TIME: Interdisciplinary Forum - Ian Potter Museum of Art

TIME: Interdisciplinary Forum

23 Sep 2023

In this year’s Interdisciplinary Forum, we’ll take a moment to consider TIME.

 

Bringing academic expertise and artists’ perspectives together for this popular annual event, we’ll embark upon an engaging day of presentation and discussion on how we experience, measure and harness TIME.   

 

We live in a time of urgency around many pressing societal and environmental needs – time is short and rapid solutions are needed, while we remain mired in indecision. Yet this is only part of the story of duration. TIME reveals itself to us in myriad ways – in the human life cycle, our shared oral histories, the hours of the working day, seasonal changes and eroding rocks. This year’s forum will take time-out from the day-to-day to reflect. Following a keynote presentation from Gerald McMaster, curator, artist, author, and professor emeritus OCAD University, Toronto, we’ll traverse deep time, anxious time, cycles and rhythms across three dynamic sessions.  The day will be rhythmically punctuated by Submerged, a participatory audio score for ALL bodies, by choreographer and writer Amaara Raheem.

 

Forum participants will include artists Robert Andrew, Lisa Sammut and Yasmin Smith, alongside University of Melbourne experts from a range of disciplines including social and political studies, geochronology, contemplative studies, and media and communication.

 

Professor McMaster’s presence in Australia is made possible by the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Power Institute.

 

SESSION DETAILS

Please note the Forum begins with Submerged, a participatory audio score developed by Amaara Raheem, choreographer and writer. This will be held in the Old Quad Library space and begins at 10am sharp, with no late entry for this session. Doors open at 9.45am and we suggest arriving then so we can direct you to the room and cloak bags. Participants will be invited to lie down for this experience; chairs will be available for those who need them.

Submerged will be repeated twice more in the day, as a rhythmic punctuation; please see the Forum program for more details on the work and scheduled times.

 

10–10.30am
CREATIVE PRESENTATION 
Amaara Raheem, choreographer and writer | Submerged 

Submerged is a listening score for body and imagination. It draws on the ancient practice of Yoga Nidra (as led by Jennifer Pearcy), the writings of Ursula Le Guin and Body-Earth guided somatic improvisation by Andrea Olsen. Submerged also flows through my own creative practice-research exploring how language can transport us, through sound and silence, space and time. 

LISTEN HERE

 

 

10.30–11am
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT AND WELCOME 
Charlotte Day, Director, Art Museums

 KEYNOTE
Gerald McMaster, curator, artist, author, and Professor Emeritus OCAD University, Toronto | Our ancestral memory is always two days away.  

Professor McMaster’s presence in Australia is made possible by the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Power Institute.   

 

11–11.15am
MORNING TEA 

 

11.15–12.15pm
SESSION ONE: DEEP TIME

CHAIR: Tilly Boleyn, Head of Curatorial, Science Gallery
Dr Agathe Lisé-Pronovost, DECRA Fellow, School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences | Deep Time Earth History 
Yasmin Smith, artist | The Afterlife of Plants 
Robert Andrew, artist | Unfolding Language 
CHAIRED PANEL DISCUSSION 

 

12.15 – 12.45pm 
LUNCH 

  

12.45–1.15pm
CREATIVE PRESENTATION 
Amaara Raheem | Submerged 

 

1.15–2.15pm
SESSION TWO: ANXIOUS TIME

CHAIR: Rose Hiscock, Director, Museums and Collections
Leah Ruppanner, Professor in Social and Political Sciences, Founding Director of Future of Work Lab | AI, Technological Change and Time: Should Anxious Time Reign? 
Robert Hassan, Professor of Media and Communication, School of Media and Communication | “There is No Time Without Man” (sic) 
Dr Cullan Joyce, Insight Fellow – Contemplative Studies Centre, School of Psychological Sciences and Yin Paradies, Professor of Race Relations, Deakin University | It’s OK to be Afraid: Honouring Sacredness of Country during Climate Apocalypses   
CHAIRED PANEL DISCUSSION 

 

2.15–2.30pm
AFTERNOON TEA 

 

2.30–3.30pm
SESSION THREE: CYCLES and RHYTHMS

CHAIR: Kyla McFarlane, Academic Engagement Manager, Museums and Collections
Dr Marie Keatley, RMIT University, Applied Chemistry and Environmental Science/Adjunct Senior Fellow, University of Melbourne, School of Agriculture, Food and Ecosystem Sciences | Plants, Clocks and Seasons 
Dr Loren Bruns Jr, AURIN eInfrastructure Team Lead, Architecture, Building and Planning | Longitudinal Epicycles: Anecdotes From a Decade Spent Building Research Study Platforms 
Lisa Sammut, artist | Circular Time and the Cosmic Self
CHAIR PANEL DISCUSSION 

 

3.30–4pm
CREATIVE PRESENTATION 
Amaara Raheem | Submerged

 

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Amaara Raheem | choreographer and writer
Submerged

Amaara Raheem’s practice of choreography and writing is deeply shaped by her history of migration. In her life and work Amaara practises multiple belongings and is fascinated by creative, cultural and interdisciplinary collaborations, to develop new tools for transformation. In 2021 Amaara completed a PhD by practice at the School of Architecture & Urban Design (RMIT University). Her work crosses many borders and occurs in multiple modes: performance, text, video, sound, documentation and design. In 2022 Amaara was selected for ABC Top 5 – a media residency with Radio National – to voice her ongoing research on artists in-residence programs, to wider audiences.

Gerald McMaster | curator, artist, author, and Professor Emeritus OCAD University, Toronto
Our ancestral memory is always two days away.

Gerald McMaster is a curator, artist, author, and professor emeritus OCAD University, Toronto. Dr McMaster has forty years of international work and expertise in contemporary art, critical theory, museology, and indigenous aesthetics. His international curatorial projects include the 1995 Venice Biennale, 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, and Artistic Director to the 18th Biennale of Sydney in 2012. His most recent books are Iljuwas Bill Reid: Life & Work (2020); Post-commodity: Time Holds All.

Dr Agathe-Lisé Pronovost | DECRA Fellow, School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
Deep Time Earth History

Agathe Lisé-Pronovost-Pronovost is an expert in Earth’s magnetic field research working in the disciplines of Geochronology, Paleoclimate, and Archaeological Sciences. She is currently an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow in the School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Melbourne and Chair of the Science Committee for the Australia and New Zealand Consortium for International Ocean Discovery Program. Her research unlocks data from the past in materials such as lake and marine sediments, cave deposits, archaeological artifacts and lava flows to understand geomagnetic field changes and how it impacts society.

Yasmin Smith | artist
The Afterlife of Plants

Yasmin Smith works with ceramics and glaze technologies, producing large-scale sculptural installations that investigate particular sites via extensive field research, community collaboration and studio development. Her practice brings scientific and artistic concerns together to allow ecological forms of intelligence to be expressed through aesthetic outcomes in ceramic glazes. Smith works with plants, ash, rock, coal, salt and wild clay in her expanded material investigations that involve an ongoing conceptual interrogation of labour, extraction, colonisation and political ecology. Her large-scale ceramic installations have been presented in prestigious national and international exhibitions and extensively acquired by major public institutions in Australia.

Robert Andrew | artist
Unfolding Language

Robert Andrew is a descendant of the Yawuru people, their Country is the lands and waters of the Broome area in the Kimberley Region, Western Australia. His work investigates personal and family histories that have been denied or forgotten. Andrew’s work speaks to the past yet articulates a contemporary relationship to his Country. His work often combines programmable machinery with earth pigments, ochres, rocks, and soil to mine historical, cultural, and personal events that have been buried and distanced by the dominant paradigms of western culture. 

Leah Ruppanner | Professor in Social and Political Sciences, Founding Director of Future of Work Lab
AI, Technological Change and Time: Should Anxious Time Reign? 

Leah Ruppanner’s research investigates gender and its intersection to inequalities, technologies and policies. Professor Ruppanner is a leading expert on COVID-19 and its impact on gender inequality in US and Australia. Her book, Motherlands: How States Push Mothers out of Employment (2020) provides a typology of childcare and gender policies and their relationship to mothers’ employment varies across US states. This has led to a range of high impact publications showing women have divergent experiences based on their state of residence. Finally, she is leading a project on gender bias in hiring algorithms to understand how gender bias limits women’s access to employment. 

Robert Hassan | Professor of Media and Communications, School of Media and Communication
“There is No Time Without Man” (sic) 

Professor Robert Hassan’s most recent book is Analog (2022) which considers the question: ‘are human’s analogue creatures in a digital world?’ His book Uncontained (2020), was an auto-ethnographic account of a four-week journey on a container ship from Melbourne to Singapore, with no access to digital media of any kind, so to discover the effects ‘digital detox’ on the subjective experience of time and memory. From 2012 until 2022 he was Editor of Time & Society

Cullan Joyce | Insight Fellow – Contemplative Studies Centre, School of Psychological Sciences
It’s OK to be Afraid: Honouring Sacredness of Country during Climate Apocalypses 

Dr Cullan Joyce is a passionate collaborator, activist, and meditation practitioner and is an Insight Fellow at the University of Melbourne’s Contemplative Studies Centre. He has twenty years of living with, studying, and practising different Buddhist and Christian contemplative traditions in Australia and overseas, particularly China and Vietnam. He has lived (now part-time) in a contemplative interfaith community outside Melbourne since 2018. He helped organise with Extinction Rebellion Regenerative Culture or Regen until 2021 by supporting the community’s well-being and providing care during dozens of disruptive actions. His research examines how the insights and practices of contemplative traditions can support communities during the Anthropocene.

Yin Paradies | Professor of Race Relations, Deakin University
It’s OK to be Afraid: Honouring Sacredness of Country during Climate Apocalypses 

Professor Yin Paradies is an animist anarchist activist Wakaya man who is committed to understanding and interrupting the devastating impacts of modern societies. He seeks mutuality of becoming and embodied kinship with all life through transformed ways of knowing, being and doing. Yin is Chair in Race Relations at Deakin University where he conducts research on racism and anti-racism. He also teaches and undertakes research in Indigenous knowledges and decolonisation. Yin has authored 242 publications, been awarded grants worth $48 million, is an invited reviewer for 127 journals and 17,669 citations with a Google h index of 64.

Dr Marie Keatley | RMIT University, Applied Chemistry and Environmental Science/Adjunct Senior Fellow, University of Melbourne, School of Agriculture, Food and Ecosystem Sciences
Plants, Clocks and Seasons 

Marie Keatley is a plant phenologist; she studies the timing of budding, flowering and fruiting of plants including what influences the timing and whether timing is shifting. This intersects with vegetation ecology, botany, climate change and citizen science. At the international level, she has contributed to studies on the impacts of climate on plant phenology, particularly of the southern hemisphere.  She is a member of the Executive Board of the International Society of Biometeorology. Marie was one of the founders of ClimateWatch, Australia’s citizen science phenological observation network.

Dr Loren Bruns Jr | AURIN eInfrastructure Team Lead, Architecture, Building and Planning
Longitudinal Epicycles: Anecdotes From a Decade Spent Building Research Study Platforms 

 Dr Loren Bruns Jr is the eInfrastructure Team Manager at the Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN), overseeing a team of research infrastructure engineers building modern, cloud-first digital infrastructure for the urban research community. Prior to joining AURIN, Loren completed a Bachelor of Arts in Physics from Reed College and a PhD in Astrophysics from the University of Melbourne. This was followed by a decade spent as a full-stack research software engineer, creating research platforms and co-authoring papers in the fields of Alzheimer’s disease, neuropsychology, addictive behaviours, and juvenile diabetes before pivoting to managing national digital research infrastructure.

Lisa Sammut | artist 
Circular Time and the Cosmic Self

Working in sculpture, video and installation, Lisa Sammut’s practice oscillates between notions of cosmic perspective, belonging, connection and time. Privileging the poetic, intuitive and experiential, her immersive installations use a wide range of media to alter perceptions and question human-centric thinking. Incorporating objects, light and moving image, Sammut draws on natural, cultural, and historical imagery, transforming familiar visual language in unexpected ways. Sammut holds a Bachelor of Fine Art with Honours (2012) and Master of Fine Art by Research (2018), both from UNSW Art & Design. She currently lives and works in Kamberri/Canberra.

 

 

 


About Interdisciplinary Forums

The Ian Potter Museum of Art Interdisciplinary Forum is an ongoing, annual series presented by The University of Melbourne’s Museums and Collections Department. Each Forum seeks to address pressing themes of our time, and features academic researchers from across the University of Melbourne, alongside contributions by creative practitioners, proposing art-making as a form of knowledge creation alongside other academic fields of inquiry. Previous Forums have explored the themes of  WATER, LANGUAGE, MACHINE, CONSENT and CARE.