Rules of play

Exhibition and performance project

TIn Sheds Gallery, Sydney, 8 September - 1 October 2011

Moonwalkers are the masters of beginnings. Their steps are heavy, not just because there is zero gravity but because their steps are full of hope and promise of new worlds and great forward leaps into new frontiers and beyond, beyond young boys’ dreams . Their steps say ‘hello universe’ “is there anybody out there?” *

Rules of play is an ongoing project involving Austrian and Australian artists Bernadette Anzengruber, Brian Fuata, Agatha Gothe-Snape, Michaela Gleave, Kathryn Gray, Michael Poetschko, Teik-Kim Pok, Sarah Rodigari and Nina Stuhldreher. Together we are staging performance and research which is to be situated here, then, there, now. We aim to work collaboratively across cultures and distance to extrapolate local and shared parameters of asserting relevance. Or where those rules and we fail.

Looking back, “Nothing is wrong with anything,” said Henry Ford in 1928, when asked about the possibility of serious  competition, “and I don't see any reason to believe that the present prosperity will not continue.”** Henry may not have been playing games, but his reductive processes of making making cars and making profits ever more efficiently were ingenious, and certainly shifted expectations of labour and leisure. We are still playing out the consequences.