Undercurrents
Christine McFetridge, Sally Ann McIntyre, Carly Fischer, Joy Zhou, Hannah Zhu
16–27 Jul 2025
As part of Blindside's Gallery Activation series, this pool of artists have been invited to present site-responsive projects in tandem. Their works offer windows into displaced histories and other echoes of local places, from the Nicholas Building to surrounding waterways. Over two weeks, they will inhabit the gallery with installations, performance and residency workings.
This activation will conclude with a CLOSING EVENT on SUNDAY 27TH JULY from 3-6pm.
More details on the closing event HERE.
Please see below for further information on the activation.
WEEK ONE ACTIVATION:
Wednesday 17th - Sunday 20th July.
Gallery 1. Exhibition.
Christine McFetridge, Trying to Fit Birrarung into a Rectangle
Gallery 2. Open Studio and Performance.
Sally Ann McIntyre & Carly Fischer, Re-sounding buried waterways
Public Performance on Saturday July 19th from 2-4pm
Christine McFetridge, An Inconvenient Curve, 2024, Library at the Dock Gallery, photograph by Chris Bowes. Courtesy the artist and M.33, Melbourne.
Christine McFetridge, Trying to Fit Birrarung into a Rectangle
Since the beginning of settler occupation in Narrm (Melbourne) in 1835, settler representations of Birrarung (Yarra River) have been central to furthering the colonial project. Through photography and text, Unlearning Landscape seeks to trouble white perceptions of the river—including my own—to attend to the ongoing violence of the colonial regime.
This activation grapples with the shameful relationship colonisers and settler colonisers have had with Birrarung since the beginning of settler occupation in Narrm in 1835. In order to attend to this history, which reaches into and shapes the present, I describe the colonial violence perpetrated against the river.
Christine McFetridge's project is also supported by Regional Arts Victoria.
Carly Fischer & Sally Ann McIntyre, Re-sounding buried waterways, performance still, Fitzroy Gardens, 2024. Photo: Edwina Stevens.
Sally Ann McIntyre & Carly Fischer, Re-sounding buried waterways
A collaborative sonic and sculptural project between Sally Ann McIntyre and Carly Fischer, they experiment with speculative re-routings of the historic creek that was partially buried and erased with the construction of The Fitzroy Gardens. Drawing on audio-recordings of water traces collected throughout the gardens via a series of artificial waterfalls, pipes, drains and storage facilities, the project extends these traces into an expanded sound performance of radio transmissions, echoes and sculptural-acoustic feedback loops; speculative ghostings of the creek past and present.
PUBLIC PERFORMANCE ACTIVATION of Re-sounding buried waterways on SATURDAY 19TH JULY from 2-4pm.
WEEK TWO ACTIVATION:
Wednesday 23rd - Sunday 27th July.
Gallery 1. Residency.
Joy Zhou, Prologues: I am watching you from afar, in proximity
Gallery 2. Live Capture Video Installation.
Hannah Zhu, The One Watching the Scenery From the Door Watches You
Joy Zhou, Fed Square WIP annotations, 2025. Courtesy the artist.
Joy Zhou, Prologues: I am watching you from afar, in proximity
Zhou's activation initiates a process-led investigation into the spatial power dynamic of public spaces, site-specifically to Federation Square, Blindside and the spaces in between. The project reconsiders the use of language and normativity rendered by institutions, such as through words ‘activation’ and ‘experience’, and explores possible alternatives unfolding beyond the implied socio-economic impact.
A guided walk will accompany this process-led exploration during BLINDSIDE activation-residency period. Presents, objects, thoughts and concepts unfolded during the process.
Hannah Zhu, The One Watching the Scenery From the Door Watches You 0.00, 2025. Projection Photo: Pearl Dempsey / Photo: Hannah Zhu.
Hannah Zhu, The One Watching the Scenery From the Door Watches You
Zhu's activation invites the gallery and its visitors to simultaneously observe and be observed through a site-specific live video projection of BLINDSIDE’s doors. Rephrased from a 1930s Chinese poem, the title evokes a sense of relativism in any given scenery. The installation draws on how visitors engage with the doors—the mundane or uncanny act of passing through, the encounter with their own image in motion, or the imagining of new openings in the gallery’s walls. The doors seem to watch the visitors, as the gallery itself is watched by the city beyond.
You watch the scenery from the bridge, the one watching the scenery from the bridge watches you.
The moon adorned your window, you adorned someone’s dream.
Bian ZhiLin, Fragments, 1935
你站在桥上看风景，看风景的人在楼上看你，明月装饰了你的窗子，你装饰了别人的梦。
卞之琳 《断章》1935
PLEASE BE ADVISED.
All visitors who enter the gallery activation will be recorded.
Gallery Activation featuring projects by
Christine McFetridge, Sally Ann McIntyre & Carly Fischer, Joy Zhou, and Hannah Zhu.
About Blindside's Gallery Activations:
As a counterpoint to our regular exhibition programming, Blindside has introduced Activation Periods in 2025, which allows for projects that are experimental, with varied timelines, a focus on public-programming, and possibilities for collaborative practice and exchange. These periods sit as alternatives to our conventional 4 week exhibition periods.
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.
Christine McFetridge is a settler coloniser of British and Irish descent born in Aotearoa New Zealand and based on unceded Wadawurrung Country. She is an artist, educator and researcher represented by M.33, Melbourne. Using photography, video and text, McFetridge’s work aims to contest and unsettle colonial histories through engagement with public archives. In 2024, she completed her practice-led doctoral research project An Inconvenient Curve: Unlearning Settler Colonial Representations of Birrarung.
Sally Ann McIntyre is an artist and writer fromAotearoa New Zealand and lutruwita Tasmania who lives and works in Naarm Melbourne. Sally’s recent work has focused on themes of transmission, memory, sound, silence and extinction, locating acts of ecocide and sonic erasure within particular sites, scoring species extinction as echo, noise and silence across and within relational multispecies environments and their traces within the memory spaces of the museum and the archive. Her projects link the methods and materials of expanded-field radio ecology, the anarcheaological fossils of media cultures, the exploitative extraction economies of colonial science, and the poetics and politics of listening.
Carly Fischer is a sculptural artist from Narrm/Melbourne who often works collaboratively across sculpture and sound to create expansive installations. Her place-responsive practice engages with the smaller details, forgotten fragments, hidden histories and peripheral dialogues of specific places and sites through improvisational and accumulative processes of wandering, field recording, archival research and collaborative experimentation. Weaving alternate narratives through incidental intersections and tangents, these processes generate sculptural, sonic and video responses that slip between form, materiality and context, reflecting on places as complex and shifting sites of interaction and negotiation.
Joy Zhou is an artist, designer and producer in Naarm/Melbourne. Joy works responsively to their surroundings through sonic, spatial and socially-engaged intervention, interrogating and subverting power dynamics experienced within spaces and between people through queering, embodied and relational gestures.
Hannah Zhu explores cinematic space and nomadic ecology through her practice as an artist, architect, and academic. Her work has been exhibited, awarded, and archived internationally at TU Delft in the Netherlands, Parsons in the USA, and the Venice Biennale. On the lands of the Kulin Nation, Zhu has realised public art commissions for the City of Melbourne and the University of Melbourne, with projects featured in Melbourne Design Week. Working across installation, multimedia, and spatial practices, Zhu’s work draws on ecological dramaturgy, spatial storytelling, and collaborative methodologies, forming what she termed a ‘geo-fictional’ approach.
Grey Dear is an interdisciplinary artist based in Narrm (Melbourne) who works with choreography, live art, public programs and discursive practice. Grey's values and approaches, both artistically and beyond, are informed by their perspective as a queer, trans and disabled person. They are a passionate thinker, mover, reader, scholar and collaborator who has neurodivergent-style special interests in human-tree relations, plant intelligence, the nature of perception and theoretical/philosophical frameworks.
Grey employs choreographic thinking and somatic approaches across the diverse tendrils of their practice to create sensorially and intellectually engaging experiences. This could be a participatory experience, an educational talk, action in a gallery or outdoor engagement in a public setting.
Whatever the context, Grey’s work prioritises community/audience participation. Through incorporating immersive and interactive elements, they bring people into a direct and embodied engagement with the inquiries of their projects. Thus, working toward dissolving boundaries between artist, audience, artwork and everyday life.
Grey’s work has been described to (paradoxically) engender clinical wonder and focused multiplicity, encouraging audiences to ponder philosophical problems from an embodied perspective with a scientific sensibility.