Women (seen) Artists' Talk, Intercultural Sister Kin-a talk with Marian Abboud and Vicki Van Hout

Marian is a Western Sydney based socially engaged artist of Lebanese heritage who graduated from the University of Western Sydney with a Bachelor of Visual Communication. She is passionate about creating meaning across perceived borders of place, language, and identity. She has exhibited extensively locally and nationally and has collaborated on many dance and performance-based projects including Volume at the AGNSW, Mona Foma in Hobart, 24 Frames, Carriageworks, and her recent performance, Not Her Reflection, a travelling performance at Artspace. FCMG, Granville Art Centre, Pari and UTS Library.

Vicki Van Hout’s First Nations heritage hails from Wiradjuri country in far Western NSW and she has Dutch, English and Afghan roots as well. Vicki has dedicated her career to Indigenous arts practice as a graduate of NAISDA, Australia ‘s premier Indigenous Dance College. Vicki returned from New York after graduating from Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance NYC to dance with both leading Aboriginal dance companies Bangarra Dance Theatre and AIDT.  Vicki has won the prestigious Australia Council For The Arts Dance Awards and is the current recipient of Creating Australia's Dance Fellowship.

Marian Abboud and Vicki Van Hout's careers crossed paths as part of a speed dating event pairing multiple dancers with visual artists to then make a pitch to the joint organisers Parramatta Artists Studios and FORM Dance Projects (then known as Western Sydney Dance Action). They won with a work titled Behind The Zig Zag.

Approximately fifteen years later Abboud and Van Hout have maintained their collaborative partnership which can be distilled as a continuing cultural exploration examining the ways Abboud's Lebanese and Van Hout's Indigenous heritages intersect including paradigms surrounding temporality, being, belief and magic.

Their talk will focus on the way they navigate kinship structures, more specifically Marian’s inclusion of her immediate family in the process of her solo, and their combined image making.

RSVP via web page.