| Hannah Furmage is a conceptual artist based in Sydney, Australia. Her work aesthetizes risk and the margins of culture by orchestrating encounters with people who inhabit the outskirts of society. Rather than being a passive voyeur, she is an accomplice in the scenarios that she creates by reasserting the outsider‘s voice against the establishment. The work strives to turn the hierarchies inside-out and to harness democratic power. Her collaborations with prisoners, drug dealers and boxers highlight society’s bias towards people who violate moral codes and raise the question of how we, as a society, assimilate our fringe? |
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Hannah Furmage
Hannah Furmage is a conceptual artist based in Sydney, Australia. Her work aesthetizes risk and the margins of culture by orchestrating encounters with people who inhabit the outskirts of society. Rather than being a passive voyeur, she is an accomplice in the scenarios that she creates by reasserting the outsider‘s voice against the establishment. The work strives to turn the hierarchies inside-out and to harness democratic power.
Her collaborations with prisoners, drug dealers and boxers highlight society’s bias towards people who violate moral codes and raise the question of how we, as a society, assimilate our fringe? The resulting liability difficulties involved in staging each work is often played out in the local press and adds a new layer of meaning to the work. Artlife commented—“Furmage is becoming a one woman punk band, always getting banned/cancelled and always quote unquote controversial!“
In A Groundbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Furmage teased conservative radio pundits and police authorities by exhibiting a bag of heroin alongside hidden camera footage of her buying it from street drug dealers. The police took the bait and the work was closed down two days after the opening by the Drug Squad. Furmage was not charged with possesion on the grounds that she never show the work again.
Fighting Song was a collaboration with a group of professional and amateur boxers, recontextualizing live boxing bouts in a gallery space. It was cancelled a week before its opening by one gallery due to litagation concerns but quickly found a new venue. It presented an evening of live boxing fights in a ring installed in an art gallery. Sensor technologies were attached to the boxers‘ bodies that tracked and translated their movements into live sound. The sound attempted to harness destruction and chaos as a creative force.
In Scoring Dope For Sally, Furmage recreated the murder scene of Sydney underworld figure Sally Anne Huckstep, who was set up to meet her drug dealer in a park only to be found dead the next day, floating in a pond. Furmage lay bound in ropes and submerged in a glass tank with living eels for seven hours. The underwater sounds were sampled and manipulated live, adding to the feeling of dread. Huckstep‘s family publicly threatened legal action upon learning of this portrayal, but the show went ahead regardless, with a security guard present.
Pig Town was a site specific audio installation where Furmage presented the opinions of people currently imprisoned in New South Wales jails to the law enforcers themselves. The prisoners‘ recorded voices are played through small speakers in the cellar of the stately, historic home of an early colonist. The work explored Australia‘s white settlement as an enormous jail, suspending the chasm between guilty and innocent by making the audience complicit through eavesdropping on criminals‘ testimonies.
Furmage’s work evokes a legal and moral wilderness that holds the potenial for poetry, adventure and excitement.
