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69 Capel Street, West Melbourne VIC 3003

Open 12pm-5pm, Thursday - Sunday

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KINGS Artist-Run is a wheelchair accessible venue. Unfortunately, there is no wheelchair accessible toilet. Please contact the gallery with any access requirements and we will endeavour to support your visit.
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About

Kings Artist-Run provides a location for contemporary art practice, supporting distinctive experimental projects by artists at all stages of their careers.
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KINGS Artist-Run acknowledges the Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung people of the Kulin Nation as the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we operate.

We offer our respect to Elders both past and present and extend this offer to all Australian First Nations people.

KINGS Commissions

Daniel R Marks
Ezz Monem
Katayoun Javan
Mohamed Chamas

23 December 2020–19 March 2021

Kings Commissions, is a series of commissioned new works by emerging artists. Presented as part of our mobile program, these works manifest as web-based presentations, performances and public outcomes. The commissions signal a new stage in KINGS history and continues our ongoing engagement with, and support of emerging artists.

 


War Mixtape, Katayoun Javan

23 December 2020 – 30 January

War Mixtape is a video collage about life in Iran during the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980s. The video is comprised of a mish-mash of images that elicit feelings of nostalgia, pain, humour and sarcasm through a seeming clash of imagery drawn from a context of war and 80s pop culture.

 


Collectables, Ezz Monem 

15 January – 19 February 2021

Collectables investigates the narrative history of found objects which have been left on the streets of Melbourne. Considering in particular domestic objects, which may be rehoused or repurposed, the project evokes a lineage of ownership, linking disparate individuals in a unique narrative traversed by the object. The images produced in this project document a stage in this journey and aim to capture the aura of these personal histories.

The project involves multiple transformations between found object and photographic image. Initially, objects that might be collected by others are located in the street and documented but not removed. Through repeated photographing and processing, a layered image is produced which is then printed in the darkroom. This work is framed and returned to the site of the object to be freely collected by the public. Operating as a form of gift economy, these works enter the narrative thread of the original found object, while also initiating a trajectory of their own.

The locations of prints were shared via @kingsartistrun and @ezzmonem’s Instagram accounts. All the prints have now been deposited and collected either by passers-by or people actively following the project online. View Collectables here.

 


}.exxxxu.exxxxu.exxxxu.exxxxu{, Daniel R Marks and Mohamed Chamas

12 February – 26 March 2021

}.exxxxu.exxxxu.exxxxu.exxxxu{ is an accumulation of cross-modal collaboration, sedimented to four streams of faux video-game “Let’s Play” footage. The videos are loosely bound by the archaic biopsychology of the “four humours” (blood, phlegm, black bile, yellow bile) through which we navigate with a tangential poesis.

A symbology hardens like stomach stones in the convolutions of this navigation, re-scripting inter-facial gameplay perspectives and allowing for the perforation of an anonymous and ruined game-logic.

A networked subjectivity of panoptic dissonance here bleeds-out the clotting of agency, and recurrent cues of gamification choreograph the blooming of our “protagonist”: a feedback loop of psychogeographical self-intervention.

See all projects by:


  • Daniel R Marks is an interdisciplinary artist based in Naarm/Melbourne, currently undertaking a PhD research project in the area of “post-singular” performance-installation methodologies at RMIT University. Applying a framework of queer self-esotericism to processes of entropy and feedback-looping, Marks works through collusions of performance art, poetic-didactic writing/diagram work, sculptural installation, and accumulative media archives to exhume intertextual potentialities of embodiment. Artefacts of doing and undoing are, in Marks’ practice, choreographed as archaeo-architectural re-configurations of bodily agency. They have shown performance, installation and video projects at various art venues within Melbourne and regional Victoria including RMIT Gallery, La Trobe Art Institute, BLINDSIDE, Testing Grounds, Trocadero Art Space, Schoolhouse Studios and First Site. In 2019 they were included in the City of Knox’s Immerse public art program. In 2020 they were selected for the DEBUT XVI graduate artist showcase at BLINDSIDE, and presented at RMIT’s Practice Research Symposium.
  • Ezz Monem (born Mohamed Ezzeldin M. Abdelmonem; October 23, 1985) is an Egyptian artist living in Melbourne, Australia. He graduated from the Faculty of Engineering, Cairo University in 2007, but his explorations in visual arts began years earlier. In 2003, he began to focus on photography besides his work as a software developer. His work has been shown in exhibitions and festivals in and outside of Egypt, where he received awards such as the Golden Award at the Emirates International Photography Competition (2009), the Golden Award from Sharjah Awards for Arab Photo (2011), and the Salon Award from the 24th Youth Salon in Egypt (2013). Ezz is currently doing a Master of Contemporary Art at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA), University of Melbourne.
  • Katayoun Javan is an Iranian Australian photographer and video artist. Through documentary photography, portraiture, and use of found photos and videos, she draws on personal and public stories in order to explore notions of family, home, memory, displacement, and the Iranian Diaspora. Most of her works are somehow related to Iran from a migrant point of view. She completed a Master of Fine Art in research in 2013 and has taken residencies in Australia and exhibited in solo and group shows in Australia, Iran and internationally.
  • Mohamed Chamas is an artist, game developer and poet based in Naarm (melbourne) who channels the 'dijital djinni'; a rewired/rewiring agent for practice-based research. Chamas' work calls upon magick and mysticism of the ancient past to create fusion and synergy with emerging technologies. This diffractively interfaces with religious studies, ludology, performance, language, and critical and contemporary theory. Chamas' Virtual Reality (VR) works exist as unsurveilled sites of healing for orientalized bodies; namely سايبر تصوف (cyber tasawwuf) 2018 and باب القرين (Baab Al Qareen) 2020. The former received two Freeplay Independent Games Festival Nominations in 2019 and has exhibited at Testing Grounds, Seventh Gallery, Siteworks and Incinerator Gallery. Chamas has been published in Co-, Running Dog, The Lifted Brow, and the Writing & Concepts Lecture series. In 2020 they were part of Experimenta x Hedie’s Mixed Realities Symposium, a public program for Heide’s major exhibition TERMINUS (Jess Johnson and Simon Ward).