Exhausted Vocalities ongoing - 1986

Exhausted Vocalities is a vocal action in which the artist uses her voice as a resonant engine—extended through petrol-infused economies, and off-road singing in the form of inherited peasant tongues. She sits beneath a grief ramp, an aspirational instrument crafted from hand-grown crystal and metal, inspired by her collaborator Matthew Cassar’s journey of riding dirt bikes blind, including his ambition to achieve the world’s highest jump. This parallels the artist’s own aspirations as she moves through the many modes of becoming a professional artist in her first major solo exhibition.

Through the intimacy of voice, improvisation, and its material extensions, the space transforms into a site for new vocalities and class relations, where exhaustion, aspiration, and notions of visibility coalesce.

Exhausted Vocalities arrives from Tina Stefanou’s background as a vocalist, and practice as an improvising vocalist, performing across new music, contemporary classical, and experimental music contexts. Tina Stefanou uses voice as form and medium in all her works, singing solo and with others for over twenty years. 

Artist and Performer: Tina Stefanou, Curator: Elyse Goldfinch, Dramaturgy: Anna Nalpantidis, Production design: Romanie Harper, ramp fabrication and project management: Ellen Sayers, photo documentation: Sarah Walker.