Jincheng Deng, Tom Denize, Majed Fayad, Briony Galligan, and Jen Valender 

Curated by Channon Goodwin and Chantelle Mitchell  

17 November 2025 - 30 January 2026 

Opening Friday 28 November 2025, 6-8pm 

The George Paton Gallery presents Bells and Whistles, an exhibition of postgraduate work from Masters and PhD students at the Victorian College of the Arts. Featuring Jincheng Deng, Tom Denize, Majed Fayad, Briony Galligan, and Jen Valender, the exhibition brings together artists whose practices span installation, moving image, sculpture, performance, and sound. Together, these projects reflect the multiplicity of contemporary artistic research and the varied concerns and conditions that shape it.

Across the exhibition, viewers encounter practices that engage with material possibility, more-than-human relations, queer futurity, diasporic experience, and architectures of care and play. Jincheng Deng works through the complexities of materiality via composite sculptural forms that embed translation as methodology and employ an uncanny, disarming humour. Jen Valender’s cinematic works investigate nonhuman performance through encounters with landscape and material process. Tom Denize’s installations consider queer temporalities and belief systems, tracing circulations of memory and affect across time and space. Majed Fayad reimagines Arab futurism through artistic and social practices that cultivate hospitality and diasporic gathering. Across drawing, installation, sculpture, and performance, Briony Galligan works through theatrical and architectural structures that explore order and authority, the possibilities of play, and traces of queer desire.

Rather than illustrating a single theme, Bells and Whistles presents a meshwork of practices—each shaped by differing questions, experiences, and contexts of making. The exhibition reflects the conditions of postgraduate study as a site of dialogue and experimentation.

Jincheng Deng 
https://www.jinchengdeng.com/about 

Tom Denize is an artist and writer from Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa, now based in Naarm/Melbourne, where they are completing a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne. Working through installation, video, and photography, Denize explores queer theologies, temporalities, and the relationships between belief, desire, and place. Their recent exhibitions include CHTHONIC CHORUS (Incinerator Gallery), Bangkok Experimental Film Festival, Play_station Offsite Film Festival, and Obscuring The Self, the Veil Between Yours and Theirs (Bundoora Homestead). 

Majed Fayad is a Lebanese-Australian multidisciplinary artist based in Naarm/Melbourne. His practice examines the intersections of Middle Eastern and Western cultures through immersive, performative installations that explore Arab identity, in-betweenness, nostalgia, and futurism. Through sound, movement, and spatial design, Fayad reimagines dreamscapes of Arab futurity and hospitality. 

Briony Galligan was born on palawa Country and is based in Naarm/Melbourne. Working across drawing, installation, and sculpture, Galligan creates environments that hover between coherence and dissolution. Their practice considers objects as conduits through states of transformation, exploring conditions such as queerness, illness, and permeability. 

Jen Valender is an artist from Aotearoa New Zealand, based in Naarm/Melbourne. She holds a Master of Fine Arts (Research) and is a PhD candidate at the Victorian College of the Arts. Valender’s work spans performance, video, and installation and has been presented internationally at venues including the Saatchi Gallery (London), MONA (Hobart), Arsenale Nord (Venice), and Heide Museum of Modern Art (Melbourne).