Next to Nothing

21.03.—
21.03.25

Project8 Gallery, Empty long view 01, Photo: Lucy Foster

“One night only” curated exhibition event: 6-8pm, Friday 21 March 2025

Performance sits at the core of the creative arts, functioning both as a framework for and a registration of embodied experience. Perhaps, the more that we isolate what seems essential in creative expression, the more that the value of performance comes to the fore. Ultimately, all creative expression—from painting to music to writing and even programming—carries some kind of performative imprint of the gestures that brought it into being.

This “one evening only” curated exhibition event considers the elemental nature of performance through the lenses of three artists working through very different modalities. What is revealed in the seeming absence of anything other than voice and body inhabiting space and time? What kinds of aesthetic, political and ethical dimensions emerge through reductive forms of performance?

The three artists featured in this curated program explore the limits of what it means to perform without elaborate staging, supporting props, or external narrative frameworks. Emphasising the immediacy of presence and gesture, the performance becomes both process and encounter—an ephemeral act that unfolds in real time and space to leave an impression in the minds of those that bear witness.

This event frames performance as a creative practice reduced to its barest essentials, shifting the focus from what performance is to how it offers insights into the nature of the artistic process itself.

Featuring:

Archie Barry
Brooke Stamp
Jiayang Zhang

Curated by:
Cūrā8 (Kim Donaldson and Sean Lowry)