Must-See Events at Melbourne's Rising Festival
Julian Rosefeldt, Euphoria (2022) (still). © Julian Rosefeldt.
From 7 to 18 June, Naarm (Melbourne) hosts RISING, a festival that brings lively intersections of performance, installation, and visual arts to major venues across the city. Highlights include unmissable artworks by Julian Rosefeldt, Wu Tsang, and Geumhyung Jeong, and an immersive exhibition by 30 First Peoples artists and collectives. 
Julian Rosefeldt: Euphoria
Melbourne Town Hall, 90/130 Swanston Street
2–18 June 2023
Expect: an arena-sized big budget art film about power, greed, and money, complete with Hollywood actors, high-end visual effects and a singing tiger.
In Euphoria, Berlin-based artist Julian Rosefeldt, interrogates the failings of capitalism in a visually stunning multi-screen installation that draws on the cinematic language of the blockbuster film and the choreography of Hollywood's golden-era.
Filmed across Kyiv, Sofia, Berlin, and New York from 2016 to 2022, Rosefeldt weaves together a series of vignettes about power, greed, and money, set in locations as varied as a distribution warehouse, abandoned factories, and a bank lobby.
The ensemble cast includes Giancarlo Esposito as a taxi driver and Cate Blanchett as a tiger, as well as acrobats, magicians, dancers, and hundreds of extras. Rosefeldt's narrative unfolds with working-class protagonists espousing mostly anti-capitalist rhetoric through conversations, thought tracks, and soliloquies.
The score is performed by five percussionists presented on suspended screens, with the Brooklyn Youth Chorus wrapping around the room on ground-level screens. Rosefeldt's Euphoria is an allegory exploring the aspects of human nature that have enabled capitalism to flourish.
Wu Tsang: Anthem
St Paul's Cathedral, Flinders Street
7–18 June 2023
Expect: a sublime aural experience in a befittingly grand venue that invites us to 'be here, now, together, somehow'.
If Wu Tsang and Beverly Glenn-Copeland led the congregation, we'd be at church every week. Originally commissioned by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2021, Wu Tsang's Anthem is adapted for Melbourne's landmark gothic cathedral, taking advantage of its resonant acoustics to transform St Paul's into a stunning sensory soundscape.
Anthem is produced in collaboration with American singer-songwriter, folk icon, and trans activist Beverly Glenn-Copeland, whose towering film-portrait is projected onto a 19-metre-high silk screen. Glenn-Copeland's ethereal vocals reverberate with surprising agility, playful inflections, and textured timbre.
The cathedral has seen packed crowds since its modestly attended opening night, where visitors could move quietly among the pews and enjoy the ever-shifting visuals. The contrast couldn't be more stark against the lively extravaganza of Night Trade (7–18 June), curated by Puerto Rican art collective Poncili Creación, on the adjacent cathedral grounds.
Speaking to Ocula Magazine about Glenn-Copeland, Wu Tsang said, 'I feel like his work is an invitation for us all to be ourselves, but not in a self-centred way. Rather, in the sense of being "okay with who we are, where we are, when we are." To be here, now, together, somehow.'
Geumhyung Jeong: Under Maintenance
Arts House, 521 Queensberry Street
7–18 June 2023
Expect: a suite of unnerving, needy robots that make you rethink your relationship with inanimate objects.
Korean choreographer and performance artist Geumhyung Jeong has long delved into the human body and its relationships with non-human objects. For Under Maintenance, Jeong sheds an unexpectedly empathetic perspective on robots that she has constructed from a flotsam-and-jetsam of exposed wires, plastics, metals, and mannequin body parts.
In spite of their sterile, discombobulated appearance, Jeong's relationship with her robots begs a sense of care, intimacy, and sympathy from the audience. In doing so, the artist challenges our preconceptions of machines' sentience.
Also screening at ACMI from 15 to 17 June is Jeong's performance-lecture Oil Pressure Vibrator (strictly 18+), an hour-long confessional meta-quest that fuses video, performance, and documentary. Narration of the artist's affair with an industrial excavator becomes increasingly ambiguous and unwieldy as she segues into discussion about her works in a quirky, nuanced examination of sexuality and autoerotic desire.
Shadow Spirit
Flinders Street Station, 273 Flinders Street
7 June–30 July 2023
Expect: an immersive 75-minute journey through ancestral knowledge, spirit worlds, and stories of Australia's lands.
ConversationsKarla Dickens: ‘the more you know the rules, the more fun it is to break them’Read More
In disused rooms on the top floor of Flinders Street Station, 30 First Peoples artists and collectives from across Australia share ancestral knowledge and Indigenous histories. Participants include Karla Dickens, Judy Watson, Maningrida Arts and Culture, Dr Vicki Couzens, Dylan Mooney, Julie Gough, John Prince Siddon, and Warwick Thornton, among others.
Brought together by Yorta Yorta curator Kimberley Moulton, Shadow Spirit is the largest exhibition of commissioned works of its kind by First Peoples artists in Victoria state. It includes 14 new commissions.
Dazzling installations of light, sculpture, sound, and video make for an invigorating experiential journey where visitors can encounter water spirits, song, ceremony, and protective guardians that encourage deep connections between body and mind. Shadow Spirit energises the abandoned historic station in the heart of Naarm. Book tickets here. —[O]
