Remember Me Remember Me
Stacey Collee, Andrea Illés
31 Jan–24 Feb 2024
Stacey and Andrea will use the gallery as a stage for their investigation of the Baroque Opera ‘Dido and Aeneas.’ Through their durational, iterative performances, they will explore the source material through various modes of performance, staging, and filming.
The work engages with and challenges philosophical and psychoanalytic ideas around the sex/death binary while furthering the artists’ enquiries into performativity, self, and gazing. Although adaptation, their exploration of the material is critical and unmakes the narrative, preferencing its emotionality. The work is subjective and autobiographical in its enquiry and originates from discussions about tragic love.
The artists will commence the performance on opening night with a prelude, setting up the narrative and main characters of Dido and Aeneas. These characters (and others) will be played interchangeably by Andrea and Stacey over the course of the exhibition.
Over the subsequent month, the work will include choreographic, vocal, and other sound interpretations of the libretto/score. The performers will be present in the space from 4-6pm everyday, continuing their rehearsal, and accumulating recorded footage. When the performers are not present an evolving video work will occupy the gallery space.
The project will culminate in a feature length video adaptation of ‘Dido and Aeneas.’ The film will be constructed from footage documented in the space, as well as footage taken from specific locations around Naarm.
The work exists between film and theatre, live storytelling and prerecorded interludes, script and anecdote, mythology and autobiography.
The artists are interested in exhibiting the rehearsal of ‘Dido and Aeneas’ as an iterative performance over the course of the month, where slippage and accident are embraced and showcased as operatic spectacle. Mythology and Autobiography become indistinguishable in climactic arias, as texts and bodies are made/unmade.
Stacey Collee + Andrea Illés assemble various forms of performance; pop covers, choreography, noise, and live macro photography to unmake a shape-shifting adaptation of Purcell’s opera Dido & Aeneas. During the four week durational performance they will explore the relationship between eros and annihilation within and without the libretto.
Opening Thursday 1 Feb 6–8pm & Performance 7:30pm
Live Performance Activations Wed–Sat 4–6pm
Please be advised this exhibition contains nudity and mature content. Thank you
This program takes place on the land of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. We recognise that sovereignty was never ceded - this land is stolen land. We pay respects to Wurundjeri Elders, past, present and emerging, to the Elders from other communities and to any other Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders who might encounter or participate in the program.
Stacey Collee is a performer whose work reaches toward the raw emotive force of love and desire. Since graduating from VCA in 2022, Collee has exhibited at various galleries such as KINGS ARI, West Space, George Paton Gallery, Seventh Gallery, and the Fiona and Sidney Myer Gallery.
Andrea Illés is an artist whose enquiry emerges from her interest in objectification and how it interplays with performativity and embodiment. Merging modes such as dance, theatre, sound, and film, she primarily makes live performance. Her work has been shown at Westspace, Carriageworks, Seventh, George Paton Gallery, Miscellania, Fiona and Sidney Myer Gallery and Temperance Hall.