Contemporary Art, Feminism and the Internet

Zin is the artist partnership of Harriet Gillies and Roslyn Helper. Formed in 2011, zin’s work focuses on the power of experience by combining immersive, visceral and hybrid-art elements. Through their work they are interested in developing methodologies and concepts that deal with the public sphere, immaterial performance modes, large-scale execution, site specificity, audience immersion and activation. zin continuously redefine the audience-artist relationship by creating generative environments that encourage new ways of thinking and interacting. Gillies attained a Graduate Diploma of Performing Arts (Directing) at NIDA and Helper completed her Masters in Arts Politics at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.

Xanthe Dobbie is a Melbourne-based new media artist and curator. Her practice aims to capture the experience of post-internet contemporaneity as reflected through feminism, art history, iconography and queer culture. Graduating from RMIT Fine Art (Honours) (2013), Xanthe has been included in Next Wave, Channels, Paradise, Midsumma, MELT, Mardi Gras and Gertrude Street Projection Festivals. She has presented solo exhibitions for Grey Gardens Projects (2015) and John Buckley Gallery (2014), was a curated guest speaker for Screen Futures 2016 (ACMI, RMIT) and ACMI X OpenLAB (2017), and has been a finalist in the John Fries Award (2016) and the Macquarie Digital Portraiture Award (2014).

She is the recipient of City of Melbourne and Creative Victoria arts grants and was selected as a Kickstart artist for her collaborative project 'One Million Views' for Next Wave 2016. A member of the Queertech.io Curatorium (2017), Xanthe has co-curated an international touring collection of queer digital artworks for a series of on and offline exhibitions at major Australian Queer Festivals. Xanthe's work was recently screened in Graz, Austria as part of Queeriot Festival and in London as part of Cuntemporary's 'Royal Trash'. 

Talia Smith is an artist and curator based in Sydney but originally from New Zealand. She has curated shows in both Australia and New Zealand, has participated in the 4A Curatorial intensive in 2016 and is part of the 2017 emerging curators program at Firstdraft. She is also one of the founding members of the ARI Cold Cuts. Her photography and video practice has been shown in Australia, New Zealand, Germany and New York and she will be completing a residency at Bundanon Trust in August, 2017. Smith's practices examines ruin, memory and time with a focus on landscape and the photographic medium. In 2018, she will undertake her MFA at UNSW, Sydney.