The Lost Hour

The Lost Hour is an exhibition led by artist Diana Baker Smith that reanimates the work of the Australian dancer, choreographer, and artist Philippa Cullen. During her brief career, Cullen forged new connections between movement, sound and technology. She is remembered by her peers as a brilliant, genre spanning artist, who profoundly shaped Sydney’s early experimental art scene.

When Baker Smith began researching Cullen in 2015, she identified two boxes of archival material, listed in the collection of the National Library of Australia. When she went to Canberra to inspect them, she found one had gone missing. The second contained the records of Cullen’s most expansive project, 24 Hour Concert, 1974, a collaborative, durational performance event, staged in multiple locations across Sydney.

Like many ephemeral works from the 1970s, 24 Hour Concert lives on only as traces and in the memories of those who were present at the time. In conversation with one of Cullen’s collaborators, composer Greg Schiemer, Baker Smith learned that 24 Hour Concert took place on the day when clocks are put forward for daylight savings, meaning it ran for only 23 hours. A second, hour long concert was planned for the following year, but Cullen died before it could take place.

The story of this lost hour, together with the documents, fragments and other anecdotes surrounding 24 Hour Concert, was the starting point for this exhibition. In keeping with the collaborative spirit of 24 Hour Concert, Baker Smith has worked with dancers Wendy Morrow, Sofie Burgoyne and Brooke Stamp, artists Ella Sutherland and Samuel Hodge, and musicians Bree van Reyk, Miles Brown, and Jon Smeathers, to create a series of new works that span performance, moving image, photography and text based instructions.

These collaborative works suggest that, while traces can disappear, they might also be embodied and performed in multiple ways through strategies of intergenerational care, rewriting and reimagining. With a commitment to speculative reinvention – as a way to carry the past into the present – The Lost Hour embraces the generative capacities of Philippa Cullen’s archive.

The One Hour Concert in Hobart will take place at CAT on 9 April. Performers: Sofie Burgoyne, Wendy Morrow and Jon Smeathers.

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body; by the NSW Government through Create NSW; and UNSW Art and Design.

Featured image above: Diana Baker Smith with Samuel Hodge, The Drama of Hands, 2021. Pigment print on cotton rag paper 54 x 80cm

Opening: 17.30 Friday 18 March 2022

Exhibition: 19 March – 17 April 2022

Performance: 2pm Saturday 9 April 2022