You Can't See Speed: Digital Publication →
Artist Profile
Slowing down to listen in a world obsessed with speed →
2025 West Space Commission
West Space is proud to present a major new project by Greek-Australian artist Tina Stefanou as part of our 2025 West Space Commission series.
The second chapter in a two-part exhibition across two major public art galleries in Naarm/Melbourne – Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) and West Space – this Commission encompasses immersive installation, live performance and music. Stefanou presents a groundbreaking interdisciplinary project, redefining how artists, contemporary art institutions and audiences perceive and participate with socially engaged art, visual culture, performance and access.
With a focus on relationality, knowledge sharing and impactful collaboration and innovation around questions of access, the artist is working with an array of collaborators with different art and non-art backgrounds and access needs, from rural and urban Australia.
Stefanou's recent time spent living in rural Western Australia amidst shifting political and environmental terrains has shaped the ways she chooses to engage and communicate within the arts. Her practice contemplates how neoliberal-humanism and social class dynamics infiltrate our day-to-day lives, sense of self, bodies, practices, and relations, affecting how we connect, communicate, and create liberation for one another and the planet. It holds the potential for other forms of sharing, making, and contributing to the cultural commons beyond the rat race.
Tina Stefanou: You Can’t See Speed is showing at ACCA, 4 April → 9 June 2025.
"Tina Stefanou is an iconoclast—an artist who is tender yet uncompromising in her explorations of sound, community, collaboration, 'the rural' and settler-coloniality.
In a strong field, the Artist Committee was impressed by Tina's proposal, her most rigorous yet convivial body of work so far." — West Space Board Member Eugenia Lim
This project is a West Space Commission, assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body, presented in partnership with the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art.
Thinking Together: Exchanges with the natural world
Thinking Together: Exchanges with the natural world will present major commissions by contemporary artists Robert Andrew, Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan and Keg de Souza, presented alongside intricate paintings by the Martu communities of central Western Australia, and video works by Sorawit Sangsataya and Tina Stefanou.
The exhibition explores themes of reciprocity and collaboration between the human and non-human. Each work responds to notions of community, and considers the possibility that new knowledge can only be created through a process of thinking together, via communal making, cooperation between the species and embodying First Nations practices of knowledge sharing. A central pillar of this approach is presented in the large scale collaborative paintings of the Martu communities of central Western Australia, reflecting long histories of creating together that strengthens culture and grounds knowledge in place. These works reflect a complex web of relationships, linking environmental and ritual knowledge, geographic information and ancestral stories, whilst also building strong connections between the artists who come together to paint.
You Can’t See Speed
Main exhibition gallery
Free
Continuing the Contemporary Australian Solo series of annual exhibitions by Australian artists at critical moments in their practice, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art is pleased to be presenting a major solo exhibition by Tina Stefanou, a Greek-Australian artist who works with experimental forms of performance, film, sculpture, ethnographic research and socially engaged practice.
Tina Stefanou: You Can’t See Speed attends to the interconnected and multisensory experience of film beyond vision. The exhibition continues Stefanou’s interest in the voice as medium; co-creative collaboration, communal gathering and breaking bread; and solidary between humans and animals. Her work is also known to challenge institutions of power and capitalism, embedding the commons – from the planetary to the everyday – and her diasporic, working-class ethic within her work and practice.
Presented across ACCA’s four galleries, Tina Stefanou: You Can’t See Speed transforms the building into a living instrument, merging its subterrain engines with the intimacy of voice, all within a haptic, tactile labyrinth of sculptures, films, live performances and dirt bikes. Altering perceptions and cultural hierarchies of sight and social access, the exhibition blurs the boundaries between vision-sound-touch to create an experiential landscape for blind, low vision and sighted audiences.
The exhibition centres a collaborative new commission with blind motorcycle mechanic and rider Matthew Cassar. Concerned with the ideals of collaboration and trust, coinciding with Cassar’s journey of riding dirt bikes in high performance contexts, the new film follows Cassar along a surrealist voyage of adrenalin and self-actualisation. Shot across Super 8, 16mm, digital and high-definition film stocks – tracing the material histories of motion picture – the work interrogates notions of speed, long-euro-modernity and mechanical process captured on film, from Eadweard Muybridge’s images of the horse in movement to the machismo of contemporary motorcycle racing. Accompanying the film is a large-scale, site-specific stunt ramp emblazoned with totemic and ritualistic symbols such as evil eyes, crystals and rosettes, designed to protect from and ward against threats, both imagined and tremendously real.
Alongside the new commission, Stefanou presents a modified configuration of her body of cinematic performance works. Featuring rural and regional collaborators, the films form a complex ecology of multispecies, class realities and rural poetics, from migrant, farmer and youth perspectives. The multiple screens are scaffolded by a field of sculptural materials, from salted horse-hooves to found agri-materials, which trespass across the galleries shifting them into a metaphorical nervous system made up of more-than-human, animal and machine parts.
Curator: Elyse Goldfinch
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body, Arts House through the CultureLAB creative development program, and presented in partnership with West Space.
Logos / Λογότυπα is an exhibition exploring Greek culture →
Eflux Screening: View From A Body
What is an artist supposed to do with all this?
Moving-the-Image through the Social Flesh: Gathering in Difference
2.20–3.40pm
PANEL SESSION
CHAIR: Tristen Harwood, Writer and Lecturer in Critical and Theoretical Studies, VCA
Dr Laresa Kosloff, Artist and Senior Lecturer, RMIT | The paradox of agency
Hayley Millar Baker, Artist | The Indigenous Feminine Body as Universe
Tina Stefanou, Artist and PhD Candidate, VCA | Moving-the-Image through the Social Flesh: Gathering in Difference | Talk and response with a chorus of first-year sculpture students from the VCA.
