Sophie Rose
Exhibitions
Writing & Publications
Programs
Writing & Publications
Programs
Andrew Brooks on Christopher Kulendran Thomas. Artist-on-artist tour, Artspace, Sydney, 31 January 2026
What do artists see in the work of other artists? How might one artistic practice provide a pathway into another? Veering away from the curatorial talking points, Artspace’s artist-on-artist tours bring a fresh perspective to exhibitions by welcoming idiosyncratic associations, fixations and tangents as interpretive tools. For the first tour in the series, the artist, writer and researcher Andrew Brooks will take visitors through Christopher Kulendran Thomas’s solo exhibition Safe Zone. Drawing from his interest in the politics of contemporary media events, systems and infrastructures, Brooks will offer his response to the formal and conceptual provocations of Kulendran Thomas’s recent body of work.
Safe Zone tour with Helena Kritis. Artspace, Sydney, 4 December 2025.
This special guided tour of Christopher Kuldendran Thomas’s Safe Zone was led by exhibition curator and co-commissioning partner Helena Kritis, Chief Curator at WIELS Centre for Contemporary Art in Brussels. In this evening tour, Kritis shared her personal insights into the early development of Kulendran Thomas’s two major bodies of work, his use of artificial intelligence as a time-based medium and the role of art in confronting how marginalised political histories are told and remembered.
Images of War, War of Images. Reading Group, Artspace, Sydney, 18 November - 2 December 2025.
In the opening weeks of Christopher Kulendran Thomas's Safe Zone, Artspace hosted three-part reading group led by art historian Donna West Brett, author Shankari Chandran and historian Niro Kandasamy. These intimate gatherings trace the ethical and aesthetic questions raised by images of war and the battlefield of representation itself during times of political conflict. Drawing from the ongoing concerns of Kulendran Thomas’s practice, this series explores the ‘postwar’—not as a shorthand for modernist art made after 1945 but as a generative category for any work emerging in the wake of violence or collective struggle. Through close readings of selected texts and artworks, this program considers the ethics of remembering atrocity, the limits or betrayals of its representation, and how certain images persist as unsettling and unsettled cultural objects.
Speculative Evidence. Panel discussion, Artspace, Sydney, 15 November 2025.
‘Evidence’ would seem opposed to fiction—strictly a matter of observational photographs, government documents, statistical calculation, forensics and courtroom testimony. Yet what happens in the absence of such proof? When evidence of state violence is suppressed or simply ignored, culture may be able to fill in the gaps, holding weight long after any statute of limitations.
Accompanying Christopher Kulendran Thomas’s Safe Zone, this program saw a discussion between novelist and lawyer Shankari Chandran and filmmaker and human rights lawyer Visakesa Chandrasekaram on the unexpected role of speculation in bearing witness to atrocity, moderated by lawyer, community organiser and broadcaster Thinesh Thillainadarajah. This conversation took cue from Kulendran Thomas’s AI-assisted paintings of the 2009 Mullivaikkal Massacre, which attempt to give visual form to the largely unphotographed event. Drawing from the artist’s experiment, Chandran and Chandrasekaram considered how fictionalised evidence may bring us closer to a collective understanding of mass traumatic events.
Accompanying Christopher Kulendran Thomas’s Safe Zone, this program saw a discussion between novelist and lawyer Shankari Chandran and filmmaker and human rights lawyer Visakesa Chandrasekaram on the unexpected role of speculation in bearing witness to atrocity, moderated by lawyer, community organiser and broadcaster Thinesh Thillainadarajah. This conversation took cue from Kulendran Thomas’s AI-assisted paintings of the 2009 Mullivaikkal Massacre, which attempt to give visual form to the largely unphotographed event. Drawing from the artist’s experiment, Chandran and Chandrasekaram considered how fictionalised evidence may bring us closer to a collective understanding of mass traumatic events.
Niro Kandasamy, Indian Ocean Entanglements Artspace, Sydney, 15 November 2025.
The post-9/11 ‘War on Terror’ remains central to determining security outcomes across the world. Within this shifting landscape, Australia has positioned itself as both a regional peacebuilder in the Indian Ocean and enforcer of border control, acting as a supporter of postwar ‘reconstruction’ efforts in Sri Lanka while simultaneously deterring asylum seekers and refugees fleeing that same violence.
In this talk, historian Niro Kandasamy situated Christopher Kulendran Thomas’s Safe Zone within the Australian context by uncovering the longer history of Australia’s security relations with the Sri Lankan state and its citizens. The Australian government and diaspora communities have together shaped the island’s political and humanitarian outcomes through key motivations: colonial legacies, the Cold War, natural resources, and unsevered family and community ties. Drawing on examples from United Nations peace efforts to refugee activism, the talk brought much needed historical perspective to Australia’s engagement with our Indian Ocean neighbour and the enduring entanglements that link the two countries.
In this talk, historian Niro Kandasamy situated Christopher Kulendran Thomas’s Safe Zone within the Australian context by uncovering the longer history of Australia’s security relations with the Sri Lankan state and its citizens. The Australian government and diaspora communities have together shaped the island’s political and humanitarian outcomes through key motivations: colonial legacies, the Cold War, natural resources, and unsevered family and community ties. Drawing on examples from United Nations peace efforts to refugee activism, the talk brought much needed historical perspective to Australia’s engagement with our Indian Ocean neighbour and the enduring entanglements that link the two countries.
Christopher Kulendran Thomas in conversation with Katie Dyer. Artist talk, Artspace, Sydney, 15 November 2025.
This program brought together Christopher Kulendran Thomas with Artspace Senior Curator Katie Dyer to explore the artist’s recent exhibition, Safe Zone. Kulednran Thomas’s body of work explores images on the precipice of major historical and geopolitical shifts—from twentieth-century modernism, the twilight of broadcast television, to the current emergence of AI-created images. The discussion explored how these turning points in image technology map onto the complex legacies of imperialism and soft power, raising questions on whose narratives are valued and distributed.
Towards Futureproofing with Consuelo Cavaniglia. Workshop. Artspace, Sydney, 18 October 2025
This collaborative workshop with Consuelo Cavaniglia—artist, co-founder of Sydenham International and recipient of the 2016 NSW Visual Art Fellowship (Emerging)— explored strategies that early-career artists can adopt now to sustain a practice in the long term. In this program, participants will map the current ecology for making and presenting work—from apartment galleries and artist-run initiatives to low-cost publishing—and reflect on how to carve out space within this landscape, or imagine new systems altogether. Recognising that problem-solving underpins any artistic process, the workshop also examines models for collaboration, skill-sharing and reciprocal economies. From facing rejection to riding the ebbs and flows of commercial success, this program offers various tools to futureproof your artistic practice.
NSW VAF(E) Alumni Roundtable with Lauren Brincat, EO Gill, and Gillian Kayrooz. Artspace, Sydney, 23 August 2025.
The NSW Visual Arts Fellowship (Emerging) is one of the longest-standing awards within the Australian arts ecology. With various titles over the decades, the Fellowship has helped launch artists’ careers for over 120 years and has been a mainstay of Artspace’s exhibition program since 1997. On the opening weekend of the 2025 NSW VAF(E) exhibition, this roundtable discussion brought together prior Fellowship recipients Lauren Brincat (2009), EO Gill (2018) and Gillian Kayrooz (2024), moderated by Sophie Rose, Associate Curator - Programs. Together, these artists reflected on their experiences as early-career practitioners in the Fellowship and their subsequent journeys in fostering distinct artistic practices.
VNS Matrix: The Future is Unmanned. Artist lecture with Josephine Starrs. Artspace, Sydney, 19 July 2025
In 1991, the Adelaide-based collective VNS Matrix put forth the short but radical Cyberfeminist Manifesto, coining the term that would soon influence artists and theorists across the world. The four members of the collective—V Barratt, Francesca da Rimini, Julianne Pierce and Josephine Starrs—were on a mission to wrench digital life from its masculine pretences, unplugging from the ‘big daddy mainframe’. Through their billboards, performances, exhibitions, and experimental video games, VNS Matrix foreground technology’s inextricable connections to the body. ‘We make art with our cunt’, they wrote in 1991; ‘the clitoris is a direct line to the matrix.’ As part of the closing programs for Amongst the clouds, VNS Matrix member Josephine Starrs took audiences through the collective’s varied public and digital projects, including the 1995 Artspace exhibition, All New Gen. The talk was hosted in the Franco Belgiorno-Nettis Archive, which featured exhibition ephemera from this prescient exhibition.
Data and Sovereignty. Conversation with Shevaun Wright and Kris Wilson. Artspace, Sydney, 19 July 2025
This program brought together artist and practising lawyer Shevaun Wright and legal scholar Kris Wilson in a conversation on the multiple intersections of data and Indigenous sovereignty. Drawing from their expertise across Indigenous Cultural Intellectual Property (ICIP), data sovereignty and cybersecurity, Wright and Wilson explored how First Nations cultural heritage and knowledge circulate in a digital context, and the crucial role that data access plays in self-determination. As part of the program series for the exhibition Amongst the clouds, this discussion recognised data as a force that touches nearly all aspects of life and one that poses complex legal, ethical, and political questions for First Nations communities.
Michael Falk: The Robots are Coming! Anatomy of a Nightmare. Lecture. Artspace, Sydney, 1 July 2025
Artificial Intelligence (AI) remains a dreamy technology. The dream has come perilously close to reality due to the outrageous success of deep learning, but computers remain trapped in a simplified micro-world, and we don’t yet live with the AI companions so familiar from page and screen. The dream of AI is intoxicating. AI companies seduce investors and customers with the delightful dream of a computer that just gets you, a computer that can understand you and help you like a friend. But this is a dream with a seamy underside, and for many people AI has become the heart-clenching nightmare of our age.
In this talk, Digital Studies scholar Michael Falk revealed the long history of our dreams about AI. Writers, artists, scientists and philosophers have wondered about the creation of artificial life for thousands of years, and they foresaw many of the debates we are having today about work, love, money, ego, human creativity and dehumanisation. Drawing from a host of references—from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene—Falk anatomises our contemporary hopes and fears by devolving into their literary precedents.
In this talk, Digital Studies scholar Michael Falk revealed the long history of our dreams about AI. Writers, artists, scientists and philosophers have wondered about the creation of artificial life for thousands of years, and they foresaw many of the debates we are having today about work, love, money, ego, human creativity and dehumanisation. Drawing from a host of references—from Ovid’s Metamorphoses to Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene—Falk anatomises our contemporary hopes and fears by devolving into their literary precedents.
Megan Alice Clune: Repetition Study II: tenfrancs.in. Sound performance. Artspace, Sydney, 10 May 2025
As part of the opening programs for Amongst the Clouds, composer and artist Megan Alice Clune presented the commissioned performance, Repetition Study II: tenfrancs.in (2025). Clune’s performance builds from a single digital sample: a recording of the artist improvising with the sound effects library of the Fairlight Computer Music Instrument (CMI) at the Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio (MESS). Developed in Sydney in the late 1970s by Kim Ryrie and Peter Vogel, the Fairlight CMI was the world’s first digital synthesiser and sampler. It quickly became an integral part of popular music in the 1980s and was the favoured instrument of Kate Bush, Stevie Wonder and Herbie Hancock, amongst many other musicians. The Fairlight CMI used recordings of acoustic instruments and other naturally occurring sounds and re-pitching them, creating a eclectic audio library that included everything from orchestral strings to spinning coins. Almost half a century on, these heavily mediated, pre-recorded samples are timestamped by the technology of their day.
In Repetition Study II: tenfrancs.in, Clune plays with the potential for oblique associations with sonic material. Working with the repetition of recognisable sounds across long durations, she creates musical textures that are at first familiar, but then gradually destabilise and transform. Her composition is a dynamic experiential container, wherein the listener’s latent memories are the final element in completing the work.
In Repetition Study II: tenfrancs.in, Clune plays with the potential for oblique associations with sonic material. Working with the repetition of recognisable sounds across long durations, she creates musical textures that are at first familiar, but then gradually destabilise and transform. Her composition is a dynamic experiential container, wherein the listener’s latent memories are the final element in completing the work.
Archana Hande in conversation. Artspace, Sydney, 10 May 2025
Bangalore and Bombay-based artist, curator and organiser Archana Hande joined Artspace Senior Curator Katie Dyer in conversation to discuss the intertwined histories of analogue computing and the vast, transnational textile industry and digitisation. The birth of modern computation is often imagined against a backdrop of tireless academic experimentation or covert military operations, yet there is another, equally compelling origin: weaving. In 1804, the French merchant Joseph Marie Jacquard invented a programmable loom that mechanically incorporated intricate patterns via coded punchcards. This system of perforated cards both led the way for the world’s first computers and radically changed the nature of labour in the textile industry, eventually leading to a series of workers’ uprisings in Europe and South Asia. Outlining the entangled relationships between industrialisation, automation, migration and resistance movements, Hande asks how the dynamics of proto-computing industries might reemerge in the production of today’s digital technologies.
Salavdor Brown: Logo Le Vā. Sound performance with Measina Logo Moana & Taonga Puoro Māori.
Artspace, Sydney, 5 April 2025
Salvador Brown’s performance Logo Le Vā was a comissioned composition in his ongoing work with Measina Logo Moana & Taonga Puoro Māori (traditional musical instruments). Brown’s work interweaves the sounds of these customary instruments with digital effects and loopers, creating new reverberations of the Pacific’s long musical culture. In doing so, his practice returns to the act of storytelling, reimagining the shared Fāgogo & Pūrakau (Stories) of the vast Moana Nui (Pacific).
Deep Sea Mining and Pacific Resistance. Film screening and conversation with Jas Chambers. Artspace, Sydney, 11 March 2025
In recent years, a new threat to the world’s oceans has emerged: deep sea mining (DSM). This proposed method of extracting mineral deposits from the seabed is touted as the way forward for green technologies, such as electric car batteries, solar panels and wind turbines. In reality, it would have devastating impacts on the diverse marine life of the deep ocean. By harming these ecologies, the prospective DMS industry also threatens communities with ancestral ties to the ocean and its lifeforms. Activists from the Pacific Islands, Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia and across the world are calling on governments to stop deep sea mining before it begins in earnest.
This program feastured a discussion between Re-Stor(y)ing Oceania artist Latai Taumoepeau and Jas Chambers, Chair & Co-founder of Ocean Decade Australia, a not-for-profit organisation that convenes and connects Australia's diverse ocean stakeholders. Their conversation was followed by screenings of Matthieu Rytz’s recent documentary on the state of deep sea mining, Deep Rising (2023), and Taumoepeau’s animation Wardance: Final Frontier (2018).
Reading Oceania (reading group). Artspace, Sydney, 8 & 22 February 2025
Reading Oceania is a think tank collective of artists, arts workers, researchers and community members who take refuge in the practice of developing OceaniaX Oratory. Begun as a lounge room practice imagined and curated by the late Sēini Taumoepeau, it follows a ‘come as you are’ and ‘one-as-many’ methodology with philosophical influences from both hip hop and Oceanic cultures. As a tapu space (sacred, secret, forbidden), Reading Oceania exists as a praxis of Oceanic cosmology. The sessions explore Oceanic knowledge in various forms—poetry, song, academic papers, articles, performance, artworks and other samples—to honour the full spectrum of experiences and shared sense-making. On the occasion of Re-Stor(y)ing Oceania, Artspace hosted two sessions of Reading Oceania led by Brian Fuata and Talei Luscia Mangioni, featuring special guest Rev. Tau’alofa Anga’aelangi and Hēmi James Scott.
Various performances of Latai Taumoepeau, THIS IS NOT A DRILL, 2024. Artspace, Sydney, 23 January - 5 April 2025
On selected dates throughout the run of Re-Stor(y)ing Oceania, Latai Taumoepeau’s installation was activated through the participatory performance THIS IS NOT A DRILL, 2024. Following a choreographed score, Taumoepeau will lead groups of sports players, dancers and community members through a contemporary rendition of the Tongan ceremonial ritual of Me’etu’upaki (me’e translates as ‘dance’, tu’u means ‘standing’, and paki, 'with paddles’). Conceived as an emergency drill, this performance is an embodied call to action against the threats of climate change and deep sea mining in the Pacific.
Artspace, Sydney, 5 April 2025
This program feastured a discussion between Re-Stor(y)ing Oceania artist Latai Taumoepeau and Jas Chambers, Chair & Co-founder of Ocean Decade Australia, a not-for-profit organisation that convenes and connects Australia's diverse ocean stakeholders. Their conversation was followed by screenings of Matthieu Rytz’s recent documentary on the state of deep sea mining, Deep Rising (2023), and Taumoepeau’s animation Wardance: Final Frontier (2018).