(works)
(texts)
(dates)
Poor Opera(tions)
James Hazel
2022-ongoing
POOR/PARA OPERA(TIONS) is an exploratory ‘poor’ opera company concerned with making
‘cheap performances within one’s means’ across the three ecologies.
The first iteration B(Z)LOOM ANONYMOU$ was performed as part of Liquid Architecture’s MONO-POLY;
the second iteration THE MARINE ROOM, was developed at PACT Centre with mentorship from choreographer Martin Del Amo.
Documentation by Jeremy Elphick.
(texts)
(dates)
Poor Opera(tions)
James Hazel
2022-ongoing
POOR/PARA OPERA(TIONS) is an exploratory ‘poor’ opera company concerned with making
‘cheap performances within one’s means’ across the three ecologies.
The first iteration B(Z)LOOM ANONYMOU$ was performed as part of Liquid Architecture’s MONO-POLY;
the second iteration THE MARINE ROOM, was developed at PACT Centre with mentorship from choreographer Martin Del Amo.
Documentation by Jeremy Elphick.
James Hazel
2019
For mixed ensemble
Institutional time rendered audible. Bells operate as non-human scores, orchestrating bodies, and labour.
The bell as a technology of temporal structure.
20191128 Incubating 003 performed at Oil Tank Culture Park, Seoul, South Korea performed by Ensemble MISE-EN
Podduced by Arts Incubator(https://www.artsincubator.kr)
Atmospheres (an interminable thickness)
2025
Sound, text, fan, plastic sheet, synth, microphones, speakers
Kristina Chan,Sophia Ndaba, James Hazel
economics eclipses ecologies eclipses economics
the body is, and is, always more than its inscriptions
a hinge
In 2025, we spent time developing Atmospheres which we instigated in 2023 during the @critical_path_ Regional Fellowship.
on Awabakal and Worimi Country, with volunteer collaborators across professions and forms of labour
we explored the city’s atmospheric-classed-ecological refrains:
its creaking coal-mining and steelwork resonances
its accelerating gentrification
its working and precarious bodies, cross-classed voices
we felt and shared in coalitions of things, forces, interventions, eruptions
ordinary and extraordinary
across text, voice, writing, storytelling and site (& synthy forms between)
immense thanks to Jo, Matt, Heidi, Hannah, Jacinta for your contributions and energy
and to @catapult_dance for hosting
next in 2026: Biripi Country
supported by Create NSW @creatensw
2025
Sound, text, fan, plastic sheet, synth, microphones, speakers
Kristina Chan,Sophia Ndaba, James Hazel
economics eclipses ecologies eclipses economics
the body is, and is, always more than its inscriptions
a hinge
In 2025, we spent time developing Atmospheres which we instigated in 2023 during the @critical_path_ Regional Fellowship.
on Awabakal and Worimi Country, with volunteer collaborators across professions and forms of labour
we explored the city’s atmospheric-classed-ecological refrains:
its creaking coal-mining and steelwork resonances
its accelerating gentrification
its working and precarious bodies, cross-classed voices
we felt and shared in coalitions of things, forces, interventions, eruptions
ordinary and extraordinary
across text, voice, writing, storytelling and site (& synthy forms between)
immense thanks to Jo, Matt, Heidi, Hannah, Jacinta for your contributions and energy
and to @catapult_dance for hosting
next in 2026: Biripi Country
supported by Create NSW @creatensw
documentation by Sam James
2024
Strings, voices, electronics
Score for Mattering by James O'Hara.
Performed by The West Australian Ballet
for State Contemporary Vision
A Broadcast from Nowhere that Goes Somewhere
(I Dream Again of Loving My Destiny) )
James Hazel
2025
Performance documentation, 4K single-channel video with 2-channel sound, Microphone, Text Score, Alto Saxophone
1st photograph: Photographer @annakucera.au (Anna Kucera)
2nd Photograph: Still from video documentation by Jeremy Elphick
MERRY LANDS is the first part of the TRIBUNALS: HOME project.
This project is produced by @_ thewerewolf_ and supported by @creative.australia @ausculturalfund & @createNSW
Partners: @Liferitesfunerals
and THE COMMUNITY REFUGEE WELCOME CENTRE.
(I Dream Again of Loving My Destiny) )
James Hazel
2025
Performance documentation, 4K single-channel video with 2-channel sound, Microphone, Text Score, Alto Saxophone
1st photograph: Photographer @annakucera.au (Anna Kucera)
2nd Photograph: Still from video documentation by Jeremy Elphick
MERRY LANDS is the first part of the TRIBUNALS: HOME project.
This project is produced by @_ thewerewolf_ and supported by @creative.australia @ausculturalfund & @createNSW
Partners: @Liferitesfunerals
and THE COMMUNITY REFUGEE WELCOME CENTRE.
4k or Feral
2024
Bianca Lyla Clifford
James Hazel
Kaz Therese
Kings Artist-Run-Initiative:
14 March 2024–13 April 2024
Documentation by Sebastian Kainey
Emerging from discussions and embodiments among the three underclass artists from social-housing backgrounds, 4K or Feral explores the notion of ‘fidelity’ from a working-class, intersectional perspective.
Beyond the idea of ‘lo-fi’ as merely a co-optive or performative strategy employed by the design practices of the so-called creative class, or corporate propaganda, here we seek to examine what it means to work within the limitations of practice in a time of ongoing disaster by returning to what is available to the artists (often cheaply available media) and aligning with the ad hoc emergent.
2024
Bianca Lyla Clifford
James Hazel
Kaz Therese
Kings Artist-Run-Initiative:
14 March 2024–13 April 2024
Documentation by Sebastian Kainey
Emerging from discussions and embodiments among the three underclass artists from social-housing backgrounds, 4K or Feral explores the notion of ‘fidelity’ from a working-class, intersectional perspective.
Beyond the idea of ‘lo-fi’ as merely a co-optive or performative strategy employed by the design practices of the so-called creative class, or corporate propaganda, here we seek to examine what it means to work within the limitations of practice in a time of ongoing disaster by returning to what is available to the artists (often cheaply available media) and aligning with the ad hoc emergent.
2025
Workshop Performance
George Paton Gallery
How can we better understand experiences of precarity and social class within late-stage capitalist institutions?
Facilitated by artist and sociologist James Hazel, this workshop will focus on creating a series of ‘structural listening’ scores aimed at exploring the social practices, experiences, and embodiments rendered invisible by neoliberal governmentality and administrative logics. Through the lens of song, music, sound, and the sonic arts — and drawing on Brandon LaBelle’s idea of poor acoustics — we will explore what it means to attune to the barely audible and pre(care)ious thresholds of under/heard socioeconomic experience.
By engaging with auditory knowledge(s), we ask how listening might open up new ways of understanding and attending to soft-lives lived in precarity.
(Under)scoring the Commons
2022
Single-channel HD video with 2-channel sound, 8 minutes
informed by broader artistic, activist, and research practices (and earlier projects such as DANGER/DANCER and Cont. Score) concerned with the acoustics of gentrification, (under)scoring the commons is an ongoing project that aims to: pre(care)iously listen to the shifting soundscapes & sonic practices of gentrified environments & how these index social and interpersonal relations within communities / emphasising ‘staying with’ multiversal working/under-class histories, localities, social-ecologies, meanings, and memories, across sustained lives and livelihoods into uncertain futures / maintaining a porous structure: welcoming collaborators at any career level, life stage, occupation, or discipline. Documentation by Jeremy Elphick.
2022
Single-channel HD video with 2-channel sound, 8 minutes
informed by broader artistic, activist, and research practices (and earlier projects such as DANGER/DANCER and Cont. Score) concerned with the acoustics of gentrification, (under)scoring the commons is an ongoing project that aims to: pre(care)iously listen to the shifting soundscapes & sonic practices of gentrified environments & how these index social and interpersonal relations within communities / emphasising ‘staying with’ multiversal working/under-class histories, localities, social-ecologies, meanings, and memories, across sustained lives and livelihoods into uncertain futures / maintaining a porous structure: welcoming collaborators at any career level, life stage, occupation, or discipline. Documentation by Jeremy Elphick.
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(Comoning Atmospheres)
2024-
Supported through HAIR AIR Cité Internationale des Arts Residency; and CREATENSW
Exhibition documentation by Cristea Zhao
investigates the (counter)economies of ventilation shafts, originally installed as part of the Metro system in the early 20th century, when gentrifying social engineers sought to ‘breathe fresh air’ into the city, displacing working-class communities in turn. Beyond their ‘practical’ function, these sites also operate as more-than-weather systems of atmospheric ‘commoning’ for precarious communities and individuals in Parisian urban spaces during the extreme forces of Winter.
Bricolage scores, interactive browser, collected sound recordings
Exhibited June 2019, 107 Projects, Redfern
Exhibition photographs by Tina Stefanou
The Cont. Score Project is an assemblage of hastily written scores, and collected sound objects - mainly those of the sound contributions from the public. Repositioning the sacred status of the music score, and following the practice of fluxus bricolage, which emphasises the “not-well-made” or “almost-made,” these handwritten scores (installed in various Sydney suburbs) offer instructions to perform everyday sonic activities (singing, laughing, beatboxing) which, in turn, coax serendipitous contributions from the public through a website accessed via smart phones.
Cont. Score calls into question utopic ideas (including my own failures in this context) about democratising art for a *stable* public and the tensions that arise between two agendas that dominated the work at different stages and which only occurred to me post-exhibition: i .e. earnest aspirations for creating collective work vs. the commodification of public data within neo-liberal cultural sphere
Cont. Score project discussed in:Cleo Mees (2020). "Letters to Sheila: Improvisational Scores in Creative Practice Research". Choreographic Practices, Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 9 - 27.
https://doi.org/10.1386/chor_00009_1
Guitar, metal plectrums, delay-pedal, amp, fan
Comissioned by Maitland Regional Art Gallery. Exhibited march-june, 2018, as part of Sonant Bodies’ self-titled exhibtion
with Victoria Pham