Selected Works - Nathan Gray, 2023
Stanley Warrie reads from the biography of his father Yilbie Warrie founder of the independent Indigenous community of Cheeditha in the North-Western Australia, 2022
1. Era of The Elders, 2023
Austostrade Biennale, Pristina, Kosovo (upcoming July 2023)
The current generation of Yindjibarndi Elders (Indigenous people of the Australian North-West) read from interviews with their parents generation detailing the struggles they faced in order to survive and continue their culture. Spoken in the first person, and with occasional interruptions and commentary the slippages between the generations and the narrators’ resonances with their struggles tells of a living history still in the making. Made at the request of Juluwarlu Cultural Centre this sound work functions as both an education and active engagement with a community’s past.
Images Weirding Module #8: A Tentacled Mess (on Mark Fisher), collage by Nathan Gray, 2018 and live in the sub_xǝʇ studio by Alex Head, 2019
2. The Weirding Module, bimonthly since 2018
Cashmere Radio Berlin, 2022 - ongoing
Sub_ʇxǝʇ radio - Berlin / London, 2018-2021
Focussing exclusively on spoken word and the voice in contemporary art and experimental The Weirding Module is a bimonthly radio show featuring thematic mixes, guest practitioners and audio research. Guests have included Hanne Lippard, Steven Warwick and Rully Shabara (from the Indonesian band Senyawa) and research topics have included; the history of speech synthesis, subliminal messaging and motivational recordings, and audio works referenced in Mark Fisher’s essay: The Weird and the Eerie.
Link: https://cashmereradio.com/shows/the-weirding-module/
3. Tickle Like Electric Shock / The Yerkish Poems, 2022
Audition No.1, Composite, Melbourne Australia, 2022
Graw Böckler Garage, Berlin, 2022
Jumbo Receiver, Berlin, 2022
Told through a set of graphic poems in the visual language Yerkish, this lecture performance details the true story of a 35 year long linguistic experiment to communicate with chimpanzees and bonobos. Funny and tragic by turns, the performance considers the deep similarities but unsurmountable differences between our ourselves and our primate relatives primates. This research was complimented by a set of printed banners exhibited.
Triptych of three Yerkish poems (Tickle Like Electric Shock, Make the Keyboard Talk and Listen), dye sublimation prints on synthetic silk, 2022
Critical Flicker Frequencies, Haus N Athen, 2019 photo by Amalia Vekri & Untitled, drawing by Nathan Gray, 2019
4. Critical Flicker Frequencies, 2018
CTM Vorspiel, West Germany, Berlin, 2019
Haus N, Athens, 2019
D.O.C. Theatre Paris, 2018, Brzask
National Museum Warsaw, 2018
A performance that meditates on evidence that each animal detects stimuli at a different rate and therefore experiences time at a different speed. These speeds are illustrated using live audio effects to speed up and slow down the voice and to facilitate the feeling that you are popping in and out of different minds, not resting on the human experience but also imagining how the different species may experience each others sense realms.
5. Species of Spaces, 2014
5 Channel HD Video, 10 Channel Audio, 4:58
Commissioned for the 19th Biennale of Sydney, March 2014
Winner 2014 Substation Contemporary Art Prize, Newport, August 2014
Winner 2014 Substation People's Choice Award, Newport, August 2014
Exhibited as part of Pleasure and Reality, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, September 2015
Filmed on Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour Species of Spaces is a 5 channel video work that responds to the monumental materiality of the island with small simple gestures and improvised actions that sound the island’s materials and constructions and then cataloguing them. The island and its objects are read as a kind of score, their shapes and abilities suggest actions and these actions are tested against this materiality, the resulting resonances create an experiential mapping of the varied spaces of the disused ship yard.