GALLERY TWO | SASKIA MORRIS
ARRESTING THE ECHO
FRI 19 AUG 9.00AM - FRI 16 SEP 5.00PM
PREVIEW FRI 19 AUG, 5.00-6.00PM
OPENING EVENT SAT 20 AUG, 4.00-6.00PM
FREE TO ATTEND
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Monday 9.00am - 5.00pm
Tuesday 9.00am - 5.00pm
Wednesday 9.00am - 5.00pm
Thursday 9.00am - 5.00pm
Friday 9.00am - 5.00pm
Saturday 10.00am - 3.00pm
Sunday closed
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Platform Arts is wheelchair-accessible via our Gheringhap St entrance. Unlocked, accessible bathrooms are available on both ground and first floors.
For accessibility enquiries, please directly contact us at hello@platformarts.org.au
Please note, Platform Arts is a dry venue.
Arresting the Echo is an installation containing three filmed performances that approach mourning as both the loss of an individual and as a collective condition.
In the first performance, Morris stands on the site of 2021’s Women’s March 4 Justice at Parliament House and screams her speech inaudibly through the noise of the crowd by using a talkbox. In the second performance, she records and replays this excerpt through a crocheted breastplate of speaker wire in an exhausted quarry located in Mount Mugga Mugga Nature Reserve. In the final performance, Morris sits outside the Royal Australian Mint, listening to and silently responding to hearing her grandmother’s voice for the first time since she passed.
These performances question what capacity the feminine voice has to take on the work of embodying history, agency, capital, and grief. While centering acts of vocalization and listening against larger power systems, Arresting the Echo considers how we can learn to sit with shared loss during the cultural turn away from proximity and towards an eco-political moment that oscillates between extremes in social change and extinction events.
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Saskia Morris (b, Warrwa Country, WA, 1995.) is an emerging artist working on Ngunnawal and Ngambri country whose installation and performance works examine how language and technologies of communication convene to distort and amplify our sense of self. Morris’ work aims to present tender investigations of collective experience that position empathy as the backbone of empowerment.
She approaches political agency by employing critiques offered by media archaeology, which considers how so-called ‘dead media’ reverberates and is revived in our cultural and technological imagination. To do this, Morris negotiates and hacks machinery used to reproduce language (written, spoken or otherwise) to make new interventions that she interacts and experiments with through her performances.
A recent graduate from the ANU School of Art and Design, Morris earned a University Medal and was the 2021 recipient of the Gray Smith and Joan Scott Prize. She was awarded Highly Commended in the 2022 Goulburn Art Prize. Morris is currently a resident of You Are Here’s Cahoots program, participating in the ANU Environment Studio’s Sharing Stories Art Exchange and working on a print edition with Megalo Print Studio.
