Force Meets Vacuum

In this lecture performance Shubhangi Singh uses video, silence and storytelling to draw connections between extractivism, colonial botany, war production and the conquest of Australia by the European powers. The lecture-performance narrates historical and contemporary connections with its fair share of intersecting historical characters, parenthetical segways and (un)related anecdotes. The narrative, though meandering, joins the dots between territories, power, collective loss and grief.  

Shubhangi Singh is a transdisciplinary artist whose practice draws from existing knowledges to address movement, identity, queries related to the body and its relationship with the environment. Singh considers ideas of absence and absenting in her work as a way of reflecting upon what is visible, particularly in relation to history, memory and the labour of memorialising. Working across media, from text to moving image and site-specific installations, Singh’s works are routinely suspended between fiction and non-fiction, often adopting the position of an unreliable narrator. 

This event is part of the Dear Society, bimonthly grieving circle.