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Tina Stefanou ‘You Can’t See Speed’
LP/8pp Booklet, Digital Download, no streaming
NM066, released 10th July 2025
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You Can’t See Speed is a limited-edition vinyl accompanying the artist’s major solo exhibition at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Attending to the interconnected and multisensory experience of film beyond vision, You Can’t See Speed features vocal resonances and spoken descriptions written and recorded in collaboration with participants from Stefanou’s film works, alongside music composed by the artist. A cacophony of lived experience, oral storytelling, and vocality.
The B-side centres a collaboration with blind motorbike mechanic and rider Matthew Cassar and composer Joseph Franklin. Anchored in ideals of trust and experimentation, the work traces Cassar’s journey through high-performance dirt bike riding as a surrealist voyage of adrenaline and self-actualisation. In his own voice, Cassar reflects on the layered worlds—both on screen and within—where ‘image meets experience’. Cinema becomes sensorium, as singing, thrumming, electronically mediated dirt bikes, outer-suburban field recordings, exhausted vocalities, hymns, trumpets, harmonics and grain converge in a rush of sonic and embodied image-making.
More about the main exhibit at ACCA Melbourne;
You Can’t See Speed contains an intense, immersive soundscape that is played throughout all of ACCA’s gallery spaces, bathrooms and foyer. Some audience members may find this uncomfortable.
Earmuffs and ear plugs are available for use in the space, and we encourage you to bring your own headphones for noise relief, if applicable.
ACCA is providing quiet sessions from 11am – 12pm daily for audiences with sensory sensitivities.
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art is pleased to present the first major solo exhibition by Tina Stefanou, a Greek-Australian artist who works with experimental forms of performance, film, sound-music, sculpture, ethnographic research and socially engaged practice.
Tina Stefanou: You Can’t See Speed attends to the interconnected and multisensory experience of film beyond vision. The exhibition continues Stefanou’s interest in the voice as medium, from spoken sonic soundscapes to vocal techniques such as humming. It also expands on her methodology of deep, long-term, co-creative collaboration and socially engaged practice involving interspecies-communal-performance making and breaking bread (or grain). Her diasporic, working-class ethic and approach to making challenges institutions of power and capitalistic logics, embedding the commons – from the planetary to the everyday – within her life and work.
The exhibition centres a collaborative new film commission with blind motorcycle mechanic and rider Matthew Cassar. Concerned with the ideals of collaboration and trust, coinciding with Cassar’s journey of riding dirt bikes in high performance contexts, the work follows Cassar along a surrealist voyage of adrenalin and self-actualisation. Accompanying the film is a large-scale, site-specific stunt ramp emblazoned with totemic, ritualistic symbols and sounds such as evil eyes, crystals, and melismatic singing. Designed to protect from and ward against threats, both imagined and tremendously real.
Alongside the new commission, Stefanou presents a modified configuration of cinematic performance works. Featuring rural and regional collaborators, the films form a complex ecology of multispecies and class realities, and rural poetics, from migrant, farmer, and youth perspectives. Multiple screens are scaffolded by a field of sculptural materials, from wax casted horse-hooves to found agri-materials, which trespass across the galleries shifting them into a metaphorical nervous system made up of all-too-human, animal and machine parts.
Presented across ACCA’s four galleries (and bathrooms), Tina Stefanou: You Can’t See Speed transforms the building into a living instrument, merging its subterranean engines with the intimacy of voice; all within a haptic, tactile labyrinth of sculptures, films, live performances and dirt bikes. Altering perceptions and cultural hierarchies of sight and social access, the exhibition creates an experiential landscape, blurring the boundaries between vision-sound-touch.
Curator: Elyse Goldfinch
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body, Arts House through the CultureLAB creative development program, and is presented in partnership with West Space.
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released July 10, 2025SIDE ONE
-Tina Stefanou, Back-Breeding: Machine
2025
Vocal captions: Lisa Salvo, Aarti Jadu, and Tina Stefanou
-Tina Stefanou, There is a Dead Rabbit Under the Greek Family Unit: Group Circle
2025
Vocal captions: George Peters, Joseph Franklin, Peter Kent, Kosta Stefanou
-Tina Stefanou,
Miming for Mines: Church Dance
2025
Vocal captions: Julie Franklin
-Tina Stefanou, The Longest Hum: Alien Structure
2025
Vocal captions: Eleanor Mak, Milla Le Gall, Maddison Gater, Taya Holmes, Olive Block, Senna Robinson, Katherine Clarke
-Tina Stefanou, When I Die I Want to Come Back As A Garden: Grandma
2025
Vocal captions: Irene Poutakidis, Mary Kent, Sophia Stefanou and Tina Stefanou
-Tina Stefanou, Hym(e)nals: Undressing Vowels
2025
Vocal captions: Zahli Jimeno, Tanika Mathews, Emily Shine, and Holly Clough
-Tina Stefanou, The Ball: The Drummer
2025
Vocal captions: Jenny Hickinbotham
-Tina Stefanou, Dance the War of Proximity: Jasmine's Solo
2025
Vocal captions: Lisa Salvo, Aarti Jadu, and Tina Stefanou
-Tina Stefanou, There is a Dead Rabbit Under the Greek Family Unit: Eating Uncle George
2025
Vocal captions: George Peters, Joseph Franklin, Peter Kent, Kosta Stefanou
-Tina Stefanou, Back-Breeding: Horse Distance
2025
Vocal captions: Lisa Salvo, Aarti Jadu, and Tina Stefanou
SIDE TWO
-Tina Stefanou, You Can’t See Speed 2025, 17:39 mins
Composer, sound designer, music producer: Joseph Franklin
Creative vocal captions: Tina Stefanou and Matthew Cassar
Creative vocal recording: Tim Harvey
-Tina Stefanou, Hymn to the Dirt Bike Rider
2025
Composer, vocals: Tina Stefanou
Additional vocals: Lisa Salvo
Recording: Timothy Harvey
Mixing and brass orchestration: Joseph Franklin
Flugelhorn, trumpet, additional recording: Callum G’Froerer
-Tina Stefanou, Exhausted Vocalities 2025
Composer/Vocalist: Tina Stefanou
-Joseph Franklin, a thousand tiny mutinies (obscured)
2023
Composer, Contrabass guitar and artefacts: Joseph Franklin
Recording: Timothy Harvey
Mixing: Timothy Harvey and Joseph Franklin
Mastering: Magnus Lindberg
Label: Nice Music
-Joseph Franklin, An incomplete history of the art of the solo violin (excerpt)
2024
Composer: Joseph Franklin
Violin: Miranda Cuckson
Mastered by Magnus Lindberg
nicemusic066
41 minutes
Nice Music Label 2025
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