Haines & Hinterding: Ether

If ever there was a time to listen to the hum of electromagnetism, a momentary station-break on the ceaseless chatter of commercial broadcast, the time is now. Surely, we need to stop and listen to the environment in novel and unusual ways at this moment in time. In our work, we are opening a portal, one that redefines our ideas of the environment as paradoxically, more fluid than solid, with a myriad of vital things occurring beyond the surface. 

We need these experiences of contact with the invisible, they are necessary tools in helping to construct alternative ways of being in the world in which accepted systems are subverted, upended and provoked. In our current political reality, there is great scepticism around the existential influence of invisible forces, including the warming climate, and in this context our work offers new and potentially transformative embodied understandings of things we cannot see. By making invisible forces available to our senses, our work provides a way of coming to terms with how the real and the imagination can coexist, moving on a continuum, rather than as unproductive opposing forces.

– David Haines & Joyce Hinterding

David Haines (b. 1966) and Joyce Hinterding (b. 1958), live and work in Australia's Blue Mountains, on Darug and Gundengurra country. Exhibiting extensively, both as a collaboratively duo and independently, their internationally renowned art practice explores the broader concept of energy, through various media, from large-scale immersive video installations and real-time interactive 3D environments to experimental audio works for performance, discrete objects, images, and aroma compositions. Their work challenges conventional notions of perception and reality.

Highlights include the 23rd Biennale of Sydney Rīvus (2022), as well as the 2002 and 1992 Sydney Biennales. In 2009, they received the Prix Ars Electronica Award of Distinction, and in 2015, the MCA featured their collaborative work in the survey exhibition Energies Haines & Hinterding. In 2016, they produced an extensive monograph exhibition titled Résonances Magnétiques at La Panacée in Montpellier, France. Their work is represented in numerous collections in Australia and internationally, including Artbank, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, Christchurch Art Gallery, Te Puna O Waiwhetu, New Zealand, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra and Queensland Art Gallery | The Galley of Modern Art, Brisbane.