Akil Ahamat’s work considers the physical and social isolation of online experience and its effects in configuring contemporary subjectivity. Ahamat uses the vocal techniques used in ASMR online roleplay videos. These videos have a calming sensuousness that creates an intimacy between audience and performer across the physical dislocation of the internet. Despite their often-banal subject matter, the ‘tingly’ relaxing sound components create an attentive relation between audience and performer. This displaced virtual intimacy becomes a platform for the artist to discuss the formation of his own subjectivity, refracted through film, literature, and fashion. Ahamat produced online works for Bleed: Biennial Live Event in the Everyday Digital, Arts House and Campbelltown Arts Centre (2020), and for Collective Trace, PACT, Erskineville (2020). He has also exhibited at Monash University Museum of Art, Parramatta Artists’ Studios, Verge Gallery, and UTS. He won the 2018 John Fries Award.

Christopher Bassi is an artist of Meriam, Yupungathi, and British descent. His work addresses cultural identity, alternative genealogies, counter narratives, and speculative worlding using the traditional language of representational painting. Approaching painting as storytelling, with narrative intent akin to literature or poetry, his work sets the stage for history and heritage to become the foundation of a personal cosmology that explores concepts of place, belonging, and the entangling of racial and cultural identities, while researching the image as socially coded and embedded within historical legacies of western art history.

Ohni Blu was born in Central West Queensland on the traditional lands of Koa People and resides on the traditional lands of the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation. Their work negotiates personal narratives across LGBTIQ+ identity, chronic health, and disability, and explores themes of community care, radical healing, and vulnerability. Blu holds a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Hons) from Sydney College of the Arts and is currently undertaking a Master of Social Work at Western Sydney University. Recent exhibitions include PICA, Casula Powerhouse, C3 Contemporary, Powerhouse Museum, and Verge Gallery.

Visaya Hoffie’s practice spans painting, sculpture, printmaking, ceramics, design, animation, leatherwork, haberdashery, and a range of craft media. She often brings these together in immersive installations. Her love of a broad range of historical and cultural influences informs her slightly wry, amusing, and often revealing responses to contemporary culture. Her most recent solo exhibition, Hot’n’Heinous with Innerspace Contemporary Art, included site-specific installations for BAD Festival 2021.

Born in Australia to Filipino immigrants, Canberra-based artist Alexa Malizon explores the lived experience of existing within a diaspora. She explores this through a range of photographic media, reconnecting with her cultural roots and engaging with themes of identity, miscommunication, cultural shame, and the representation of the sexualised ethnographic body. She completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours) at the ANU School of Art and Design in 2020. She was the recipient of the ANU School of Art and Design Emerging Artist Support Scheme’s Tuggeranong Arts Centre Exhibition Award, culminating in her first institutional solo show in 2021. She also exhibited in Hatched: National Graduate Exhibition at Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts in 2021.

Ivy Minniecon is a descendant of the Kuku Yalanji, Kabi Kabi, Gureng Gureng, and South Sea Islander Nations. She works in printmaking and sculpture, photography and video. She has been a practicing artist for the past decade and recently commenced a Bachelor of Contemporary Australian Indigenous Art at Queensland College of Arts, Griffith University. 

Jayanto Tan was born and raised in a small town in North Sumatra, Indonesia. As a Chinese-Sumatran living in Sydney, he blends Eastern and Western mythologies with the reality of current events. He has shown at Verge Gallery, Firstdraft, 4A Centre for Contemporary Asia Art, the Australia-China Institute, the 66th Blake Prize, Incinerator Art Award, and the Fisher’s Ghost Art Award. He won the 11th Small Sculpture Greenway Art Prize. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts from National Art School, Sydney. 

Grace Herbert was born on Muwinina land in Nipaluna/Hobart and lives in Naarm/Melbourne. She is an artist, curator, and writer, whose practice examines architecture, monumentality, and methods of material and self production with a political and feminist approach. She is co-founder of Hobart’s artist-run initiative Visual Bulk and founder and co-curator of Hobiennale festival.