LONG DISTANCE CALL | SUBVERSUS

Subversus is a creative studio, artist collective and production house working across culture and commerce. We connect artistic practice and commercial opportunity, enabling work that’s ambitious and culturally sharp.

Founded by filmmakers, artists and cultural producers, Subversus was built from within these worlds. We understand commercial realities, their workflows, expectations and standards, because we work inside them every day.

Subversus acts as the bridge between artists and commercial partners, providing a support structure that protects the artist’s practice, serves the brief, and creates the conditions for shared authorship and collaboration. We make commercial production navigable for artists, and prioritise creative environments over traditional hierarchy. We work with artists who move across film, art, music, performance, fashion, installation, experiential and tech.

As a creative studio and production partner, we work alongside agencies, brands and cultural partners from concept through to delivery. Work is artist-led, brand-initiated, institutionally commissioned, or developed through independent practice and extended into commercial and public contexts.

Based in Sydney and operating globally, Subversus takes on unconventional briefs while honouring artist authorship and the ambitions of our partners.

We’re for agencies and brands seeking artist-led projects with cultural weight, for institutions exploring alternatives to traditional commissioning structures, and for artists whose work demands more room than a single category allows. Subversus is where artists and commercial partners meet on equal terms.

Subversus acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we work, create and collaborate. We pay our respects to Elders past and present, and recognise the ongoing connection of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to land, culture and story. We acknowledge that sovereignty was never ceded and commit to working with care, respect and responsibility on this land.

Tanya Babić
Co-Founder / Executive Producer
tanya@subversus.com

Jason Sukadana
Co-Founder / Creative Director
jason@subversus.com

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SUBVERSUS RAINBOW CHAN

LONG DISTANCE CALL

Presented in Primavera 2024: Young Australian Artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Long Distance Call 長途電話 is an immersive installation combining silk painting, animation, and a soundscape constructed from a single recorded phone call. The work reflects on the costly international calls exchanged between Chan’s mother and her late aunt following the family’s migration from Hong Kong to Sydney in the mid-1990s - brief, fragile moments that offered Chan rare access to the Weitou dialect and its forms of kinship.

Across a series of hanging banners, an imagined view from her aunt’s grave looks out over a changing Hong Kong, paired with a newly composed Weitou lament developed through experiments in translation with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Voiced within the gallery and rendered through deconstructed calligraphy and wax-resist techniques, the lament loops and slowly erodes, tracing how tradition, language, and memory shift across generations and distance.