Interviews

When I contacted Ellen van Neerven in May to see if they would talk with me about Personal Score, I…

Cigdem Aydemir is a Sydney-based contemporary artist whose work primarily engages with the topic of veiling and the way in which Muslim women are commonly depicted and perceived in Australian society. Cigdem draws on her Turkish-Australian heritage and past experiences as a veiled Muslim in Sydney to inform her art practice. Her various installation, performance and video art pieces often explore the social and political nuances surrounding the topic of veiling.

Gerald Murnane’s meticulously self-curated ‘Chronological Archive’ – as distinct from his ‘Literary Archive’ and ‘Antipodean Archive’, both of which he likewise compiled…

Every project is a valuable project. My first questions are always, ‘What do you need?’ ‘What do you want?’, ‘What do you need me to do?’

There is something about weaving, creative nonfiction writing, and, I will say this last – coding – that overlap with each other. Sometimes when I’m coding, the way I pay attention to some of these lines of code, it really reminds me of sitting at the loom and trying to figure things out. Like, I see something in my head, and I’m just trying to make it happen on my screen.

There’s this thing people do when they talk about translation that I find very frustrating – they focus on what is lost in the process, and I really think that is putting the emphasis on the wrong thing. Because just look at all that is gained. You get a whole new work. People in a new language are reading it a different way, and they’re not reading it in its original language, which some people believe automatically makes it inferior. But I don’t think that’s true. I think it adds a lot. I think it contributes to the literary culture of the language it’s translated into.

‘What is most important to me is to write a strong text. My intentions are aesthetic, not therapeutic. The work of research, composition, revision, structuring, is what absorbs me utterly and what brings me repeatedly to the page.’

Drama is about writing other people’s points of view of the world … Through craft you can hopefully speak to other people, and the more you do, the more you learn about what works, what doesn’t, how to connect to an audience, the ways you can structure a story to have a particular kind of impact.

Most emerging and mid-career Asian-Australian performance artists call Annette Shun Wah their ‘Asian Fairy Godmother.’ Dig deep into the origins of any Asian-Australian theatre work over the past ten years and her influence will make itself felt:

‘I’ve always wanted to change and do something different than just Scott McClanahan stories.’