Deborah Kelly is a Melbourne-born, Sydney-based artist whose works have been shown in streets, skies and galleries around Australia, in the Singapore and Venice Biennales, and elsewhere. Her award-winning collaborative artwork with Tina Fiveash, Hey, hetero! has been shown in public sites from Sydney to Glasgow, and is taught in universities from Winnipeg to Hong Kong. She is a founding member of the art gang boat-people.org, which has been making public work around race, nation, borders and history since 2001. Her cross-media work considering the rise of religiosity in the public sphere, BEWARE OF THE GOD, was commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art, and included public service announcement videos in train stations, 40,000 distributed sticker-postcards and projections onto clouds over Sydney and Singapore. The participatory memorial she devised for the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre was performed in 20 cities on 4 June 2009. Her work won the 2009 Fisher’s Ghost Award, the 2009 Screengrab International New Media Art Award, and was shortlisted for the Sadler’s Wells Global Dance Contest and the 2010 Reeldance Awards.

Beastliness continues Deborah Kelly’s ongoing exploration of the poetics and metaphors of biotechnology, especially reproductive technologies. This strand of Kelly’s research and practice emerged in Adelaide in 1989, through a residency at the Experimental Art Foundation, which gave artists access to some of the very first image-capable computing available in Australia.

Terminal Garden, the resultant 1990 Adelaide Festival exhibition, showcased work by Kelly and others including Fiona Hall and Mark Kimber. In that exhibition her artwork contemplated the potential of our embodied lives mediated, remixed and rebooted through intimate embrace of the machine.

Twenty-one years later, human physicality and culture have entirely transformed in relation to the technologies of everyday life. Miraculous conceptions are ordinary, death is deferred, biology is no longer destiny. The horizonless, post-species-specific possibilities of our new on- and offline lives demand sustained investigation, as we tango into the far-fetched future, propelled by unchecked hungers.

Beastliness has been commissioned by RiAus for LIFE 2.0. The brief, vivid animations extend these threads of research into moving image works that synthesise traditional handmade photomontage with digital animation techniques.

Deborah Kelly is represented by Gallery Barry Keldoulis.

Related RiAus Exhibitions: