UnWrappedShortwaveNew Screen Commissions
8 September 2024
In the Studio
Cinema
A playful and provocative showcase of new Sydney Opera House short film commissions. Australian interdisciplinary artists explore their relationship with the screen, through themes of resistance, reclamation and renewal.
Date | Time |
Sunday 8 September | 7.00pm |
Ticket | Price |
Standard | $25 |
Concession* Australian Senior, Australian Pensioner, Domestic Students, Children Under 18 | $18 |
*Must provide valid ID
$8.95 booking fee applies per transaction
Prices correct at the time of publication and subject to change without notice. Exact prices will be displayed with seat selection.
Young people under the age of 15 must be accompanied at all times.
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Run time
This event will run for 55 minutes.
Event duration is a guide only and may be subject to change.
Age
Recommended for audiences 15+
Children aged 15 years and under must be accompanied at all times.
The Opera House is committed to the safety and wellbeing of children that visit or engage with us. Read our Child Safety Policy(link is external, opens in new tab or window).
Useful information:
A playful and provocative short film showcase
Shortwave is a commissioning program from Sydney Opera House that invites interdisciplinary artists to explore their relationship with the screen. This playful and provocative screening will premiere six short film commissions that highlight interconnectedness across communities and generations, through themes of resistance, reclamation and renewal.
Shortwave’s 2024 program of new Australian voices includes choreographer and dancer Trà Mi Dinh (Winner of 2022 Keir Choreographic Award); a collaboration between interdisciplinary artist and vocalist Maissa Alameddine and artist and academic Narjis Mirza; and a new work from Blak Social, an Indigenous arts company dreamed into existence by Kabi Kabi / Gubbi Gubbi and Wiradjuri artist and producer Alethea Beetson.
Commissioned artists also include Tahlia Palmer, an artist of Murri and mixed settler descent, working across music, sound art and video; Blue Mountains based dancer and physical performer Em Yali; and Melbourne artists Harrison Hall and Mat Spisbah in collaboration with Taiwanese video performance artist Li Yi Fan.
This special Unwrapped screening also features short films from previous Shortwave programs by Jazz Money, Feras Shaheen, Riana Head-Toussaint and JD Reforma.
Program
Trà Mi Dinh Nhang Trầm Hương, 2024
Maissa Alameddine & Narjis Mirza Mohabbat, a Lullaby for a Rising, 2024
Tahila Palmer Look Intruder, 2024
Mat Spisbah, Harrison Hall, Li Yi Fan If you cant Larp, You'll cry, 2024
Em Yali Planetether Kin, 2024
Blak Social Gatekeepers, 2024
Feras Shaheen The Bop, 2023
JD Reforma Butterfly 2023
Riana Head-Toussaint Animate Loading: 3, 2023
Jazz Money All a Homeland, 2022
Shortwave is made in collaboration with organisations across the sector. Mohabbat, a Lullaby for a Rising was curated, produced and supported by Blacktown Arts. Planetether Kin was produced by the Cultural Development Team at Blue Mountains City Council. The Bop was supported by Sydney Opera House & Parramatta Artists’ Studios. Animate Loading: 3 was facilitated through Critical Path’s digital and choreographic exchange program.
UnWrapped
An ongoing series dedicated to uncovering the best independent creators. UnWrapped hands over the stage and introduces audiences to an eclectic panorama of the finest original performances by groundbreaking and unique local artists.
Meet the 2024 artists
Trà Mi Dinh is an award-winning choreographer and dancer working across Naarm/Melbourne and Gadigal/Sydney. Her choreographic work is built upon an unrelenting fascination with time; harnessing the dancing body to magnify and disrupt linearity and expectation. Trà Mi is invested in movement that is virtuosic, precise, absurd, embodied, surprising, energetic, and rhythmic.
In 2022, Trà Mi won the Keir Choreographic Award, for her duet The ___. Her choreographic works include HOLDING (2021), The ___ (Commission for the Keir Choreographic Award 2022), And, again (2022), (UP)HOLDING (2023), Not the Piece (2023), Somewhere between ten and fourteen (Commission by Sydney Dance Company, 2023). Her choreographic practice has been supported through residencies with Bundanon, Australian Dance Theatre, Critical Path, Lucy Guerin Inc, DirtyFeet, Tasdance, Sydney Fringe, Ausdance NSW. Currently, Trà Mi is an Artist in Residence at The Substation.
Trà Mi has danced for Lucy Guerin Inc in multiple major works; Make Your Own World (2019), The Clock: Timepiece (2019), Pendulum (2021/22/23), Flux Job (2021), and NEWRETRO (2023). Recently she stepped into Guerin’s iconic duet work Split (2017) performing at Seoul International Dance Festival (2023). In 2023 she joined the cast of Stephanie Lake’s Manifesto (2021), performing in recent shows in Melbourne, Auckland, Madrid, and Châlons-en-Champagne. Trà Mi has danced for many celebrated artists and companies including Chunky Move, Joel Bray Dance, Michelle Heaven, Victoria Chiu, Dance Makers Collective and more. Trà Mi graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Dance) from Victorian College of the Arts in 2014.
Narjis Mirza is a media installation artist who orchestrates a poetic, philosophical, and spiritual exploration of light through sensory installations. Her work encompasses large-scale light and sound installations, seamlessly integrating projection, animation, video, textile, and voice. Through immersive experiences, she invites viewers to actively participate, transforming her artworks into interactive events.
Initially trained as a painter, Narjis graduated with the highest honour of distinction from the National College of Arts in Pakistan before pursuing a Master’s in Media and Design at Bilkent University, Ankara. Her journey led her to exhibit her work in Iran, Turkey, and Pakistan. In 2017, she was honoured with the Vice Chancellor’s Doctoral Scholarship, culminating in a practice-led PhD at Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand. Narjis contributed to the development of interactive participatory media art at the Interactive Media Lab, University of New South Wales.
Her research has produced a body of work, notably the multisensory installation Hayakal al Noor, Bodies of Light, inspired by Islamic philosophy, and her latest work, Rahma: Our Creative Feminine.
Maissa Alameddine grew up in Tripoli Lebanon and now lives and works on the unceded lands of the Cammeraygal and Dharug peoples. Maissa is a multidisciplinary artist, vocalist, performer, and creative producer working across a range of mediums.
Maissa’s work explores the idea of migration as a chronic injury. Maissa inherited her voice from a long line of women vocalists, she uses voice as a provocation and a response. Her work is personal, exploring inheritance and transference of heritage in the complexity of what is coined by Lebanese Australian anthropologist, Ghassan Hage as the ‘lenticular diasporic existence’. Her interpretive song and music is an attempt to honour her ancestors.
Maissa has been part of the contemporary Arab Australian arts community for over twenty years, performing with Arabic music ensembles, Western orchestras, and art organisations. She is a founding member and one of the creative producers of Western Sydney-based Arab Theatre Studio.
Blak Social is an Indigenous arts company dreamed into existence by Alethea Beetson (Kabi Kabi/Gubbi Gubbi and Wiradjuri). We currently work across music, performance and film. Alethea Beetson established Blak Social after successfully founding a renowned Indigenous youth arts organisation, Digi Youth Arts, to continue creating spaces for the sovereign-led development and presentation of Indigenous stories and connected arts practice.
Blak Social’s previous and current work includes:
- Queen’s City at Brisbane Festival 2022
- Blak Friday (An Indiginised fright night at The Greaser 2022)
- Blak Narrative Music Videos: Volume one - A visual album written and directed by Alethea Beetson for First Nations led band Selve
- Blak Social’s residency at The Tivoli Brisbane including:
- Blak Day Out 2022 ft. Shakaya, Barkaa, The Merindas, Alice Skye and more
- Blak Day Out 2023 ft. The Last Kinection, Birdz, Cloe Terare, DRMNGNOW, Kee’ahn, Djanaba and more
- Blak Social Records - a sovereign label, distribution and management service for First Nations artists. Through which BNMV’s visual album, Red Desert Dream, will be released in 2023. Also being released in 2023 through BSR is the Queen’s City Soundtrack.
- Blak Social knows how to have fun while burning down the colony. Creating hilarious and viscous stories that rewrite history, Indiginise popular culture and are an assault to the senses while traversing deep time and being meta as fuck.
Em Yali's artistic journey has been shaped by their extensive and dynamic training under the guidance of renowned dance practitioners Emily Cooper, Emma Saunders and Sarah Boulter. Drawing inspiration from their personal experiences, Em explores the intersection of social conditioning, particularly focusing on the AFAB non-binary neuro-divergent experience. Through a blend of movement improvisation, character work, and experimental exploration, they delve into the dynamics of physical, spiritual, and emotional environmental relations, offering profound insights into the human psyche. Their practice extends beyond traditional boundaries, incorporating costume and soft sculpture to create a universal visual language. Collaborating and learning from artists such as Emma Saunders, Sarah-Vynn Vassallo, and Jan Walter, Em continues to evolve and innovate, pushing the boundaries of creativity. Em Yali’s dynamic approach and commitment to artistic growth are evident within their multidimensional performances, which captivate and inspire audiences.
Tahlia Palmer is an artist of Murri and mixed settler descent, born on Whadjuk boodjar, based on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung biik, working predominantly across sound and video to explore history, identity, perception and trauma. Palmer's practice is both intensely personal and grounded in place- based research. Her musical pseudonym, amby downs, is taken from one of the pastoral stations in so-called Queensland on which her Murri ancestors and kin worked in servitude.
Li Yi-Fan is an artist who describes his production process as staging a death match between artist and software until a narrative work quietly unfolds from the decaying corpse of their confrontation. The artist laboriously develops his own software tools for video production: a personal, DIY system that nonetheless rivals capabilities in the resource-intensive digital special effects industry. Incorporating a video game engine that allows him to improvise in real time with detailed 3D animations, Li reflects on both the strange suspension of time and space within games, but also on the increasingly detailed desires that arise from increasingly complex technical tools.
Harrison Hall’s work situates contemporary performance and dance in experiential art environments. His recent works traverse states of flux within digital and live worlds, working to increase the embodied experience in mixed digital and live performance contexts.
In 2021 Harrison completed a Solitude1 Residency from the Tanja Liedtke foundation and Chunky Move, within that context he presented BONANZA! with Dr. Sam Mcgilp, a PerformancexDialogue media artwork that included conversations with NAXS Future (Taiwanese audiovisual art collective) and Lu Yang (Chinese digital artist). This work was a Green Room Award winner and selected for the Melbourne International Film Festival.
These projects have since led to Harrison collaborating on Lu Yang’s Doku, first at ACMI and then most recently at the Sydney Opera House as well as leading Body Crysis, alongside NAXS Future, presented at the Substation in 2022. He was an invited artist at the Taipei Performing Art Centre's ADAM artist Lab and is a recipient of the Chloe Munro AO Fellowship. Harrison is also a founder of experimental digital arts studio PSEUDO.
Mat Spisbah is an artist and organiser focusing on digital and sound work. Spisbah has a long history within Australia’s DIY music communities, as well as commissioned performance works, exhibitions and projects across Australia and Asia. His artistic work traverses the overlapping terrain of his life, practice and output.
About the 2024 films
About the work
Nhang Trầm Hương is a cinematic movement piece suspended in a cloud of incense smoke.
In an abstract choreography of body and film, Dinh considers her relationship to incense, identity, and family. Incense smoke is fleeting; always moving, unfurling, expanding. As it curls and wafts through space it acts as a conduit between past, present, and future, connecting us to our ancestors, our body, and the present moment. It is in this temporal space that Dinh pushes at the edges of her identity amongst the expanse of her ancestors, meditating on the notion of interbeing.
Nhang Trầm Hương is a desire to embody, surrender, and embrace the idea that “A cloud never dies” (Thich Nhat Hanh)
Artists
Lead artist, Choreographer, Editor, and Dancer
Trà Mi Dinh
Videographer and Editor
Cobie Orger
Composer and Sound Design
Tilman Robinson
Lighting
Alex Nyguyen
Costume
Geoffery Watson
About the work
Multi-disciplinary artists Maissa Alameddine and Narjis Mirza share a practice of working collaboratively with their communities, developing contemporary stories grounded in their diasporic experiences.
Stemming from their recent collaboration at The Leo Kelly Blacktown Arts Centre, Maissa and Narjis continue to further explore the sacred practice of the lullaby.
This new work is rooted in the lullaby’s power to preserve and transmit stories across generations. From soothing songs to melodies of resistance, lullabies galvanize us to envision a decolonised world with true liberation.
Mohabbat, a Lullaby for a Rising uses voice, installation and projection on sites across unceded Dharug Land in Blacktown and Gadigal Land at Sydney Harbour.
Produced by Blacktown Arts and filmed by Matthew McGuigan.
Artists
Artists
Maissa Alameddine
Narjis Mirza
Featuring
Katie Shammas
Maissa Alameddine
Narjis Mirza
Rawi
Tamara Alameddine Needham
Vasy
Vocal
Mago Shaheen
Maissa Alameddine
Mumtaz Mirza
Narjis Mirza
Nour
Vasy
Cinematographer & Editor
Matthew McGuigan
Camera Assistant
Eleanor Witt
Audio Recording
Kurt Mikolajczyk, Maissa Alameddine, Narjis Mirza, Safe House Studios
Audio Post Production
Matthew McGuigan
Producer
Verónica Barac-Gomez
Curated and Produced
by Blacktown Arts
Supported by
Sydney Opera House, Blacktown Arts, Blacktown City Council, Create NSW
Filmed on Dharug, Bidjigal and Gadigal lands and waterways.
About the work
Gatekeepers is a hidden bar out the back of Haze Land in Queen’s City. The place where you find all the Indigenous musicians you never get to meet because of the gatekeepers in the music industry.
Gatekeepers is the fourth instalment of Blak Social’s Queenscitiverse project which already includes the plays Queen’s City and Meet Your Maker; alongside the Indigenised Fright Night Blak Friday. Queen’s City is a fictional town that uncovers the truth about the colonial project through the fierce reclamation of pop culture.
Key creatives:
Alethea Beetson
Katina Olsen
Neta-Rie Mabo
Moss
Loki Liddle
Joe Geia
Maggie Walsh
Sue Ray
Mark Munk Ross
Kerrod Meredith-Creed
Kerrinne Jenkins
Sasha Parlett
Roger Stonehouse
Harriett Williams
About the work
Planetether Kin follows an exploration of human relationships with the Earth and each other. Through a blend of neo-ritualistic practices and contemporary film techniques, we embark on a journey of intergenerational wisdom and interconnectedness. Soft sculpture and earth materials guide us through a gentle yet profound reflection on our evolving relationship with the planet, reconceiving current ideologies which separate us from our ties to the planet and offering an intimate glimpse into the timeless cycle of knowledge transmission. Planetether Kin responds to current world events whilst celebrating long-enduring ties between humanity and the Earth, inviting viewing audiences to reconsider their place in the intricate web of terrestrial existence. Showcasing Yali's creative work, and performed alongside art practitioners across generations from the Blue Mountains community, this video sparks a dialogue which echoes the universal language of connection and renewal.
Artists
Artist
Em Gemia Yali
Filmographer and Editor
Kalani Gacon
Collaborating Performer
Janelle Randall-Court
Collaborating Performer
Emily Cooper
Music
Alia Sharp
About the work
Look Intruder confronts the volatility of Australian national identity, a concept fraught with contradictions, where symbols and narratives of colonial triumph mask harsh realities. The flag’s southern cross and union jack are to be found everywhere, floating above, haunting and hanging. “Australian is a false concept, a made up thing,” opines Yuin activist and community worker Keiran Stewart-Assheton in a monologue cut throughout the work, continuing, “Why would you want to be Australian?”
Footage of parasitic architecture, unending roads, and distorted gumtrees wipe past the screen, overlaid together to form a ghostly glow of destruction and loss. In conversation with the artist, Larrakia climatologist Jackson Browne details the ongoing damage of colonialism to Country and community. The hope of ecosystem regeneration is weighed against the real possibility that ‘the climate might not be suitable by the time these trees are in maturity.’
Questions protrude out from the work, inviting the audience into a space of uncertainty, doubt, and the fleeting chance for renewal. A space of conversation, where the loss of cultural practices like corroboree can be acknowledged, even if it cannot be performed as it once could... Enduring the psychic onslaught of colonialism as an artist of Murri and mixed European descent, Palmer turns to the work as a mode of therapy, a way to express, and tell story beyond linear time. The artist’s own voice and image are included, glancing back self-reflexively from within the car as she travels through Country.
The audio consists of field recording collected through Gunditjmara, Woi Wurrung, Bunurong/Boonwurrung, Djab Wurrung, Wadawurrung, Taungurung and Dhudhuroa Countries, during Palmer’s creative residency with the public records office of Victoria. Music samples taken from The Settlers’ Sing Songs of the Snowy Mountains (1966)
Artists
Tahlia Palmer
About the work
The work scrutinizes the shift in digital media production brought about by the subscription economy and the implications of not owning but merely accessing software. It explores how these tools have changed the way we communicate, and created new desires for understanding and connection. Through the work, the group speculates that services and hacks use video technology could construct a new politics of life by projecting a totality yet to come.
Artists
Unreal Engine Development
Li Yi Fan
Sound & Script
Mat Spisbah
Choreography & Movement
Harrison Hall
Plan your visit
Venue information
Our foyers will be open 90 minutes pre-show for Concert Hall and Joan Sutherland Theatre performances, and two hours pre-show for Western Foyer venue performances. Refreshments will be available for purchase from our theatre bars.
All Sydney Opera House foyers are pram accessible, with lifts to the main and western foyers. The public lift to all foyers is accessible from the corridor near the escalators on the Lower Concourse and also in the Western Foyer via the corridor on the Ground Level (at the top of the escalators). Pram parking will be available outside the theatres in the Western Foyer.
Getting here
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Please check the Transport NSW website for the latest advice and information on travel. You can catch public transport (bus, train, ferry) to Circular Quay and enjoy a six minute walk to the Opera House.
Frequently asked questions
Ticket purchases and collection at our Box Office is discouraged and eTicket or postal delivery methods should be used, wherever possible. However, if you are collecting your tickets from the Box Office, we recommend doing this at least 60 minutes before the event starts. If you have already received your tickets, the venue doors will be open 45 minutes pre-show for Joan Sutherland Theatre performances, and 30 minutes pre-show for Western Foyer venue performances. Please take your seats as soon as you arrive.
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Details of our right to refuse admission can be found in our General Terms and Conditions for Tickets and Events.
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The authorised agency for this event is the Sydney Opera House.
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Please contact Box Office on 9250 7777 as soon as possible to advise if you can no longer attend.
Foyers will be open 90 minutes pre-show for Concert Hall and Joan Sutherland Theatre performances, and two hours pre-show for Western Foyer venue performances. Refreshments will be available for purchase from our theatre bars.
The venue doors will be open 45 minutes pre-show for Concert Hall and Joan Sutherland Theatre performances, and 30 minutes pre-show for Western Foyer venue performances.
Please bring a credit or debit card for any on site purchases to enable contactless payment. You’re welcome to bring your own water bottle but no other food and drinks are permitted inside our venues. Opera Bar, Opera Kitchen and Portside are also available for you to enjoy.
The health, safety and wellbeing of everyone at the Sydney Opera House is our top priority. In line with this commitment, the Opera House became a smoke-free site in January 2022. Read our Smoke-free Environment Policy.
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