This performance took place over 8 consecutive hours in Stephen Bram’s spectacular architectural sculpture, Level 3, E29, NGVI. The performance was a response to Bram’s installation that was designed for gallery viewers to move through, sit inside, regard, and to rest within, to seek a temporary refuge.

This site-specific and durational performance was developed using a talking and dancing practice developed with Jo Lloyd called ‘Conversation Therapy’ that played with the idea of subconscious desires and the effect of language on the body. We were interested in the liminal space created through talking and doing and creating small performative moments in galleries with an unknowing collaborator – anyone who showed up and was willing to participate in the experiment of putting action to thought, movement to words, or “seeing the thinking”. Movement had the obvious ability to shift energy states of the talking and ideas themselves, and add layers of both complexity and frivolity that in many ways, either amplified or subverted meaning.

Inside Outside Stephen Bram’s L3, E29, NGVI was a conversation and a meeting of forms. We talked almost continuously while we moved. What we talked about ranged from the quotidian talking about nothing to conversations that dipped in and out of complex ideas and current social concerns. We worked in response to the space, the installation, time, each other and spectator.

CREDITS:
Artists NICOLA GUNN and JO LLOYD

This durational work was originally commissioned by Melbourne NOW and performed at NGVI. It was re-presented at Gertrude Contemporary Art Gallery as In and Around Stephen Bram’s 200 Gertrude Street.