Tina Stefanou – Hym(e)nals, 2022-2026

The elderly rescue horses in Tina Stefanou’s Hym(e)nals no longer race or work, though their bodies retain histories of labour and human use. Shown outside a defunct locomotive shed, the film places them beside the remains of an industry whose engines displaced animal labour and made speed and acceleration signs of progress. Their slow circling resists that measure of power. For more than a decade, Stefanou has volunteered with the same horses at a farm near Melbourne, attending to what each one wants and how it moves through the world. Over four years, neurodivergent teenage riders joined her in vocal workshops. Beneath translucent silk, riders and horses circle together as their laughter settles into humming, carried between bodies as breath and vibration. The title joins “hymn” and “hymen”, bringing collective song into contact with culturally charged ideas of transition. Stefanou describes the film as an artefact of these long-tended relationships and a possibility for interspecies dreaming.

Voice and listening structure Tina Stefanou’s practice across performance, sound and installation. Her projects bring together human and non-human participants in shared vocal configurations, where expression emerges through proximity and mutual attunement. By shifting between music and visual art, she examines how the voice is conditioned by labour, care and collective experience.