I'm not a spiritual person

Barcode People (Qihao Liang and Tong Shu)Barcode People(Qihao Liang, Tong Shu) is a creative duo based in Naarm/ Melbourne, syncing hyper-surrealism with immersive digital expression. Their practice instantiates uncanny presence through post-internet aesthetics, rendered through performance, installation, gaming simulation, and video works. Their recent works have been developed or presented at Trocadero Project, Goethe-Institut, HAU Hebbel-am-Ufer, Berlin Art Week 2025, The 7th Wrong Biennale, Footscray Community Arts, Next Wave, Melbourne Fringe, LOOKLIVE, La Mama, Darebin Arts Centre, and SCOPE BLN.

Qihao Liang was born in Guangdong, China, and now based in Naarm/Melbourne, he is a writer whose works have appeared in Poemnovel and Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine. He was recognised at the 46th Hong Kong Youth Literature Award, and in 2019, founded Barcode People in Naarm/Melbourne.

Tong Shu is a China-born, Melbourne-based interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans installation, video, and performance. Working conceptually across forms, she creates uncanny, participatory encounters within dreamlike situations. With an education background in film and digital media across China, the UK, and Australia, she co-founded Barcode People in 2019.

Noah Bridger is a sculptor. He is bothered by failure, repetitions, obsession, hunger, death, and all the sorts of work that make our world. He models and gathers and moulds and casts, doubling things in a process both industrial and alchemical. Things that wear the touch of vacancy, ambling steps, the dry burn of cement, slurry, bird scratchings, bodyheat, rotten sweat. A little foolish, perhaps mundane.

Hanto Cantwell is an art director and designer. At the helm of their work is a belief that the design process should be playful, expressive, imperfect and inconclusive

Martina Copley is an artist and writer whose practice explores the poetics of compositional processes. She has worked with Sutton Projects, Propane, Bus Projects, RMIT Project Space, SEVENTH, West Space, City and Docklands Libraries, Melbourne Festival, and Liquid Architecture. She has co-produced two artist books and her writing (often with live readings) has been published by the Expanded Writers Collective, Runway Journal, no more poetry, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), and Bloomsbury Academic. Martina is Chair Artistic Director at Blindside and lectures in contemporary art and writing at RMIT University, the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne and La Trobe College of Art & Design.

Jincheng Deng is a Hainanese artist based in Melbourne, working across installation, sculpture, performance, and curatorial practice. He is a PhD candidate in Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne.His solo projects have been presented at Trocadero Projects, Kings Artist-Run, TCB Gallery, and MPavilion Parkville, and he has participated in collaborative projects at Firstdraft. Alongside his artistic practice, Deng works as a curator and organiser. His curated exhibitions have taken place at Composition Art Museum in Lingshui, China and at Propane and 138 Gallery in Melbourne. He is a co-founder of HAIR ARi in Melbourne and the initiator of the Office of Octo in Haikou. He was shortlisted for the Incinerator Art Award and received the New Public Arts Curating Award in China. He is also engaged in scholarly translation work and has translated Graham Harman’s Immaterialism: Objects and Social Theory and Objects Untimely: Object-Oriented Philosophy and Archaeology into Chinese.

Cinoo Christina Lee lives and works in Melbourne.

Ming Liew is an artist-researcher based in Naarm (Melbourne). His practice spans moving-image art, experimental film, archival research, and artificial intelligence, probing Chinese diasporic identity at the intersection of culture, ideology, and technology. His work has been exhibited across Australia, including at NGV Melbourne Design Week, Melbourne Fringe Festival, Footscray Community Arts, and MARS Gallery. He has received several accolades, including first prize in the fortyfivedownstairs Emerging Artist Award and the Ignition Prize from the National Association for the Visual Arts. Ming has been an Artistic Director at Blindside ARI since 2024. He is currently a PhD candidate at RMIT University and a creative resident at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image.

Karen Luo is a China-born, Melbourne/Naarm-based artist working across photography and installation, often merging photographic and sculptural forms. Karen’s practice investigates layered relationships: between the self and its internal landscape of identity and emotion, between individuals, and between human presence and the natural environment.

Kate Marshall, born in lutruwita (Tasmania), is an emerging artist based in naarm (Melbourne). Kate creates across soft sculpture, photography, video and installation. Engaging with play and performativity Kate’s work imaginatively interprets autobiographical experiences of intimacy, queerness, desire, and vulnerability. Kate uses colours and materials associated with their childhood home to materialise adult experiences and emotions, building sensory connections between these temporalities. Through practice, they are interested in cultivating a creative relationship with their own embodiment, expanding and queering their understanding of being in the world.

Kate finished a Master of Fine Art at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 2025, researching how play and performativity can be methodologies for queering intimacy. In 2023, Kate presented their debut solo exhibition With Myself. This autobiographical body of work explored emerging queer desire, sexuality and loneliness. They have shown in many group exhibitions across Australia, including Walls of Skin curated by Constance ARI for Dark Mofo in 2023. Kate graduated with a combined Bachelor of Arts and Fine Arts at the University of Tasmania in 2021.

Josephine Mead is a visual artist, curator & writer, residing on Wurundjeri woi-wurrung Country. She works through photography, sculpture, installation and writing to explore personal notions of support. Her recent work has positioned female family members as support-structures, considered the body as a site of discursive practice, explored notions of deep listening; examined the temporal and sonic nature of writing and photography; and charted notions and experiences of queer-love.

She has exhibited in many solo and group exhibitions, in Australia and abroad. She has undertaken residency programs in rural Victoria (The Macfarlane Fund), Mexico (Arquetopia Foundation), Portugal (Córtex Frontal), Turkey (Tasarim Bakkali TAB) and Germany (ZK/U). She was an inaugural Room to Create studio artist at Collingwood Yards. She co-founded Co- Publishing (with Christine McFetridge) in 2020 and was a founding Artistic Director of MILK Gallery in 2022. In 2023 she participated in the Writing in the Expanded Field program through the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA). She was Chair of Artistic Directors for Blindside Gallery from 2020-2022 and re-joined the Blindside team as Community Coordinator in 2024.

Fiona Morgan is a multidisciplinary artist based in regional Victoria, on Wadawurrung Country. Her painting and installation practice focuses on provisional painting and spatial installations; drawing from both natural and architectural environments, she constructs abstract works that are influenced by form, place and intuition.

Genevieve Pikó is a Naarm/Melbourne based artist working predominantly in video and digital collage, using appropriated footage and images to explore ideas of memory, time and identity. Pikó takes a painterly attitude to the digital, embracing the ‘glitch’ and exploring digital landscapes.

Shannon May Powell is a poet and artist whose work poses gestures of longing towards new possibilities of gender, sexuality and identity. Their practice is grounded in the body and relationally activated by the people and places they collaborate with.

Yongping Ren is a Melbourne-based artist and arts worker whose practice investigates how materials accumulate and preserve gestures, thoughts, and desires through time. Working with tensions between public and private, permanence and fragility, his work dissolves boundaries between the sacred and profane while centering marginalized forms of spatial intimacy, failure, and instability. Born in Xiaoyi, China in 1990, Ren is currently undertaking a Master of Fine Art by Research at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. He holds a BFA from VCA and an MFA (Coursework) from RMIT University. His work has been featured in the Huaniao Island International Art Festival, performances at Powerhouse Museum Sydney, and group exhibitions at Testing Grounds, Alta Forma, Kyneton Ridge Artspace, and RMIT's IDAHOBIT celebrations. He has presented solo work at MAILBOX ARI, participated in the ARIXCHANGE residency program between Sawtooth ARI and Blindside ARI, and completed a residency at Absolutespace AIR in Tainan, Taiwan. Ren worked as Gallery Assistant at Bus Projects (2022-23) and currently co-directs Run Artist Run, an artist studio residency program in Docklands, Melbourne.

Geoff Robinson is a Narrm/Melbourne-based artist who creates situated projects that engage listening as a process for unravelling the durational layers of place. Robinson’s practice develops comparative relationships between multiple situations and places as a way of understanding deep time, current, and future relations to place

Kate Stewart is a Naarm/Melbourne-based multidisciplinary artist working across expanded painting, assemblage, and installation. She holds a Master of Fine Arts (with Distinction) from RMIT University and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Victorian College of the Arts. Recent exhibitions include Liquid (Alta Forma, 2026), Intermission (Five Walls Projects, 2025), The Murmuring (Rubicon ARI, 2024), and The Weather (Tropical Lab, Singapore, 2024).

Ella Simpson is an emerging artist and arts worker whose painting practice explores the tensions between Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and the abject body. Her highly personal work investigates themes of control, contamination, and the psychological relationship to the body through visceral imagery. Simpson completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) at RMIT University and is currently undertaking a Master of Arts Management. She has exhibited at multiple sites, including Brunswick Street Gallery, Queen Victoria Women's Centre, RMIT, and Unassigned Gallery. Alongside her practice, she has worked as a gallery technician at Wangaratta Art Gallery and as an arts technician and teacher’s aide at Galen Catholic College.

Andrew Sinclair’s art journey deepened in 1995 during high‑school work experience with master printmaker Bill Young. He went on to study Fine Art Printmaking at RMIT before co‑founding Artery Studios in Northcote, Melbourne. Sinclair’s practice was profoundly shaped by a decade of collaboration at Injalak Arts in Western Arnhem Land, where he worked with leading artists to produce etchings informed by ancestral rock art traditions. Following ten years in First Nations art centres and a decade in secondary education, Sinclair now approaches his practice with renewed clarity—exploring, teaching, and making art with the same curiosity that first ignited his career.

Ellen Yeong Gyeong Son is an artist and heritage consultant based in Naarm (Melbourne). Drawing from her lived experience in Korea, Singapore, and Australia, her practice broadly considers transculturalism, linguistic limitation, and cultural hybridity. Using text, drawing, scratching, sewing, installation, music and performance, Son frequently blends Seoul and Busan dialects, Singlish, and English through phonetic spellings, mistranslations, and invented words. Through these layered linguistic and material gestures, her work reflects on the instability of language and the ways ideas are translated, distorted, and reinvented as they move between people, places, and cultures. Alongside her artistic work, she is engaged in heritage planning and historical research with a focus on progressive conservation and the social value of heritage places. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours (First Class Honours, 2017) and a Master of Urban and Cultural Heritage (First Class Honours, 2022) from the University of Melbourne.

Benjamin Woods is an artist and researcher living in Naarm on unceded Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Country. His sculpture and sound installation practice mutates and develops in the context of specific place-based research projects.

Siying Zhou is a visual artist born in China whose practice draws upon her Chinese heritage and social status as an Asian female immigrant in the West. Through producing predominantly installation works, Siying uses spatial structure and materiality of various media, such as, video, photography, performance, drawings and text, to undertake her research about cultural difference and cultural representation, and to create discussions about ontological issues about Asian immigrants and epistemological experiences formed in the visual art. Siying’s artworks have been exhibited nationally and internationally and also included in private collections. She obtained her Master of Fine Art at the Victorian College of the Art, the University of Melbourne, in 2018. Siying is the winner of Linden Art Prize 2019.

Martina Copley is an artist and writer whose practice explores the poetics of compositional processes. She has worked with Sutton Projects, Propane, Bus Projects, RMIT Project Space, SEVENTH, West Space, City and Docklands Libraries, Melbourne Festival, and Liquid Architecture. She has co-produced two artist books and her writing (often with live readings) has been published by the Expanded Writers Collective, Runway Journal, no more poetry, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), and Bloomsbury Academic. Martina is Chair Artistic Director at Blindside and lectures in contemporary art and writing at RMIT University, the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne and La Trobe College of Art & Design.