CHTHONIC CHORUS, 2025, installation view of artworks by Patrick McDavitt (foreground) and Shan Turner-Carroll, Tom Denize, TRi Kallady, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, Jazz Money, and Tarik Ahlip (background) at Incinerator Gallery. Photography by Gianna Rizzo.
CHTHONIC CHORUS, 2025, installation view of artworks by Shan Turner-Carroll, Tom Denize, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, and Jazz Money at Incinerator Gallery. Photography by Gianna Rizzo.
CHTHONIC CHORUS, 2025, installation view of artworks by Shan Turner-Carroll, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, and Jazz Money at Incinerator Gallery. Photography by Gianna Rizzo.
CHTHONIC CHORUS, 2025, installation view of artworks by Shan Turner-Carroll, Anchi Lin (Ciwas Tahos), Amias Hanely and Devika Bilimoria, and S.J Norman at Incinerator Gallery. Photography by Gianna Rizzo.
CHTHONIC CHORUS, 2025, installation view of artwork by Tom Denize at Incinerator Gallery. Photography by Gianna Rizzo.
CHTHONIC CHORUS, 2025, installation view of artwork by Tarik Ahlip at Incinerator Gallery. Photography by Gianna Rizzo.
CHTHONIC CHORUS, 2025, installation view of artwork by S.J Norman at Incinerator Gallery. Photography by Gianna Rizzo.
CHTHONIC CHORUS, 2025, installation view of artworks by Tarik Ahlip and Shan Turner-Carroll at Incinerator Gallery. Photography by Gianna Rizzo.
CHTHONIC CHORUS, 2025, installation view of artwork by Tom Denize at Incinerator Gallery. Photography by Gianna Rizzo.
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CHTHONIC CHORUS

1 February 2025 - 30 March 2025

Curator: Jake Treacy

Artist(s): Anchi Lin (Ciwas Tahos), Amias Hanley and Devika Bilimoria, Jazz Money, Patrick McDavitt, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, Ri Kallady, Shan Turner-Carroll, S.J Norman, Tarik Ahlip, and Tom Denize.

Location: Main Gallery

This exhibition unfolds as an imagined archaeological site, where queer theory unsettles normative, binary views of the past. By activating queer archaeology, CHTHONIC CHORUS digs into layers of strata and memory to radically rethink and critique colonial constructs of place, language, time, gender, sexuality, identity, and ecological relations. 

The chthonic—meaning "beneath the earth"—refers to spaces absent of light but far from void. These are fertile realms where darkness fosters ritual, transformation, and queer potential. The underground, both literal and metaphorical, is a place where the hidden is revealed, and the dormant awakened. Here, contemporary art reimagines the archive, disrupts linear timelines, and invokes connection with ancestors through physical and psychological terrain.  

CHTHONIC CHORUS envisions this subterranean site as one for queer communion and reactivation, laden with long-standing narratives that surface latent images and conjure rhizomatic entanglements.  

Participating in Midsumma Festival’s 2025 keynote program ‘Midsumma Presents’, this exhibition takes to action this year’s thematic call, COLLECTIVE IDENTITY (S), by considering the unique power of queer community connections across time and place, intergenerational space, and via the conduit of art as truth-telling. This exhibition unearths these truths by looking back in order to nurture an inclusive present of care and carve a future space of belonging.  


PARTNERS

Midsumma Logo Black scaled

Anchi Lin (Ciwas Tahos)

Anchi Lin 林安琪, her Atayal tribal name is Ciwas Tahos. She is a visual artist of Atayal/ Itaṟal and Taiwanese Hō-ló descent. She is based in Taipei, Taiwan, and Naarm (Melbourne), Australia. Ciwas completed an MFA in New Media Art at Taipei National University of the Arts (Taiwan) and a BFA in Visual Art at Simon Fraser University (Canada).

Ciwas' body-centered practice weaves the Indigenous Atayal worldview through performance, moving images, cyberspace, ceramics, and kinetic installation to claim a self-determined queer space, her work is an exploration of cultural and gender identity, using her body as a medium to trace linguistic and cultural experiences of displacement to seek out new forms of understanding.

Amias Hanley

Amias Hanley is an artist who explores auditory-led questions through sound, sculpture, and installation. These inquiries often attend to queer ecologies and transgender studies, generating site-responsive, speculative encounters that offer sonic propositions for engaging composite forms and conditions. Their recent work investigates the mechanisms and channels used by plants, animals, and machines to interpret and produce audio signals, examining the artistic possibilities and influence of these processes on auditory cultures and communications. 

Devika Bilimoiria

Raised in Naarm/Melbourne and currently undertaking research and development in London, Devika Bilimoria (b. Fiji) engages an X-disciplinary practice with performance, dance, video, photography, sculpture and installation to explore notions of queering, time, materiality and body-ing. They enlist chance-based methods of making, duration and somatic listening as tools to agitate archived and encoded embodiments of separateness, hierarchies and gestures across socio-cultural conditions.

Jazz Money

With a practice centred in poetics, Jazz Money produces work across a range of mediums including visual art, film, performance, audio and print. She has been described by Vogue Australia as a “multidisciplinary force.”

Jazz's artworks have been presented in public settings and leading institutions including: ACCA, Melbourne; ACMI, Melbourne; The Art Gallery of South Australia; The Art Gallery of Western Australia; Carriageworks, Sydney; Fremantle Biennale; HeK Basel, Switzerland; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Pivô, São Paulo; Powerhouse, Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences, Sydney; The Shed, New York; and others.

Jazz Money is represented by The Commercial.

Patrick McDavitt

Patrick McDavitt is an artist working on Gadigal land in Sydney who works in ceramics and mixed media in an experimental, practice driven approach. Patrick creates ‘queer artefacts’ by imbuing ceramic works with his own lived experiences and through this process he proposes new ways of generating and presenting queer histories. Through immersive installations, Patrick wields and re-purposes traditional methods of display used in museums to present his own intimate and minor histories, ones which do not rely on didactic representations of queer life, but actively force the viewer to discern their own meaning.

Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran

Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran is a Sri-Lankan born contemporary artist who explores global histories and languages of figurative representation. He has specific interests in South Asian forms and imagery as well as politics relating to idolatry, the monument, gender, race and religion. While he is best known for his irreverent approach to ceramic media, his material vernacular is broad. He has worked imaginatively with sculptural materials including bronze, concrete, neon, LED and fibreglass, as well as painting and printmaking materials and techniques.

Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran is represented by Sullivan + Strumpf.

Ri Kallady

Ri Kallady is Traditional Witch, the founder & one of the owners of Elfhame. He has been practicing Witchcraft for over 26 years, walking the path & being steeped in traditional & animistic currents, practicing a form of Cornish folk-magic. Ri specialises in providing consultations & spell-work for clients, crafting traditional charms & talismans, mixing incense & powders & brewing ritual oils. Like many, Ri began his journey in Witchcraft at a young age, finding witchcraft through his love for history, mythology & folklore. Being drawn to the magic of traditional customs & the expression of the craft through crafting & creating.

Ri is also a Vodouisant & initiate of Haitian Vodou, serving his escort of Lwa & being a proud member of Hounfo Racine Deesse Dereyale.

Shan Turner-Carroll

Shan Turner-Carroll is an Australian artist of Burmese descent. Deeply fascinated with unearthing tacit knowledge, his practice integrates mediums including photography, sculpture, performance and film. The artist’s practice interrogates both human and non-human nature, alternative forms of social exchange and interactions between art, artist and viewer: sending and receiving signals. His work can sing to snakes, serenade and signal with aliens, and barter with islands, rivers, and oceans. Looking towards the multiplicity of connections between body and landscape, site-specificity is key to his practice, not only in making, but rather in how an embodied methodology of making emerges upon each site and location. Turner-Carroll sees art-making as ritualistic and transformative, using play, humour and experimentation as key elements within his current practice. 

Shan Turner-Carroll is represented by COMA Gallery.

S.J Norman

S.J Norman is a cross-disciplinary artist and writer. He is a non-binary transmasculine person and a diasporic Koori of Wiradjuri descent, born on Gadigal land. Norman’s work centres the corporeal and the inter-corporeal: he inhabits and disrupts the prevailing vocabularies of performance as a queer/ed Indigenous body, addressing that body as both site and material. He utilises ephemeral, process-based and long-durational practices as a means of antagonising the prevailing economies of colonial spectatorship and capital value, as well as a means to excavate and elevate embodied knowledges.

Tarik Ahlip

Tarik Ahlip is a multidisciplinary artist working on Dharug and Gadigal land. Working across film, sculpture, verse and sound, Tarik’s practice considers poetics as capable of driving epistemic change.

Tom Denize

Tom Denize is a multidisciplinary artist and curator living and working on Wurundjeri land. Originally hailing from Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa, Tom’s practice is primarily concerned with queer theologies and temporalities, and how these things can reimagine understandings of place, memory and desire.

Friday, 31 January, 6-8pm

The opening night, with speeches and a Welcome to Country, will be held at Incinerator Gallery alongside exhibitions A Gift of Hibiscus Flowers, From things flow what we call time and Mother's Little Helpers.

Artist Talk
Saturday, 1 March, from 2pm

Duration: 60 minutes
Location: Incinerator Gallery

Free—tickets essential

Join artists along with the exhibition's curator, Jake Treacy, as they discuss key themes of CHTHONIC CHORUS, including the underland, queer archaeology, and cruising spaces.