Brian Fuata: Response to Stranger than fiction

The Stranger than fiction Symposium explored the slippage between reality and fiction as a narrative tool through lively discussions, performance, food and film screenings.

Expanding and responding the Stranger than fiction exhibition, the Symposium held focus on the artists' experimental strategies and practices. Audiences experienced and discussed their satirical, humorous, and sensual approaches.

Curated by Helen Grogan and Joanna Kitto.

Brian Fuata is a Samoan artist born in Aotearoa and based in Sydney, Australia. Broadly informed by lived experience and social discourse, together with tradition and customary knowledge, Brian Fuata’s work incorporates a diverse array of performance and communication modalities, including spoken word, concrete poetry, authentic movement (dance), correspondence, clowning, glossolalia (speaking-in-tongues), and sound art. In many works, he inhabits the role of trickster; engaging humour in his blurring of lines, between autobiography and fiction, audience and performer, art and the everyday. His prodigious and enigmatic output speaking, contemporaneously, of the body, place, self, and other.

Documentation contributions by artist Ahmed Coshnow, with mentoring and editing support by Helen Grogan.

The Stranger than fiction Symposium took place at Collingwood Yards on 24 August 2024. Supported by City of Yarra.