Announcing Arts House Developments 2025 – 2026

 Arts House is a creative home nourishing artists’ agency and ambition.  

We are thrilled to announce the next cohort of artists participating in The Warehouse Residency, CultureLAB and Arts House Develops and Arts House Investigation programs across 2025 – 2026. 

Read on to find out more about these artists and their projects!

Header Image: A photo grid featuring participating artist headshots.

The Warehouse Residency

The Warehouse Residency is Arts House’s main commissioning pathway for Deaf and Disability led projects developed at North Melbourne Town Hall.

This is an Arts House DIAP Initiative. 

The Language of Lunacy (Working Title) 
Fayen d’Evie and collaborators Luke D. King, Nelly Kate, Ebony Wightman, Access Lab and Library  

“Development of a new, intersensory stage performance, engaging with the history of the early lunatic asylums in Victoria. This experimental work will weave threads of story from inmates who were committed to the asylums for refusing normalcy. We will craft a stage play that considers legible and illegible language, and that counters eugenics by reimagining the asylum as a community of poets, writers, and performer, co-authoring a collective work of multilingual fiction that prioritises unrestrained dreaming. The team includes several artists who worked together on the stage production ~~~~~ “…derelict in uncharted space…”, presented at Chunky Move for the 2023 Melbourne Fringe Festival, which received a Green Room Award for Design & Technical Excellence, a nomination for Outstanding Experimental and Contemporary Performance, and also Melbourne Fringe Awards for Sound and Technical Excellence, and Innovation in Dance. Our Warehouse Residency will include access-led experimentation with spatialised captioning, stop motion Auslan, tactile stage design, and multichannel audio description. “ 

Fayen d’Evie is an artist, scholar, and access advocate, living on Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung lands in Naarm.  Luke D. King is an artist based in Naarm, focusing on paper-based art, portraiture, dance, performance, and collaboration; proudly Deaf. Nelly Kate is an artist working on the lands of the Pawtucket, Massachusetts, and Naumkeag nations, who creates space for public imagination and healing, working through her expanded practice of sound, and the lens of Queer and late-Deaf experience. Ebony Wightman is a Dharug based visual artist, creative leader and disability advocate with a passion for systems thinking, social justice and access for all. Representing Access Lab and Library (ALL), based in Naarm; Jon Tjhia is an artist, writer and editor, and radiomaker; and Lloyd Mst creates inclusive experiences and communication, as a neurodivergent thinker and designer. 

Image: Flowering weeds in the cracked mortar of the lichen-clad outer wall, Kew Lunatic Asylum, December 2024. 

STR4NGE GARDEN  
Riana Head-Toussaint 

“I will use The Warehouse Residency to begin researching and developing a new experimental choreographic performance work, STR4NGE GARDEN, which exposes, explores and subverts the choreography and conventions of the fashion show. I am interested in the affective possibilities that can flow from taking the fashion show, holding it up to a microscope, ripping it to shreds and then sewing it back together using very different hands to those traditionally directing these performances. I will work with a range of movement/performance, music and technical artists who cross disabled, fat, bla(c)k, queer, trans and POC intersections to begin exploring choreographic methods for performatively redefining the fashion show. By the end of the residency I will have completed my initial research, and begun to developing a choreographic language and toolkit/methodology around this work.”

Riana Head-Toussaint (she/they) is an interdisciplinary crip/disabled artist, DJ and curator/community organiser of Afro-Caribbean heritage. Her practice sits at the intersection of creative expression, activism, cultural exchange and disability justice. Riana makes work spanning choreography, video/film, sound design, writing, and installation; often aimed at interrogating entrenched systems, structures and ways of thinking, and advocating for social change. Her work has taken place in carparks, post-industrial ruins, galleries, theatres, and online/digital spaces, and has been presented and supported by a range of institutions and organisations including Human Rights Watch, the Art Gallery of NSW, the Opera House, Buxton Contemporary, Carriageworks, The Keir Foundation, the British Council, FRAME, Casula Powerhouse, Performance Space, Pari Ari and more. Riana is also the founder and creative lead of CRIP RAVE THEORY, a club night outside the club, drawing on intersectional disabled knowledge to foster more accessible rave/party spaces. She has recently come to live on the unceded lands of the Kulin Nation. 

Image: Riana Head-Toussaint 

CultureLAB

CultureLAB is our creative development program that supports independent artists, collectives, and small-medium organisations to create new work. CultureLAB is our Expression of Interest pathway through which Arts House commissions work for our presentation seasons.   

Baseline 
Crystal Nguyen 

A second stage creative development of Baseline, a multi-disciplinary theatre work exploring recovery after rupture and universal power of grieving towards interdependence. Baseline follows a disabled Vietnamese education migrant through shimmering moments in time to bind fragments of a collective self-portrait. 

Crystal Nguyen (she/her) is a disabled actor and performance maker living in Boorloo/Perth, Western Australia. Originally from Vietnam, Nguyen has cultivated a dynamic performance calibre including theatre, dance and musical prowess, with credits extending across stage and screen (Plum, Erotic Stories, Eddie’s Lil’ Homies). Nguyen represented WA in Midsumma Festival’s Pathways Program (2023), co-produced Boorloo/Perth’s inaugural Disability Pride Fest, and co-facilitated Perth Festival 2024’s Connect program “Real Talk”. Aspiring to create original works with joy and colonial resistance at the centrefold, Nguyen – among other trailblazing disabled creatives – contributes to the ripples charging towards a more inclusive, equitable and vibrant arts ecology. 

Image: Crystal Nguyen 

Working Class Clown
Tommy Misa 

Working Class Clown looks at the transcultural figure of the fool and their unique ability to speak truth to power. Taking inspiration from Fale Aitu (Samoan Clowning) the show is a riot of collective joy inspiring us to spiral up from the residue and rebuild new worlds together. 

Tommy Misa is a Samoan Australian artist, writer, and award-winning performer working across screen, theatre, live performance, and community engagement. His work centers on finding heart and humour in community, place, and people. He sold out three seasons of his acclaimed solo play They Took Me to a Queer Bar and premiered Working Class Clown in 2024 for the 24th Biennale of Sydney, co-presented by Performance Space. 

Tommy has created performances for First Draft Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Art Gallery of NSW. He’s held writing residencies with Belvoir Theatre and Co-Curious. His work has been published by SBS Australia and Archer Magazine, and he contributed to the SBS digital series Moni and Scrubbers. 

As a performer, Tommy has graced stages at Belvoir Theatre, National Theatre of Parramatta, and in Kalaga Atu at the Art Gallery of NSW. He has also worked in screen projects for SBS, Amazon Prime, and Buzzfeed. Passionate about community, he leads queer youth workshops with Wear It Purple and was a keynote speaker at Pacific Universities AUPAC conference 2022. Tommy is the co-creator of Walsolmoana Connect for the Australian Museum, a contemporary performance-making program for young Pasifika people and incarcerated Pasifika adults. 

Image: Tommy Misa by Emele Ugavule 

Iron Valley  
Jackie Sheppard 

Iron Valley – a new embodied theatre piece by Jackie Sheppard set in Gulf-Savannah Country. “First Nations woman, Tahlia, unwittingly opens an inter-dimensional portal while attempting to repatriate her Ancestors bones. A utopian dystopia unravels, and she must navigate heaven and hell on Earth while embarking on a multi-dimensional journey of repatriation.” 

Jackie Sheppard is a mixed-medium performing artist of the Tagalaka Clan Group. Their creative forms are grounded in dance, embodiment, writing and installation. They are a workshop facilitator, writer, and somatic storyteller. They have experience as a creative provocateur, cultural & creative consultant, lecturer & social impact facilitator. Through their creations, Jackie attempts to interrogate Ancestral, Intergenerational, and embodied narratives that are relevant to their lived experience as a First Nations person. Drawing on Somatic, symbolic, & sensorial interrogations, Jackie seeks to shed light in dark places, speaking to the taboo & uncomfortable. Jackie’s work is strongly grounded in ritual, cultural reclamation and Deep Listening. Some notable projects Jackie has worked on: The Honouring, a self-devised dance theatre production with puppetry and projection, presented in its new evolution at Arts House for FRAME Festival, 2023; Wild Australia – Men in Chains by Jacki Sheppard (YIRRAMBOI Festival 2017); Jackie has participated in Force Majeure 2-week INCITE intensive; the STRUT Dance ‘Perth Moves Workshop Series’, Dancenorth’s ‘Art Residency in the Tropics’, and recently performed a short self-choreographed dance ritual and performance piece at ARTJOG in Indonesia. Jackie is currently studying their Master of Dance at the Victorian College of the Arts. 

Image: Jackie Sheppard by Jeff Busby 

Justice Before Peace, Love, Unity, and Having Fun  
Feras Shaheen 

Justice Before Peace, Love, Unity, and Having Fun is a collaborative exploration of dance as a political medium and tool to examine social realities, build community and reshape history. Through an expanding “open studio”, participants will challenge the siloing of dance practice and build a sense of collective purpose through dance. 

Feras Shaheen is an artist curious in letting his conceptual interests lead him across a variety of mediums. Working with choreography, installation work, film, performance, design, and street dance to communicate his ideas, the core of Feras’ practice is to connect and engage audiences. He seeks to bring activism into his art practice, with outcomes that are accessible and community centred. Holding a Bachelor of Design from Western Sydney University (2014), Feras often subverts traditional relationships between mediums to challenge audiences’ perspectives, specifically to disrupt colonial discourses and reduce western reliance on neutrality and apathy. 

Born in Dubai to Palestinian parents (Gaza/Al Lid), and moving to Western Sydney at age 11, Feras engages with his practice as a way to reflect and examine how he views the world, addressing local and global issues. Winner of The Australian Ballet’s Telstra Emerging Choreographer (TEC) in 2021, Feras has performed and exhibited at Carriageworks, Venice Biennale, Pari, Kampnagel, AGNSW, Campbelltown Arts Centre, and Théâtre de la Ville. Recent works include Art Festival, The Bop, ongoing collaboration Klapping, and Forum Q. 

Image: Feras Shaheen by Shea Kirk 

The Pleasures of Doing Damage  
Julia Croft and Nisha Madhan 

Over a three-week period Julia Croft, Nisha Madhan and collaborators will begin development on a new performance work about vertigo, entropy and ecstatic nihilism. This development will focus on integrated performance design, the creation of falling and decaying landscapes, and choreographies of collapse. 

Julia Croft (she/her) is a performance maker from Aotearoa. Her practice draws on a wide variety of critical theory and pop culture to create performance works that are highly theatrical, visual and comedic. Julia’s interest as an artist lies in spaces of potentiality and possibility, radical joy and the Scientific-Poetic. She is particularly interested in ways to enliven, live with and through, matter and materiality through a feminist and Queer lens. She has created over 12 full length performance works including 4 solo works: If There’s Not Dancing at the Revolution, I’m Not Coming, Power Ballad, Working On My Night Moves and Terrapolis. These works have toured extensively throughout NZ and internationally including to the UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, Mexico and Singapore. Working On My Night Moves was awarded a prestigious Total Theatre Award at the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe Festival as well as an Auckland Theatre Award for Excellence. This work was presented at Rising in 2022. She has undertaken residencies at CAMPO (Belgium), Something Great (Berlin), Mala Vaodora (Portugal), The Basement (NZ), Forest Fringe (UK) & West Kowloon Cultural District (HK) and Time Place Space (Melbourne). In 2023 she co-directed Aoteroa’s inaugural Festival of Live Art, F.O.L.A. [AKL] in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland, which will return in mid 2025. She also works as a teaching artist, director and dramaturg and considers karaoke to be her secret superpower. 

Image: Julia Croft 

Nisha Madhan (India/Aotearoa) is an independent artistic director and producer. She is the Creative Producer at AsiaTOPA, Australia’s major triennial of Asia Pacific Performance. Until recently she was the Lead Creative Producer at Next Wave in Naarm, Melbourne, and the Programming Director of Basement Theatre in Aotearoa, New Zealand. Her eclectic career includes creating, directing, and producing experimental live art, performing on stage and screen, and critical writing. In 2021 she was a guest curator for the experimental festival, Liveworks for Performance Space in Sydney. In 2022 she toured her co creation, Working On My Night Moves, a live art exploration of feminist futures to RISING Festival in Melbourne. In 2023 she co-directed Aoteroa’s inaugural Festival of Live Art, F.O.L.A. [AKL] in Auckland. Nisha is driven by relationships and artist care, and uses art as a portal through which she intends to end white supremacy and patriarchy. Nisha holds a Bachelor of Performing and Screen Arts in Acting from Unitec and a Bachelor of Art (First Class Honours) and a Masters (Distinction) from the University of Auckland in Theatre and Choreographic Research. 

Image: Nisha Madhan 

SOAPY  
Samara Hersch and Zac Chester  

SOAPY is a new performance by Samara Hersch and her cousin Zac Chester that investigates soap operas, fantasy and the limits/possibilities of “family”. This work asks which bodies get to perform the bride in our society? Who gets to publicly experience love and commitment in front of their chosen community? 

Samara Hersch is an award-winning artist and theatre director working between Australia, Europe and Asia. Her practice investigates the encounter between contemporary performance and community engagement, and her research explores intimacy as a political act, imagining different modalities that can be inhabited by non-professional performers and the public together. Samara received the prestigious Caroline Neuber Scholarship in Germany in 2023 and is part of the EU Network; ACT; Art Climate Transition. She completed her Masters at DAS Theatre in Amsterdam in 2019.

Recent projects include: It’s Going to Get Dark, exploring how darkness shifts the way we speak and listen through intimate conversations between teenagers and seniors in darkness; Body of Knowledge, inviting teenagers to remotely host conversations with adults about the body and body politic; Sex & Death_and the Internet, an intimate encounter led by performers in their 70s and 80s; Dybbuk(s), a feminist conversation with the dead, presented by Chamber Made in 2018 and winner of the 2021 Music Theatre Now Award. Samara has also collaborated with artist Lara Thoms on a number of projects -including the award-winning We All Know What’s Happening. 

 
Image: Samara Hersch by Pier Carthew

Zac Chester is a painter, performer and disability activist. As a visual artist Zac has presented his solo shows Rainbow Portal in 2022 and Romantic Rose in 2024 at Compendium Gallery in Armadale. In 2023, Zac was invited to share his work as part of the group show Not Fair Art in Malvern. Zac performs regularly as part of the Sun and the Moon Theatre Company and has performed in theatre works including Permanence with Dir Samara Hersch and Choreographer Gabby Rose at Dance House, Fringe Festival 2010, Call Me Anytime You Want, State Theatre Rotterdam and Short Film SUPER, as part of the Other Film Festival. Zac regularly attends CAMP at Back to Back Theatre. Zac is an advocate for disability awareness. In 2024 he was invited to present at the World Down Syndrome Conference in Brisbane. 

Image: Zac Chester 

Lung Swara  
Cahwati Sugiarto, Aviva Endean and Matthias Schack-Arnott  

Lung Swara is a new ritual performance work created by Javanese musician and dancer Cahwati Sugiarto with celebrated Australian musicians Aviva Endean and Matthias Schack-Arnott, supported by Australian/Javanese artist Melanie Lane as dramaturgical consultant. It combines an exploration of music as ritual form, Javanese melodic contours and visceral sonic textures. 

Cahwati Sugiarto has been involved in numerous dance, music and theater productions since 2000. She worked with Slamet Gundono (in Wayang Suket), Garin Nugroho (in Opera Jawa, Selendang Merah, Nyai, festival Malay, Pager Bumi and Satan Jawa) which toured to Netherlands, France, Melbourne, Jakarta and Solo. With Goenawan Mohamad, Tony Prabowo and Melati Suryodarmo in operas Sysiphus, Macbeth and Gandariwhich toured to Jakarta, Belgium and Frankfurt. She performed as a dancer for Eko Supriyanto, Didik Nini Thowok, Fajar Satriadi, and other artists. 

With her husband, Sri Waluyo, they are also the founders of the Tegal Art House foundation and who is working as dalang (wayang puppeteer), they presented their work Wayang Pesisir in Berlin and Turkey. Cahwati is also involved in making music including works for IDF (International Dance Festival), Garin Nugroho for Pesta Raya Malay Festival of Art at Singapore , Melati Suryodarmo for International Coproduction Fund, Bathara saverigadi for entertainment, Razan wirdjosanjojo for A_PART works, making song for the horror movie Sinden Gaib sutradara Fozan Rizal and horror movie Syirik sutradara Hestu Saputra, and making song and choreography for horror movie Kampung Jabang Mayit sutradara Wisnu Surya Pratama, as composer Perjalanan Tubuh Jawa coreographer Rianto in museum Humboldt forum Berlin and Artjog. 

Image: Cahwati Sugiarto 

Aviva Endean is a clarinetist, composer, and performance-maker dedicated to connecting people with each other and their environment through attentive listening. Aviva has developed a profile as a significant force in Australian contemporary music. Her solo music has been released on Room40 (AUS) and SOFA music (Norway), with solo shows presented by Huddersfield Festival (UK), Music Meeting (NL), Sound of Stockholm (SE), DarkMOFO, MONA FOMA, and The Substation, as well as appearing as soloist with the SSO and MSO. 

Aviva won the prestigious Freedman Fellowship (2015), was selected as the inaugural recipient of the “Pathfinder Music Leadership’ position with Australian Art Orchestra (2018-19), Associate Artist at Banff Centre in Canada (2019), resident composer at The Peggy Glanville Hicks home (2021), and selected participant in SOUND OUT, an international immersive lab for exceptional musicians to build their international profile. In 2023, she received the Creative Victoria Creators Fund to pursue a self-directed research project Listening Bodies. Aviva has performed with pre-imminent international musicians including elder of avant-garde improvisation Anthony Braxton, iconic Norwegian guitarist Kim Mhyr, and legendary Indonesian duo Senyawa, as well as Australian luminaries including Paul Grabowsky, Vanessa Tomlinson, Madeleine Flynn & Tim Humphrey and Lawrence English. 

Image: Aviva Endean by Sarah Walker 

Matthias Schack-Arnott is an Australian artist, composer and percussionist whose works span live performance, public art and installation. Over the last decade he has been building unique kinetic systems to create visceral and visually compelling sound worlds. Matthias’ works have been presented by major festivals and contemporary art spaces including the Venice Biennale, Chaillot Theatre (Paris), Noordezon (Netherlands), Spring Festival (Utrecht), Brighton Festival (UK), National Museum of Australia, Sydney Festival, Melbourne Festival, Adelaide Festival, RISING Festival, Charlotte International Arts Festival (USA), Supersense Festival of the Ecstatic, Dark Mofo, Arts House, The Unconformity (Tasmania), Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, La Comete (France), Spor Festival (Denmark), The Substation (Melbourne) and the National Gallery of Victoria. 

Matthias has also created new works with some of Australia’s most celebrated choreographers. He co-created They Want New Language with Antony Hamilton in 2017 for La Comete (France) and collaborated with Lucy Guerin to create a large-scale interdisciplinary work Pendulum commissioned by RISING Festival in association with National Gallery of Victoria. 

Matthias has won numerous awards. His work Everywhen won a Work of Year award at the 2020 Australian Art Music Awards. He has also been awarded the MTNow Prize (Rotterdam) for Pendulum and the 2016 Melbourne Prize for Music (Development Award). 

Image: Matthias Schack-Arnott 

Arts House Develops 

Arts House Develops is a by invitation development program through which Arts House commissions work for our presentation seasons.  

EULOGY 
A DAYLIGHT CONNECTION 

Thrown together by circumstance (specifically death by train) a misfit party of long-term commuters seek karmic redemption for their life, death, and mortal sins. With a one-way ticket to the perpetual prison pit of existence where death doulas the DIG DEEP CREW are in charge of cleaning up the dead, dying and rotting. Together they must join forces to save the afterlife from themselves. A DAYLIGHT CONNECTION are back with another genre-bending adventure-theatre to feed your souls. 

A DAYLIGHT CONNECTION Equally acclaimed in their individual practices lead artists Kamarra Bell-Wykes (Jagera/Butchulla) and Carly Sheppard (Takalaka) are A DAYLIGHT CONNECTION, an explosive union of weird and talented artists bound by the elusive dream of not only being independent but truly self-determined artists. This collective of artistic geniuses encompass almost all creative and design roles including dramaturgy, devising, directing, choreography, performance, set and sound design. Formed in 2020, their works include CHASE (Malthouse/Hot House) and A Nightime Travesty (YIRRAMBOI). With a slew of new works in development this motley crew are hell-bent on reimagining what First Nations performance can be and taking their unique brand of post-traumatic adventure narratives to the world 

Image: Kamarra Bell-Wykes and Carly Sheppard 

1154 Days (working title) 
Written and performed by Cheng Lei, Directed by Clyde Brunswick and Emma Valente 

In this performance, Cheng Lei – an Australian television news anchor and business reporter – takes the stage to share her deeply personal story, chronicling her imprisonment in Beijing. The narrative unfolds through four distinct spaces, each representing a pivotal stage of her life: her apartment in Beijing, the location of her Residential Surveillance, the Detention Centre cell, and her house in Melbourne. The performance integrates multimedia elements and audience interactions to immerse viewers in her journey. At its core, this is a story of freedom and resilience—a testament to the unyielding human spirit. 

Lei Cheng is an Australian-Chinese journalist who has worked for both western and Chinese media. She was born in China but grew up in Australia from the age of 10.  At the tensest point in Australia-China relations, she was detained for ‘supplying state secrets to overseas organisations’ and was incarcerated for three years and two months in Beijing by China’s Ministry of State Security. Australian diplomatic efforts secured her release and she was reunited with her family in October, 2023.  Lei has two kids and currently works as presenter for Sky News.   

Image: Lei Cheng 

Emma Valente is a director, dramaturg, lighting designer and occasional trouble maker. She is the Co-Artistic Director of feminist theatre company THE RABBLE. Emma is the recipient of the Creators Fund grant from Creative Victoria and she is a Sidney Myer Fellow Curator at Large (performance) at The SUBSTATION. Emma has directed works for THE RABBLE that have been performed for Dublin Fringe Festival, Arts House, St Martins, Wuzhen Festival, Melbourne International Arts Festival, Dark MOFO, Brisbane Festival, Malthouse Theatre, Belvoir, MTC, The Substation, Theatre Works, CarriageWorks and La Mama. Emma is also an award-winning Lighting Designer and has worked for many major theatre companies across the country.   

Image: Emma Valente 

Clyde Brunswick is a Brunswick-born theatre-maker. They are a childhood friend of Cheng Lei and a VCA dropout. Their acting credits include Rhinoceros (Adelaide Fringe) and Blueless (Fringe World). 1154 Days marks Brunswick’s directorial debut. They love fishing. 

Image: Clyde Brunswick 

Mchanga 
Mararo Wangai with Belvoir St Theatre 

On the cusp of the 2007 Kenyan elections, two strangers meet on the beach in Mombasa on New Years Eve. B.B. moved to Mombasa after finishing university in hopes of finding better work – he now works as a tour guide, trying to keep his head down to make enough money to find his friend who recently went missing. He shares the history of Kenya, of the slave trade and colonisation to tourists; “Hakuna Matata” he says as he ushers tourists towards markets, bargaining better prices for them while getting a cut of the pay along the way. Lucinda, a Polish-Australian woman, is on a luxury holiday in Mombasa after being forced to go on leave from her job at a nursing home in Australia. Her connection with an elderly Polish patient means she is left everything in his will after he passes and she is now being pursued by his family, forcing her to interact with a world outside her own and reexamine her heritage. Mchanga (sand in Swahili) tracks B.B. and Lucinda as outsiders striving to find recognition and justice with someone they mistrust in a country that is fracturing around them. 

Mararo Wangai is a Kenyan-born writer, performer and media graduate, with a passionate interest in diverse forms of storytelling. His work strives to avoid simplistic narratives, assess society critically and tries to remain adaptive, organic and alive through its development, until the eventual encounter with an audience. He is attracted to stories that deal with the struggles of humanity, and creating work that not only tests his craft both in writing and performance but work that pushes him and his audience away from comfort zones, expectations and the mundane, into the unforgiving unknown where we might both learn deeper lessons for the next chapter. Mararo was nominated twice for Best Supporting Male Actor for The Advisors, 2017 and Improvement Club, 2018 Performing Arts WA Awards as well as Best Mainstage Production and Outstanding Performer in a Lead Role for Black Brass in 2022. He was awarded the prestigious Arts Award at the 2023 Western Australian Multicultural Awards for his work in championing diversity in the arts. 

Mararo is currently working on the development of a new work with Belvoir St Theatre in Sydney and Arts House Melbourne, the development of a TV Series with Screen West and Screen Australia as well as a debut music album with Mahamudo Selimane.

Image: Mararo Wangai 

Arts House Investigation 

Investigation is a year-round program of artist residencies, workshops and long-form research offering peer-to-peer exchange and relationship building locally, nationally and internationally. 

High Altitude Exchange 

High Altitude Exchange is a self-determined cultural collaboration between Australia and Nepal, focusing on First Nations artistic exchange. Following 2024 micro-residencies, the program features reciprocal residencies in 2025 with artists Peter Waples-Crowe (Ngarigo), Kate ten Buuren (Taungurung), and Subash Thebe Limbu (Yakthung) alongside artists from the Kala Kulo collective (Kathmandu).  

Hosted at Kala Kulo in April, and Arts House and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in October, the exchange will culminate in a symposium and publication exploring First Nations futures and cross-cultural dialogues.  

Credit: Peter Waples-Crowe, Ngaya (I Am) (still), 2022; single-channel video installation. Commissioned by ACMI. Courtesy of the artist.  

Kate ten Buuren is a Taungurung artist and curator interested in contemporary visual art, film and stories. She is a founding member of First Nations arts collective this mob, and grounds her practice in self-determination, self-representation and collectivism. Kate lives on Kulin land, and has worked in curatorial positions at Melbourne Arts Precinct, ACMI and Koorie Heritage Trust. She is the 2025 Curator of the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards.  

Recent curatorial projects include The Blak Infinite co-curated with Kimberley Moulton across Fed Square for RISING Festival, Now You’re Speakin’ My Language – a program of experimental moving image works co-presented with NOWNESS Asia and the IMA, and exhibitions How I See It: Blak Art and Film at ACMI and Collective Movements co-curated with Maya Hodge and N’arweet Carolyn Briggs at MUMA. 

Kate has exhibited in BETTER NATURE: A Sudden Release, curated by Hannah Donnelly at Cement Fondu, in James Nguyen’s Open Glossary at ACCA, at C3 Gallery Melbourne, and in the Redlands Konica Minolta Art Prize. 

Credit: Kate ten Buuren, photo by Laura du Ve.  

Peter Waples-Crowe is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores the intersection of an Indigenous queer identity, spirituality and Australia’s ongoing colonisation. Influenced by his adoption and a later reconnection with his Ngarigo heritage, Peter’s art comments on the world as a contested site for his multiple identities. Referencing many disparate ideas and themes, his work is auto-ethnographic by nature, and largely based on personal experiences. 

Credit: Peter Waples-Crowe, photo courtesy of the artist. 

Subash Thebe Limbu is a Yakthung (Limbu) artist from Yakthung Nation (Limbuwan) from what we currently know as Eastern Nepal. He works with sound, film, music, performance, painting and podcast. His Yakthung name is Tangsang (Sky) 

Subash has MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins (2016), BA in Fine Art from Middlesex University (2011), and Intermediate in Fine Art from Lalit Kala Campus, Kathmandu. His works are inspired by socio-political issues, resistance and science/speculative fiction. Notions of time, climate change, and indigeneity or Adivasi Futurism as he calls it, are recurring themes in his works. 

Subash is the co-founding member of Yakthung Cho Sangjumbho (Yakthung Art Society).  

Image: Subash Thebe Limbu, supplied by the artist 

Kalā Kulo is a non-profit initiative that nurtures the flows and frictions of creative labor. Based in Kathmandu, the team experiments with speculative praxis – where acts, thoughts, and relations are reimagined – to irrigate new constellations of ideas and kinships; working across fields and frameworks of knowledge production, they embrace fluid and collaborative methodologies. Existing projects include contextualizing body marking traditions across the Indo-Nepal border, assembling a repository of modernist visual practices from Nepal, and generating transregional dialog on movements of peoples and ideas. 

This is an Arts House Equity – Builder Initiative. 

Everything You Can Dream of is True Residency 

The Everything You Can Dream of is True Residency is presented by Utp (Dharug Country, Western Sydney) and Arts House in a continuation of 2023-2024’s Counterflows program. Hosted by Utp, a transgenerational cohort of First Nations, Asian and African diasporic artists will engage in facilitated experiences and peer learning, with self-directed time over a week-long residency. Critically considering the provocation ‘Everything You Can Dream of is True’, which builds on the theme of the Sharjah Biennial 15, ‘Thinking Historically in the Present’, the residency will conclude with public programs and artist talks. 

This is an Arts House Equity – Builder Initiative.