Willoh S. Weiland

Willoh will be joining the 2018 Arts Lab as a Provocateur.

Willoh S.Weiland is an artist, writer, curator and the Artistic Director of Aphids. In 2017 she was awarded an Australia Council fellowship to begin a two year residency at the Microsoft Centre for SocialNUI at Melbourne University, researching consent through virtual reality experiments. In 2015, Willoh won the prestigious International Prize for Live Art awarded by the Saastamoinen Foundation and the ANTI Contemporary Art Festival, Finland. The selection committee described her projects as “deeply serious and deeply humorous in equal measure. They are also spectacular, epic and impossible to ignore”. As part of the prize, she created Artefact, a funeral for obsolete technology, which premiered at the 2016 ANTI Contemporary Arts Festival, and will be screened in 2017 in film format at Kuopio City Theatre (Finland) and at ACMI, as part of its ART + FILM series. 

Other recent work includes a 2017 ASIALINK residency with Yes No Klub in Yogyakarta, and a 2016 residency in Helsinki through Helsinki International Artist Programme (HIAP). Projects include Spooky Action at a Distance with James Brennan at the Schwindelfrei Festival in Mannheim, Germany (2016) and Howl at the Festival of Live Art with Lz Dunn and Lara Thoms (2016). From 2013-15 Weiland directed Aphids project Forever Now, the third in her trilogy of Space Trilogy works investigating concepts of infinity and the relationship between art, space and science. Launched at MOFO (Tasmania) in 2015, Forever Now was an international project in response to the Voyager records of 1977, resulting in the curation of a new 21st Century golden record. The first two works in the space trilogy were Void Love and Yelling at Stars. In 2015, Willoh directed Tristan Meecham’s Fun Run at the Ansan Street Arts Festival, South Korea and at the ANTI Contemporary Art Festival, Finland. 

Past Aphids projects include Game Show and The Drive-In Project, both large-scale interdisciplinary works created with community arts groups in early 2014; a national tour of Thrashing Without Looking, a live-cinema and performance work experienced through virtual reality goggles; Computer Boy, a contemporary performance work commissioned for Performance Space, Sydney; Fever Beach and Exile, interactive digital artworks for the iPhone and iPad and Atelier Edens, a research project investigating the creation of cross-artform works in remote areas.