Tina Havelock Stevens
!!

Tina Havelock Stevens has been selected for the second annual co-commission between the Art Gallery of New South Wales and Artspace. The partnership supports an artist or collective from Artspace's Studio Program to develop a new work for presentation at the Art Gallery, as part of the Contemporary Projects series, in collaboration with curators from both institutions.

Sydney artist Tina Havelock Stevens is attuned to the passing of time and the complexities of our contemporary moment. Her background as a documentary filmmaker, community worker and drummer inform her art, where observation and improvisation serve as guiding methodologies.

!! is an atmospheric installation of sound, light, moving image and sculpture. The exhibition’s unpronounceable title hints at social and environmental circumstances that evade articulation. Exclamation marks may indicate excitement, alarm or frustration, or simply provoke a question. 

Commissioned for this exhibition and providing a sonic threshold in the room, Part of the natural world 2025 is a composition that was improvised by Havelock Stevens two floors down in the resonant Tank gallery. This percussive recording emphasises the perverse silence of the flocked drum kits and becomes a distant, unsynced soundscape for the exhibition’s silent central video. The contrasting hues of orange and blue in the installation are another framing device – ‘life colours’ that meet on the horizon each day. 

The video Spectral peace 2021/2025 is a homage to the life of Havelock Stevens’ mother, described by the artist as a ‘posthumous collaboration’. In its gentle observations, it is also a collaboration with the natural elements of sun, clouds and wind.

Havelock Stevens invites you to settle in this space and experience its dualisms: silence and sound, dawn and dusk, life and death.

Co-curated with the Art Gallery of New South Wales, this exhibition is part of the Art Gallery’s Contemporary Projects series.