Exhibition

Transmission Point

Joyce Hinterding, Moss Hopkins & Alexandra Spence, Nicolas Montgermont, Sisters Akousmatica & Hayden Ryan.

Curated by Anabelle Lacroix
Everyday, temporary exhibition
Community Galleries
Free Entry

Listen, walk, and tune in to Transmission Point, where sound connects place, history, and community.

A black and white double exposure photograph of the La Perouse Cable Station overlayed with an image of the landscape surrounding the building

Transmission Point invites sound artists and the public to explore the meaning of transmission at Guriwal / La Perouse. Housed in one of Australia’s first telegraph stations, later transformed into the La Perouse Museum, the exhibition foregrounds contemporary sonic practices to connect histories of telecommunications with colonialism and the coastal environment, as well as Indigenous lineages, and day-to-day experiences of the headland across time.

Thinking about transmission as a role that museums and collections play requires activating the multiple histories of La Perouse, which takes its name from the French explorer who witnessed the First Fleet. As the headland is an active and uninterrupted place for the transmission of knowledge and stories for First Nations people, transmission not only involves sending and receiving signals, but also points to how we remember and live in relation to the world around us.

Works investigate electromagnetic fields, their social, political, and poetic potentials, highlighting how listening is always situated. The electromagnetic waves used for radio connect us to the environment as they are also present in our bodies and the natural world (at different frequencies). Central to the project is a public outdoor broadcast and new artwork commissions, including a work by French radio artist Nicolas Montgermont developed during an Australian residency. Transmission Point amplifies local voices, fosters dialogue between audiences and artists, and builds cultural exchange between communities across continents through the transmission of signals and the sharing of listening practices.

Transmission Point

Artists

Transmission Point brings together high-calibre local and international artists alongside emerging voices to strengthen professional development and international networks in sound and transmission arts.

Joyce Hinterding is an artist recognised internationally for her explorations into energetic forces and energy scavenging, using custom-built field recording and monitoring technologies. She combines sculpture, drawing, sound, digital practices and listening, often involving the agency of the audience.

Anabelle Lacroix is an independent French-Australian curator and academic based in Eora/Sydney, who is particularly interested in the overlapping fields of curating, writing and performance, with a focus on sound, speech, and radio.

Nicolas Montgermont is a French sound and radio artist exploring the physicality of soundwaves. For the past twenty years, he has been making installations, performances, and complex systems that explore the poetic, physical, and political essence of waves, focusing on the relationships between sound, time, listening, and community. His electronic music moniker is Æther Varia.

Banana is Moss Hopkins & Alexandra Spence, two sound artists and musicians living and working on Wangal and Gadigal land. Together they have developed a tactile, circular and displaced way of working with sound and space, using small instruments, domestic objects, radio and electronic devices to play, record, listen, forget, transcribe, then play, record, listen, forget, transcribe, then play…

Hayden Ryan is Yuin-Walbunja sound scholar and artist whose sound work centres Indigenous ways of knowing through acoustic and spatial practices. His research explores how sonic practice and acoustic space influence ways of understanding the environment, history, law and positionality amongst Indigenous cultures.

Sisters Akousmatica is the collaborative, expanded radio project of Julia Drouhin and Pip Stafford. Together they explore the radical possibilities of transmission with a focus on feminism, place and community through collective broadcasts, participatory events and installations.