This is Barbara Cleveland – Performance Space

Overview

Who is Barbara Cleveland? That's the point of the latest video piece by Brown Council, a portrait in honour of one of Australia's infinitely talented yet often forgotten performance artists.

This is Barbara Cleveland seeks to define Cleveland, a performance artist who disappeared mysteriously in 1981. This video installation explores the voice of Cleveland with care and intrigue, bringing to light a mythic feminist, unfairly left out of the Australian art history books. Blending fact with fiction, history with memory, the piece also delves into an exploration of art history on the whole. Namely, who is written in and out of it? And why do these calculated misrepresentations even occur?

This is Barbara Cleveland is the work of Brown Council, a company renowned for national and international projects, with recent showcases featured among the likes of Cambridge Junction (UK), Forest Fringe (UK) and Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney).

This Is Barbara Cleveland is part of the You're History season, something of a birthday party for Performance Space, but don't worry about bringing a gift. They're actually giving you the presents: wrapped-up pieces of performance, visual art, dance, music and more, celebrating their big 3-0. Also showing is the bite-sized art of 30 Ways with Time and Space, the journey into mad methodologies in The Directors' Cuts, a creative send-off to analog TV and plenty more.