Plimsoll Gallery, Hunter Street, Hobart
Summary:A one-off performance by transdisciplinary artist Bhenji Ra featuring original music by Tati au Miel
Bhenji Ra Photo: Amber Haines
Performance: Spirit Fight Club 4 | Bhenji Ra with music by Tati au Miel
Friday 9 June 5 - 6pm – Plimsoll Gallery
Bhenji Ra
Dance performance
20-30 mins
Concept, choreography by Bhenji Ra (she/her)
Original composition by Tati au Miel (they/them)
Bhenji Ra brings her critical strategy of embodied historiography and “collective re-remembering in relation to the trans feminine experience” to Plimsoll Gallery’. Continuing Ra’s Spirit Fight Club work - a series of performances wherein Bhenji approaches the gallery/museum/art space as one to be in physical contention with. Ra goes into combat with the ghosts of institutional oppression. Targeting structures responsible for enacting present and historical violence against Black and Brown, trans and cultural non-dominating bodies, Ra ingests histories of (de)generative debris: tauntology manifest.
Addition information:
This performance becomes an act of self-defence, as if to antagonise site-specific ghosts.
This latest edition for Plimsoll Gallery features an original score by Tati au Miel, and poetry by trans Pinay academic Jaya Jacobo, her body rendered as a somatic dagger cutting through lineages and fraught layers of histories, dead or alive. The vanishing point of Spirit Fight Club becomes her re-mapping, and a remembering of her own bodily archive.
About Bhenji Ra:
Born 1990, Warrang (Sydney). Lives and works in Warrang (Sydney).
Bhenji Ra is a transdisciplinary artist currently based on the stolen land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. Her practice combines dance, choreography, video and installation. Her work is often concerned with the dissection of cultural theory and identity, centralizing her own personal histories as a tool to reframe performance. With an emphasis on occupation and at times collective action, her work plays with the multiplicities of spectacle while offering strategies to disrupt normativity and western dance convention. Collaboration is key to her work as she regularly accesses her own community as an essential critical voice. She is the ‘mother’ to the Asia-Pacific ballroom house based on western Sydney, House of Slé and she also belongs to the artist collective Club Ate.
Her collaborative video series Ex Nilalang with artist Justin Shoulder has been exhibited at the 8th Asia Pacific Triennial at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2015–16; M+ Museum in Hong Kong, 2017; and Australian Centre of Moving Image, Melbourne 2017. She performed her work NRG in collaboration with Angela Goh in Auto Italia’s group show Rogue Agents with the support of the Kier foundation. In 2016, she was awarded the danceWEB Scholarship in which she participated at the Impulstanz Festival in Vienna under the mentorship of Tino Sehgal. For the 22nd Biennale of Sydney, 2020, Bhenji engaged Tausūg Elder and Pangalay master Sitti Obeso from the southern Philippines in the performative conversation The Offering (Pang Alay). In 2022 synthesised her collaborative ideas within Club Ate to create the video installation Ang Idol Ko / You are My Idol.
She is currently occupied touring as a cast member of Marrugeku’s Jurrungu Ngan-ga which has shown as part of Rising Festival, Melbourne, 2022 and La Biennale Di Venezia, 2022; developing work with Dance North Australia; undertaking residencies including at Koa Gallery on the island of O’ahu, Hawai’i; and releasing the new collaborative work Spirit Fight Club!,2023, for the Queer Encounters programme at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.
Her work, Trade Route, is currently on display as part of the ‘Interfacial Intimacies exhibition, now on at Plimsoll Gallery.
This event forms part of the public program for the exhibition Interfacial Intimacies on display at the Plimsoll Gallery, University of Tasmania (8 June – 5th August 2023). Presented as part of Dark Mofo 2023.
