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Crit Club program

Derrick DuanMohamed ChamasJoanne LeongZHITom Campbell
19. Apr 2023

Artists Derrick Duan and Mohamed Chamas (located in Victoria) joined Tom Campbell and ZHI x Joanne Leong (located in the ACT) to share practice across live and digital spaces from their home states. With IRL audiences in Melbourne and Canberra and more joining online, Crit Club was a collective deep dive into experimental methodologies of collaboration.

Four works were presented, each followed by facilitated conversations that consider what it means to embrace hybridity, working locally, by distance, and digitally.

Crit Club was held in-person at Ralph Wilson Theatre (Gorman Arts Centre on Ngambri and Ngunnawal Country/Canberra) and Brunswick Mechanics (Narrm/Melboune) and online.



This event was supported by


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Derrick Duan

Engagement: Crit Club_01

Derrick Duan is a hybird visual artist preoccupied with body, text, tech and spatial magik/rituals, working and living on unceded Wurundjeri land. Duan’s practice thrives in cross-disciplinary collaborations that allow an open-endedness & the freedom to experiment, initiating dialogues about identity, decolonisation, the anxiety of modern living, and their experience within the PoC queer community. Born in China, 1998, Duan has spent their formative years drifting between continents. They bring this open, fluid and mosaic-like way of life to each project, and turn a documentary eye to their ever-shifting surrounds, using image, text and video as a mimetic device to preserve intangible moods and stories

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Mohamed Chamas

Engagement: Crit Club_01

Mohamed Chamas is an artist, independent game developer and poet based in Naarm (melbourne). Mohamed’s work holds magickal, spiritual and mystic practices in both friction and synergy to emerging technological phenomena. This unseemly tension reconstitutes the borders of heresy and divine convolution, led by the 'dijital djinni' ; a speculative research tool. The entanglements that emerge are framed by religious and occult studies, language, ludology, gamification, and the military-entertainment complex. Mohamed’s illusory workings emerge as image, sound, writing, utterance, interaction, virtual reality (VR), artgames, installation, performance, and often as hybrid forms that dance across these mediums. Mohamed’s location-based VR altars are made for the healing of orientalised (and otherwise marked) bodies. Namely,’سايبر تصوف (cyber tasawwuf)’ (2018), which received two Freeplay Independent Game Festival nominations in 2019. Mohamed has exhibited at Siteworks, Testing Grounds, Seventh Gallery, Trocadero Arts Space, Incinerator Gallery and MARS Gallery. Mohamed's literary work has appeared in Co-, The Lifted Brow, Liminal Magazine, Cordite Poetry Review and Running Dog.

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Joanne Leong

Engagement: Crit Club_01

Joanne Leong is an Asian-Australian artist born in Hong Kong, based in Canberra. A recurring theme of their practice is translation and belonging between cultures and time. Their works often explore how language and identity mediate relationships. Using video, sound, programming and installation , they engage with the technological/cultural frameworks.

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ZHI

Engagement: Crit Club_01

ZHI is an experimental poet/artist based on unceded Ngunnawal, Ngunawal, Ngambri country. They are the author of the award-winning collection of poetry, blur by the; and is one half of the experimental poetry/sound duo known as 莎瑜 (ShaYu). He loves lo-fi stuff, emotional maximilism and not being perceived.

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Tom Campbell

Engagement: Crit Club_01

Tom Campbell is an artist and writer who works in fundraising in Kamberri/Canberra. His work often attempts to articulate the gap between disclosure and resistance, muscles and memories through various forms of the spoken and written voice. In doing so, Tom considers a lineage stretching towards Scotland and Sabah Borneo, where both sets of ancestors were involved in various forms of conflict mediation. Tom is a current studio resident at ANCA, has most recently exhibited with Tuggeranong Arts Centre, and has been selected for residencies and development programs including You Are Here’s Cahoots program in 2021, and the 2022/23 KINGS ARI Emerging Writers Program. Depending on which anecdote you choose to pursue, Tom has or hasn’t inherited the supernatural strength required to pull the palm tree up and out of the ground.