Dancing the music: Philippa Cullen 1950–1975
Curator talk and performance

For our current exhibition Dancing the music: Philippa Cullen 1950–1975 please join us for a curator talk by Dr Stephen Jones discussing Cullen’s radical choreography and technological advances, followed by a unique performance by Dr Iran Sanadzadeh, who has created a new version of Cullen’s pressure-sensitive floors and will perform with them as a musical instrument in the gallery space. In this work, the performer’s body curates subtle sequences of sound. Cullen strived to liberate the dancer from the ‘tyranny’ of music, and Iran is trying to find a new way to move and play as a musician.

Curator Dr Stephen Jones will speak on the exhibition before Dr Sanadzadeh introduces her performance, followed by a Q&A session.

Iran Sanadzadeh is a composer, performer and researcher in interaction design for the sonic arts and in musical acoustics. Her practice-led research and creative pursuits are focused on drawing new connections out at the intersection of disparate approaches. Iran performs primarily on her set of pressure-sensitive floors, developed initially from the study of the pioneering work of Australian dancer Philippa Cullen.

Stephen Jones is a video artist, historian, curator, and electronic engineer based in Sydney on Gadigal Country. He is the curator of Dancing the music: Philippa Cullen 1950–1975, and the author of Synthetics: Aspects of Art and Technology in Australia 1956-1975 (MIT, 2011). From 1983 to 1992 Jones was a principal member of the electronic music group Severed Heads.

Free event. No bookings required!