Photo: Thomas McCammon

I work primarily with film, performance and music composition, and I’m drawn to time-based mediums for their capacity to induce heightened affective states. The unsettling personas and situations in my artworks prioritise sensing above making sense, drawing from my own experiences of loss, near death and a politics of trans liberation. I work to undercut common ideas of selfhood as singular, coherent and rational, to imagine unfixed ways of being. Trans visions are more important than trans visibility. 

My artwork has been presented in solo exhibitions at Western Front (Vancouver, 2025), the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art (2023), The Heide Museum of Modern Art (2021) and Blindside Gallery (2019), and in a range of group settings including at The Samstag Museum of Art (2022), The Monash University Museum of Art (2021 - 2022), The National Gallery of Victoria (2021, 2019), The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (2022, 2020, 2018, 2017) and Contemporary Art Tasmania (2019) amongst other spaces. I’ve given performance lectures and artist talks at The National Gallery of Victoria (2022, 2019), Parsons and The New School (2020, 2018), Minneapolis College of Art and Design (2020), Monash University Museum of Art (2019) and The Centre for Contemporary Photography (2018). My work is held in the Monash University Museum of Art and private collections internationally.

I currently live on Wurundjeri country in a trailer built with the help of my friends. I work as a casual academic in visual arts at the Victorian College of the Arts and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. 


CV

Contact: helloarchiebarry [at] gmail.com