Fistimuff

'Fistimuff' is a captivating new video portrait by Archie Barry that examines the fluid nature of personality and examines strategies for eroding the linguistic and visual constructs that govern identity politics.

These ideas are channelled through the character ‘Fisti’, a bright pink superhuman who sleeps in a t-shirt, wears frilly socks and speaks in drum rolls and English. Filmed within a 12-hour period, 'Fistimuff' is a condensation of time and a particular personal message: that to be human is to be complicated and mutable.

Stylistically, the work is reminiscent of a music video, and is accompanied by a genre-blending soundscape featuring spoken words about embodiment as a shifting experience. Concerned with creating an immersive sensory environment, the work turns everyday landscapes into scenes of agency.

The newest piece in Barry’s cyclic working methodology, 'Fistimuff' features re-constituted and further developed audio elements from 'Tatsache' (2017), itself a videographic expansion of ideas around duplicity and presence first explored in the live performance work 'Hypnic' (2017).

Archie Barry in conversation with Dr Sean Lowry | Saturday 14 Sep 2–3pm

Join Archie Barry in conversation with Dr Sean Lowry as they discuss 'Fistimuff', Barry’s newly commissioned work for Channels Festival. The discussion will touch on topics such as cyclic working methodology, developing the piece across audio, performance and video mediums, and the connections between art practice and life.

Archie Barry is an interdisciplinary artist, whose work converges language and bodily gestures within a self-portraiture practice. By curating ontological spaces between what is and what can be, Barry envisages alternate possibilities for the ever-evolving architectures of personhood. Barry graduated with a Masters of Contemporary Art from the Victorian College of the Arts (University of Melbourne) in 2017. They have exhibited work at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Buxton Contemporary, the State Library of Victoria, Contemporary Art Tasmania, Artspace and Alaska Projects. Barry's solo performance projects have been staged at the the Museum of Contemporary Art, The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Contemporary Art Tasmania, Artspace, the Meat Markets, Neon Parc and the State Library of Victoria.

Dr Sean Lowry is a Melbourne-based visual artist, writer, curator and musician. He holds a PhD in Visual Arts from the University of Sydney and is currently Head of Critical and Theoretical Studies in Art at Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Lowry’s conceptually driven artistic practice employs strategies of concealment, subliminal quotation, erasure, remediation and intermedial expansion to explore the outermost limits of the world of a work of art. He has exhibited and performed extensively both nationally and internationally, and his writing appears in numerous journals and edited volumes. He is also Founder and Executive Director of global blind peer reviewed exhibition program Project Anywhere—which is currently supported as part of a partnership between the Centre of Visual Art (University of Melbourne) and Parsons Fine Art (Parsons School of Design, The New School). Lowry is also one half (with Ilmar Taimre) of the radically intermedial artistic curatorial initiative The Ghosts of Nothing.

Images | Archie Barry, Fistimuff, 2019. Photography Darren Sylvester | Courtesy of the artist.