studios, NSW, 2020; A World that Breathes Out, Verge Gallery, Sydney, 2019; and After Technology, UTS ART, Sydney, 2019. Akil was the winner of the John Fries Award, UNSW Galleries, Sydney, 2018.

Tarik Ahlip, 'Lyo Termns', 2020
, installation view, 2020 NSW VAEF, Artspace, Sydney. Photo: Document ⠀

Tarik Ahlip is an emerging artist based in Sydney, Australia with a background in architecture. His practice is mainly sculptural, with an emphasis on casting processes. Architecture and civic ideals continue to play a role in informing his practice, as well as the exploration of poetics and ontology as a means of driving epistemological change.

Recently his practice has tended towards hybridised forms of expression, including a series of works exploring the area between painting and sculpture, as well as works in other diverse media including verse, virtual reality and film. These ventures express a belief in forming functional links across disciplines, a response to the faculty model that keep bodies of knowledge apart.

Tiyan Baker, 'juruh (the thorn in durian)' 2020
, installation view, 2020 NSW VAEF, Artspace, Sydney. Photo: Document ⠀

Tiyan Baker is an early career Malaysian Bidayuh/Anglo-Australian video and installation artist. Baker's practice engages with sites of contemporary cultural crises. Her work often uses field research, documentary techniques and found artefacts to question established discourses and reveal bias, frailty and failure.

Baker has exhibited at the Murray Art Museum Albury, NSW, Fremantle Arts Centre, WA; Next Wave Festival, VIC; Prototype, online; and The Big Anxiety Festival, NSW. Baker was a 2019 recipient of the Freedman Foundation Travelling Scholarship, a finalist in the 65th Blake Prize, 2018, and the HCP Digital Art Prize, 2020, and has completed residencies at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, WA, and Chronus Art Centre, Shanghai, China. Originally from the Larrakia lands known as Darwin, Baker currently lives and works on the stolen Gadigal and Wangal lands known as Sydney.

Kirtika Kain, 'The Solar Line', 2020

, installation view, 2020 NSW VAEF, Artspace, Sydney. Photo: Document ⠀

Kirtika Kain draws from Dalit archives and literature in an intuitive and alchemical practice that confronts the embodied stigma of the Dalit or ‘untouchable’ caste, into which she was born. Kain was awarded the Lloyd Rees Memorial Youth Art Award and Hornsby Art Prize (Printmaking) in 2017. As the recipient of the Bird Holcomb MFA Scholarship, she graduated Masters of Fine Arts with the University Medal at National Art School in 2018.

Last year she completed two consecutive artist’s residencies in New Delhi, India and at the British School at Rome NAS International Residency, Italy followed by her first solo exhibition Corpus, at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery (RO9). She recently presented new works in uppercase, Gallery Lane Cove and Close Encounters, Leo Kelly Blacktown Art Centre. She is a recipient of the 2020 Parramatta Artists’ Studio program and represented by RO9, Sydney.