Kathryn Gray

There are challenges of agency and expediency for artists engaging with the world, and for all of us. We like to distinguish work and play, but they are never finite. Both can be absurd and deeply serious, and there are ever rules to attend to. We keep endeavouring to set parameters, make sense of our circumstances and actions ticking over in time.

Rules of play involves nine contemporary artists, staging visual and performative artworks across the show. The common rules we set and contend with – as artists, audiences and citizens – frame generative and exploratory spaces.

These artists are based in Austria and Australia, and the project draws on significant histories and current practices from their local contexts. They are each attentive to means of cognitive, physical and affectual labour. Working with the present, the artists refer back to what has already happened and towards a speculative reimagining of what may yet be possible.

With Rules of play there are diverse artistic systems for trial and error, dialogue and prospects. The artists are presenting works that reenact science and impersonate philosophy; that dance drawings and plot serendipity as a research process; that ask questions and play out in transmission; that cross vast distances and listen closely to you.

Such play can be considered in terms of managing risk, or as the populist theorist/financier Nassim Nicholas Taleb puts it, “a systematic program of how to live in a world we don’t understand very well.”* Rules of play considers again old art questions of experience, remembering and asserting relevance. Or where those rules and we fail.

Rules of play is curated by Kathryn Gray with support from the Tin Sheds CURATE/INNOVATE grant, the University of Sydney and the Research Residency Program at the Sydney College of the Arts. The first iteration, Rules of play 101, was staged at Bell Street Project Space, Vienna 18 - 21 August 2010. Thanks to all the artists, collaborators and project supporters, designer Kristin Sauerbrey, and all at Tin Sheds Gallery and Bell Street Project Space. Read catalogue essays by Stephen Zepke and Tessa Zettel and find out more at www.playingrules.tumblr.com

Above image: Michaela Gleave, Star #1: ‘Nashira’ or Gamma Capricorni. Meaning: Arabic ‘fortunate one’. Constellation: Capricornus. Set: 18:13pm; rise: 4:40am. 10/03/11, 35mm slide, 2011.

Menu image: Agatha Gothe-Snape, Choreography, gouache on Arches, 75cm x 55cm, 2011.

*Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, 2007.