Tina Stefanou is a Greek-Australian artist, performer, and researcher living on unceded Wurundjeri country in Wattle Glen, Victoria. With a background as a vocalist, she works undisciplined, with and across a diverse range of mediums, practices, approaches and labours: an embodied practice that she calls voice in the expanded field. As a means to seek more inclusive ways of making and to frame tangled relationships, she engages in multispecies performance with a family of local others, friends not-yet-made, and poet(h)ic meetings of matter. Informed by diasporic and working-class experiences, Stefanou engages in sound and research as social practice, exploring with and beyond all-too-human and more-than-human vocalities. She works with multiple communities over long periods of time and locations through para-ethnographic field work, vocal workshops, performance making, and filmic traces.
She has an ongoing relationship with a herd of elderly horses with who she co-creates performative co-inventions with and is especially interested in creating alternate forms of performance and exhibition, outside of human-dominated environments and audiences. Working with her grandmother and family, they create living memorials to bring grief and elderhood into skillfulness, as both personal and political sustenance. Inspired by this, she has begun Planet Hospice, a 40-year concept-in-forming project with a growing cohort of scientists, artists, religious and healthcare workers, councillors, architects, and writers. Furthermore, Stefanou has been working with the community of Carnamah in rural Western Australia to explore the intersection of agriculture, export economies, and the cultural commons. The artist is exploring the forces, flows, and fabulations that uphold, reproduce or alter where and for who art practice and welfare is experienced— playfully working through multi-scalar relations from the planetary commons to locally situated socio-economic realities of the (extra)ordinary.
Stefanou has performed, presented, published and exhibited locally and internationally including: Salt Museum (Istanbul); Kadist Gallery (Paris); Le Pavé d'Orsay (Paris); the University of Music and Performing Arts (Graz); Residency Corazon Gallery (La Plata); The Yellow House (Sydney); The Sydney Opera House; Stacks Projects (Sydney); Festaal (Berlin); Carriageworks (Sydney); Gertrude Contemporary (Melbourne); The Ian Potter Museum (Melbourne); Blindside Gallery (Melbourne); Perth Institute of Contemporary Art; McClelland Gallery and Sculpture Park (Langwarrin); Hamer Hall (Melbourne); Pheonix Central Park (SYD); University of Western Australia (Perth); Australian Centre of Contemporary Art (Melbourne); National Gallery of Victoria; Museum of Old and New Art (Tasmania); American Anthropology Association (NY); Rosi Braidotti Posthuman Artist Labs (Utrecht University); 3ecologies Project (Canada); Buxton Contemporary (Melbourne); The Substation (Melbourne); Sarah Scout Presents (Melbourne); Composite Gallery (Melbourne); Collingwood Yards Arts Precinct (Melbourne); Disclaimer Journal; Journal of Sonic Studies; and Cordite Poetry Review. She has worked with organisations such as: Liquid Architecture; Art + Australia online; Women’s Art Register; Alpha60; Erth Visual & Physical Inc; Chiara Guidi; SPACED; Young Voices Melbourne; West Australian Opera; DADAA Gallery; The North Midlands Project; Art Gallery of Western Australia; The Australian Art Orchestra; Centre of Visual Art; Speak Percussion; Cementa; RMIT’s non/fictionLab; ADSR Zine; Semi Permanent; Centre for Projection Art; Project Anywhere; and Chamber Made.
Stefanou has won an Australian Art Music Award for Excellence in Experimental Music with The Music Box Project (2020); Schenberg Arts Fellowship (2020); Marten Bequest Scholarship (2021); City of Melbourne Arts Grant (2022); SPACED Residency (2022-23) and was a finalist in the 67th Blake Prize and Incinerator Art Award (2022). She is a recipient of the Local Nillumbik Contemporary Art Prize, and CultureLAB development program with ACCA and Arts House (2023-24). In 2023, she was featured in a survey of prominent Victorian artists in the Melbourne Now exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, received Art Projects for Individuals funding from Creative Australia, was nominated for an Australian Art Music Award for Excellence in Experimental Practice with Chamber Made and has launched new arts aggregation The Opera Company as Artistic Director. In 2024, Stefanou will feature in the Adelaide Biennial of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia, is a finalist in the Darebin Art Prize and 68th Blake Prize.
Stefanou is a PhD candidate in Fine Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne.
CV available by request.
I acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the land on which I work and live, and recognise their continuing connection to multispecies collaboration, voice, land, song, water and community. I pay respect to Elders past, present and emerging and to all First Nations people.
Photo: Andrew Kaineder