Past Residents Willoh S. Weiland
Willoh S. Weiland is an Australian artist, writer and curator. She is the Artistic Director of APHIDS, a Melbourne based inter-disciplinary and experimental organization where for 5-years she has directed a program of large scale cutting edge and socially engaged programs that have combined music, performance, new technologies and site-specificity. Her recent trilogy of live works Forever Now, Void Love and Yelling at Stars (2008-2015) explores the relationship between art and infinity. Often working collaboratively with non-artists Weiland is interested in creating impossible propositions and fulfilling them. APHIDS (with Liz Dunn, Tristan Meecham, Lara Thoms, Martyn Coutts and Thea Baumman) has presented works at most major Australian venues and festivals. Weiland has also made work for the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, the Next Wave Festival, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and the Centre for Contemporary Art in Glasgow.
In residence in HIAP she is creating a new interdisciplinary work Artefact which is a co-production of ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival and the Australian Aphids Events. The project is supported by the Finnish Saastamoinen Foundation and the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts.
Artefact is a free sunset concert in the heart of the Technopolis, Kuopio in the form of a funeral for technology that has become obsolete. A tribute to the immortal consumer icons we have internationally adored and the intimate and fickle ways we worship them.
A farewell to the products that have formed us created with performance, sound, documentary and pathos. It will take place in a mysterious no-one’s land on the cities outer edge, where a new permanent public artefact will be unveiled. An object designed for the future by those from the past, to commemorate our current obsessions.
This inter-generational work will be created with the community of Kuopio, featuring some of its best loved choirs, death metal singers and a living timeline from senior citizens to wild children. The city is invited to celebrate the relationships they have with their own magical artefacts.
Artefact is a collaboration with composer James Brennan and contemporary jeweller Susan Cohn.