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Melanie Jame Wolf is an Australian artist who lives in Berlin. She works solo and with friends, making interdisciplinary pieces about power, flows of capital, and the pervasive phenomenon of 'show business'. She examines these economies and entanglements in works for gallery, theater and screen spaces.
Coming from a background in contemporary performance, Melanie Jame works with text, sound, moving image, choreography, & textiles. Her work is concerned with the poetics and problematics of ghosts, class, pop, sensuality, gender, narratology, and the body as a political riddle. Wolf pursues an ongoing interest in analysing the idea of performance-as-labour in artistic, popular entertainment, and everyday contexts. Her work often focusses on specific performance techniques, for example: impersonation, rehearsal, or stand up - using this strategy as a lens to analyse broader political currents wherein performance is understood as a means of survival and an engine for fluidity of subjectivity.
Formally, Wolf's current focus rests in how senses of liveness work for and through the camera lens and in textiles when moving image and installation are approached as an expanded choreographic practice. Wolf's work plays along a continuum of the sublime and the ridiculous. Leaning into a hyper-stylised pop aesthetic, she is invested in humour as a strategy for critical possibility, and in working with language in subliminal and surprising ways. These efforts are guided by a continual locating of a queer-feminist ethics for the mode of production of her work.
Melanie Jame has shown at: HAU - Hebbel am Ufer; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, nGbK, The National 2019: New Australian Art Biennial, Festival of Live Art Melbourne, VAEFF Film Festival NYC, Arts Santa Monica Barcelona, Schwules Museum, Sophiensaele, Münchner Kammerspiele, Arts House Melbourne; KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Künstlerhaus Bethanien & Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane.She has been supported by Australia Council for the Arts, Creative Victoria, Hauptstadtkulturfonds, Fonds Darstellende Kunst, & Creative Europe. Residencies have included Cite international des arts, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Obsidian Coast, & Arts House. She is a 3 time Green Room Award nominee & a Churchie National Emerging Art Award, John Fries Award and Lichter Art Award finalist. She is a current nominee of the 2022 Berlin Art Prize.
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