What's On / Jun-Jul — correspondences

Jun 6

Jun 6 What's On / Jun-Jul

Emma Thomson

Stories, Residencies, Cecilia Sordi Campos, Tiana Khasi, Savina Hopkins

What’s On / Jun-Jul

WHAT’S ON / JUN—JUL

BRUNSWICK| 6.06.25

Announcing—
Savina Hopkins/End Credits for a Misaligned World.Thank you for Inciting Joy with us.

Today, we’re excited to introduce Savina Hopkins and her project, End Credits for a Misaligned World, our second residency project for the year, running from 28 June until 20 September.

End Credits for a Misaligned World continues Savina’s longstanding inquiry into the creative urge to play and make with found, scavenged and repurposed materials and objects as raw art material. It’s an inquiry that begins with a question: What can we learn about ourselves and the world around us from the unwanted material things?

Read on to learn more about Savina’s exciting project and planned activities.

Thank you for joining the closing weeks of Inciting Joy, our gallery-based closing celebration of Cecilia Sordi Campos’ final exhibit and our community performance, featuring Tiana Khasi, last Friday.

Thank you to guest speaker Jaye Kranz for her eloquent words, venue partner Balam Balam Place for sharing their beautiful space, supporting musicians Ryotaro Noshiro and Sam Kuzich and our community singers for joining their transportive sounds and voices. Thank you, Fipe and Living Koko, for the delectable hot drinking cacao! Thank you, Arts Merri-Bek, for supporting our work. Last but not least, thank you to our Volunteer Team, without whom our work would not be possible.

We look forward to sharing news of the release of catalogues, including interviews with Tiana and Cecilia, exploring their residencies and selected artworks offered for sale.

Today, we close for studio maintenance/break. If you have a sales inquiry or urgent matter, please email info@correspondences.work. Otherwise, we look forward to seeing you when we reopen on Saturday, 28 June, with Savina Hopkins/End Credits for a Misaligned World.

Warmly

Emma Thomson

correspondences

Image credits: Savina Hopkins, To hear these options again, press 9, 2024 — series, ongoing, scissors, legal tape, bias binding, cord, thread, ribbon, bandages, rags, dimensions variable. © Savina Hopkins (above) Images from our community performance at Balam Balam Place. Photography: Saskia Yeung (below).

BRUNSWICK| 28.6.25—20.09.25

Upcoming projects/exhibitions

Savina Hopkins / End Credits for a Misaligned World
28 June–20 September 2025

“Certainty is the opposite of thinking. I’m certain of it”.

—Sarah Manguso

Savina Hopkins explores the interface between damage and preservation and the dynamics of interpersonal relationships. She enjoys working in a space where humour and history rub shoulders, where nostalgia and discomfort mingle. She is attracted to working with salvaged materials and objects imbued with specific histories and uses. Contemplation and manipulation of these materials, and the ideas and stories that are embedded in them, drive her creative practice.

End Credits for a Misaligned World continues Savina’s longstanding inquiry into the creative urge to play and make with found, scavenged and repurposed materials and objects as raw art material. It’s an inquiry that begins with a question: What can we learn about ourselves and the world around us from the unwanted material things? The project is presented in three parts.

––Part 1: The first part of the project showcases To hear these options again, press 9, 2024, an ongoing series of scissors, bound by materials that bear the imprints of bureaucratic, legal and medical systems. Rendered dysfunctional by their bindings, the scissors represent individual and governing bodies. Savina writes:

Since navigating aged care services on behalf of my mum, I've been preoccupied with the functions, frustrations and failures of governing systems; how bureaucracies place undue onus on the individuals they are theoretically designed to serve, while the private companies and government departments operating the systems are rarely held accountable for misconduct, wrongdoing and abuse of power. Many systems, for example those facilitating aged care services, Robodebt and refugee applications, are dysfunctional and not fit for purpose. By disabling the action of scissors with dressings including legal ‘red tape’, my work invites reflection on impersonal automation, unnecessary complexity, and the lack of transparency and accountability in bureaucracies.

––Part 2: The second part features End Credits for a Misaligned World, a new series of assemblage under development alongside an evolving display of objects and materials that Savina has been inspired by or is experimenting with. Each week, she will add to the display, examining, discussing and making with audiences during community making at the end of the month. This new series draws inspiration from the artist’s aphorisms about life, ponderings about loss, aging, relationships, vulnerability, suffering, and finitude. Combining Savina’s witty words and exacting material resolution, the works provoke and invite audiences to question their interpretation and imagine their contexts. Like all good aphorisms, there is an infinitude of interpretations to be imagined.

––Part 3: The third and final part of the project presents an expanded display of works from the End Credits for a Misaligned World series, together with a small published book of selected aphorisms. A public artwork inspired by Savina’s phrases will also be realised within the framework of a disused billboard or series of shopfronts along Sydney Road, inviting the local community to read, laugh and be provoked before making their way to correspondences to delve into the words and the deeper relevance of the artwork's materiality.

Savina Hopkins’ End Credits for a Misaligned World invites us to join her as she plays with the unwanted material things. Through creative work that privileges a spirit of play, her project reminds us to look more closely at the preciousness of found, scavenged and repurposed materials.

At the heart of the project is a proposition. Creative play that foregrounds unwanted material things is a serious pursuit. It prompts us to look inwards and outwards to the world around us to question and understand the material’s origins, the context around its unwanted nature and our human relation to it.

In today’s capitalist, digital information society, humans continue to produce unwanted things on a massive scale. Technological advancement has brought remarkable human developments and greater visibility to the sheer scale of this problem. However, it has also ephemeralised the material world, making language, the human environment, more than nature, the body and the materials we craft.

It’s changed our reverence for objects and things that kept mass consumption in check. It’s also fundamentally changed how we communicate and gather together meaningfully. With so much information instantly at our fingertips, we often know before we think. We form self-righteous opinions that leave little space for questioning and uncertainty. As the writer and poet Sarah Manguso writes: “Certainty is the opposite of thinking. I’m certain of it”.

Come play and think with us. We’d love to see you.

Keep reading or press the button below to explore and book for Upcoming Special Events/Activities.

—Emma Thomson
Curator/Producer correspondences

UPCOMING SPECIAL EVENTS/ACTIVITIES

BRUNSWICK| 28.6.25—26.07.25

Upcoming special events & activities

Savina Hopkins / End Credits for a Misaligned World
Friday, 4 July, 6:30-8:30 PM
correspondences Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country 39 Sydney Road Bulleke-bek (Brunswick) VIC

Together with Savina, we warmly invite you to join us for the opening of End Credits for a Misaligned World.

Press the ‘JOIN THE GUEST LIST’ button below to RSVP.

Attendance is free. RSVP essential.

Image credit: Savina Hopkins, To hear these options again, press 9, 2024 — series, ongoing, scissors, legal tape, bias binding, cord, thread, ribbon, bandages, rags, dimensions variable. © Savina Hopkins

JOIN THE GUEST LIST

Monthly Art Walk — Visit The Veil at Buxton Contemporary
Friday, 11 July, 11:00 AM-12:30 PM
Corner Southbank Boulevard & Dodds Street, Southbank 3006
The University of Melbourne

Join us for our July Art Walk, when we will visit Buxton Contemporary to experience The Veil.

Plan/meeting location:
—Start Buxton Contemporary entry @ 10:55 am for 11:00 AM entry.
—End Buxton Contemporary at @ 11:00/11:30 AM.
Note: The gallery at correspondences will reopen after lunch at 1:00 PM.

Press the ‘JOIN THE GUEST LIST’ button below to RSVP.

Attendance is free. Bookings essential.

Image credit: 2023 Art Walk to see Slippery Images at NGV featuring artworks by Ali McCann.

JOIN THE GUEST LIST

Studio drop-in —Self-guided community making
Savina Hopkins/End Credits for a Misaligned World
Saturday, 12 July, 16 August, 6 September, 2:00-4:00 PM - Three sessions
correspondences Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country 39 Sydney Road Bulleke-bek (Brunswick) VIC

Audiences are invited to join artist Savina Hopkins and the correspondences' team for self-guided making as part of End Credits for a Misaligned World. We'll be working with found, scavenged and repurposed objects and materials. During her project, Savina will bring different materials to play with, experiment with, and make with audiences as she develops her new series of assemblages. Drawing materials will also be available for guests to draw if they prefer, as an opportunity to think more deeply about the objects and materials in the space.

Press the ‘JOIN THE GUEST LIST’ button below to RSVP.

Bookings essential. Small donations to support our work are gratefully received.

Image credit: Community making during Inciting Joy. Photo: Saskia Yeung

JOIN THE GUEST LIST

Open late — Savina Hopkins/End Credits for a Misaligned World & Multilingual Poetry Reading/Listening Circle
Friday, 25 July, 22 August, 12 September - Three sessions
September is also a closing celebration
correspondences Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country 39 Sydney Road Bulleke-bek (Brunswick) VIC

We invite you to explore Savina Hopkins/End Credits for a Misaligned World after dark and join our Multilingual Poetry Reading/Listening Circle, held one Friday every month from 6:30 to 8:00 p.m.

We’ll explore the latest exhibit together. Then, we’ll settle down to read or listen to poetry together. Please bring a poem to share/read in whatever language you like. Or, just come to listen.

Please note: Our final session is also a closing celebration of Savina’s project.

Press the ‘JOIN THE GUEST LIST’ button below to RSVP.

Attendance is free. Bookings essential. Small donations to support our work are gratefully received.

Image credit: Poetry reading/listening circle during Inciting Joy. Photo: Javad Kashani

JOIN THE GUEST LIST

Acknowledgement of Country

We respectfully acknowledge the Sovereign Custodians of the land and waters upon which we live and work, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation. We pay our respect to their Elders past, present and emerging. We extend this respect to all First Peoples.