Transcriptions: Soft Tumble Wash & Dry Orchestra
Transcriptions is a group exhibition showcasing new work by participants of the Wunder Gym mentoring program as part of Melbourne Fringe Festival.
Transcriptions is a group exhibition showcasing new work by participants of the Wunder Gym mentoring program as part of Melbourne Fringe Festival. Over eight weeks, emerging creatives worked closely with acclaimed artist James Nguyen to explore how personal truths, and collective histories intersect through the act of storytelling.
This year’s program reaches further than ever, culminating in a multi-site public exhibitionacross Wyndham City and Hobsons Bay.
Transcriptions explores how memory, migration, and identity are shaped by inherited and untold stories. Drawing from family records, forgotten archives, government documents, and oral traditions, the artists examine how memory, migration, and identity are formed—not only by what is preserved, but also by what is lost, hidden, or erased. Through painting, sculpture, video, installation, and text-based work, they engage with the silences and absences that surround their histories.
The exhibition takes its name from the process of transcription: a translation across forms, languages, and generations. It asks what happens in the spaces between fact and fiction, the official and the anecdotal, the visible and the invisible. What is mistranslated or redacted? What persists through repetition, or mutates in retelling?
Transcriptions is both an archive and a reimagining. It considers how art can recover and remix inherited narratives—offering space for multiplicity, resistance, and redefinition. The artists work across disciplines to create counter-histories and new mythologies that foreground nuance, vulnerability, and complexity.
This exhibition marks the culmination this Wunder Gym program and invites audiences to witness the powerful interplay of memory and imagination, voice and silence.
EXHIBITION DATES
| Exhibition dates: 20 September (Saturday) – 4 October (Saturday) | Louis Joel Gallery / Altona |
| Exhibition opening: 27 September (Saturday) 11:30 – 2pm | Louis Joel Gallery / Altona |
| Laneway Gallery dates: 1 October 20 October | Laneway Gallery / Laverton |
| Soft Tumble Wash & Dry Orchestra : 4 October 2:30pm – 5pm | Blue Hippo Laundry / SOHO Point Cook |
KEY EVENTS
About Mentor James Nguyen
Drawing out conversations with family, friends and strangers through poetry, sculpture, film, music, and other shared experiences, James tries to understand the profound creativity and humour of migrants and our relationships.
Nguyen has a PhD from the University of NSW, and trained at the Sydney College of Arts, the National Art School, and UnionDocs Centre for Documentary Arts (NYC). He has exhibited at the National 2019, Next Wave Festival and ACE Open in Australia and has commissions from the Sydney Opera House, the Australian War Memorial and support from the Anne and Gordan Samstag Fellowship, Millumbuk Arts, the Clithroe Foundation, the Australian Council for the Arts, Create NSW, and Creative Victoria.
About Wunder Gym
Wunder Gym is a unique professional development program for artists and creative practitioners at all career stages. Through the program, participants create new work for an exhibition outcome with the support of an established artistic mentor. Wunder Gym participants develop new skills and techniques, extend their creative practice, engage with new audiences and connect with a broad network of practising artists.
