Monday 7 November, 10-11AM

Presenters: Claire Bridge and Chelle Destefano

What I Wish I’d Told You, centres Deaf voices, identity, language and culture. Auslan storytellers affirm Deaf experiences and complex identities, in an immersive exhibition of large-scale video projections, which bring visitors into a Deaf world.

Claire Bridge and Chelle Destefano consider themes of Deaf culture, Deaf pride and decolonising audism. The artists discuss critical approaches to embedding social justice concerns into exhibition design and curatorial custodianship.

“In Auslan, we pass stories from hand to hand. Our stories cannot be put on a page, detached from us. Our signed stories carry culture. They are a site of resistance and pride.” Chelle Destefano

Access: Auslan/ English interpreters

Presented in collaboration with + Concepts

Registration essential: T 03 5760 2619 or gallery@benalla.vic.gov.au

Cost: $2

ARTIST BIO’S:

Chelle Destefano is a multi-disciplinary Deaf artist working with performance art, textiles, sculpture, installation and poetry. Her work explores Deaf identity from her lived experience of being a Deaf person in a hearing world, Deaf history and Culture and her language, Auslan. Her video poetry performances are informed by experiences of audism and oppression as a Deaf child and adult, combined with embroidered textile installations.

Claire Bridge

Claire is a hearing interdisciplinary artist of Anglo-Indian-Australian and Deaf heritage, a grandchild of Deaf Adults, fluent in Auslan and former Auslan interpreter and researcher at the National Institute for Deaf Studies. Her practice includes ceramic sculpture, video, sound, textiles, painting, installation with a deep interest in collaborative frameworks. Bridge’s work engages with notions of shared story as vessels that contain, sustain, and have potential to transform collective beliefs, attitudes, and culture. Embedded within her processes, objects, and materials, are gestures of repair of personal and collective wounds, opening ruptures of transformational potential and plasticity. For Bridge, repair is a vital practice of cultural resistance. Her works speak to a hope towards thriving, ongoing-ness and the restorative futures of an evolving culture.

Image: Claire Bridge and Chelle Destefano, What I Wish I’d Told You, 2022, multi-channel video projection, audio and open animated captions, steel, polystyrene, aluminum, front/rear projection fabric, 254 x 860 cm (dimensions variable) with: (left) Haley Martin (Worimi and Dunghutti), Too Loud, voiced by Claire Bridge, duration 2:24 min and (right) Walter Kadiki, Story of a Deaf Mute, voiced by Marc Ethan, duration 4:57 min, installation view.

What I Wish I’d Told You, the touring exhibition, is currently on show at Artspace at Realm, Ringwood, until Sunday 20 November; and Hyphen, Wodonga, until Sunday 4 December.

+Concepts is a presentation and performance series exploring the insights practitioners have into their own creative and cultural practices. Each year around 20 lectures, performances, and other creative presentations are hosted across venues throughout Australia. Since 2016 +Concepts has produced over 120 presentations of local and international practitioners. Contributors to the program range from those in the early stages of their careers, to those well established – and everything in between. The program is interdisciplinary, intergenerational and diverse.