Material Issue opens at The Substation with a live dubplate performance
Marina Rosenfeld has spent 30 years turning turntables into something stranger and more personal than DJ culture ever intended. Now Melbourne gets to see the results up close, with her first survey exhibition in the Southern Hemisphere landing at The Substation in Newport.
Material Issue runs from 20 February through 2 May, bringing together large-format video installations, photographic works and textiles that trace Rosenfeld’s approach to sound as a physical, social and deeply tactile practice. The exhibition is curated by Lawrence English of Brisbane experimental label Room40, which has released much of Rosenfeld’s recorded work.
Material Issue
- The Substation, 1 Market Street, Newport
- 20 February – 2 May
- Wed-Sat, 11am – 5pm
- Free entry to exhibition
Opening night performance: Marina Rosenfeld + Jana Irmert
- 20 February
- Doors 7:30pm, performance 8pm
- $35 GA / $30 concession / $27 First Nations and Hobsons Bay locals
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Rosenfeld’s live practice centres on dubplates – custom vinyl records she cuts from her own recordings of voice, instruments and found sound. Rather than mixing existing tracks, she composes in real time using these one-off platters as raw material. The records degrade with each play, meaning the physical wear becomes part of the composition. No two performances sound the same because the medium itself keeps changing.
The opening night pairs Rosenfeld with Berlin-based sound artist Jana Irmert, who presents Portals – a work built entirely from hydrophone and ultrasound recordings captured in Brazil and Colombia. Irmert’s piece pulls audio from the Amazon’s underwater ecosystems, frequencies normally beyond human hearing, and transposes them into something we can actually perceive. The result sits somewhere between field recording and speculative fiction about what it might mean to listen across species.
Rosenfeld’s CV reads like a checklist of the world’s most prestigious experimental art contexts: MoMA, the Park Avenue Armory, the Whitney Biennial, Documenta 14, the 2024 Gwangju Biennial. She’s also created live scores for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and choreographers Ralph Lemon and Maria Hassabi. In 2024 she received the Alpert Award in Visual Art.
The Substation has positioned itself as Melbourne’s western home for adventurous cross-disciplinary programming, and this sits squarely in that territory – sound art that refuses to stay in one lane, presented in a venue built for exactly that kind of blurring.
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This article was made in partnership with The Substation.
