Exhalation turns the Whalers Tunnel into a living organism – one that breathes, listens and shifts with the wind. Created by Madeleine Flynn, Tim Humphrey (Australia) and Vuth Lyno (Cambodia), this immersive sound and sculpture installation is a quiet act of listening, care and renewal.

The work draws on a ritual practiced in Cambodia and across Southeast Asia, where Buddhist monks wrap orange cloth around trees in gestures of projection and care. Here, thousands of golden paper forms — echoing the form of the Kodjeningara flower from WA’s South West — flutter across the tunnel like flickers of light on the wind.

Sound enters on the breeze. Kinetic speakers respond to shifting wind currents, turning the tunnel into a space where sound is alive. The wind plays the tunnel like an instrument, and the installation shifts moment by moment, hour to hour.

This is a site heavy with histories: carved stone, prison walls, whaling ports. Exhalation doesn’t deny that weight — it leans into it, offering a counter gesture of tenderness and attention. It invites you to walk through, pause, sit, stay. To feel the tunnel differently.

Flynn and Humphrey create award-winning sonic environments that reshape how we listen. Vuth brings a deeply embedded, community-centred Cambodian practice shaped by memory, ritual and social transformation. Together, they lean into the wind — as a practical and spiritual enabling of change.

Date and Time

13-30 Nov (Thur-Sun)
11am – 8pm

Location

WHALERS TUNNEL

Entry

Free

Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey are Australian artists who create unexpected situations for listening. They have a long-term highly awarded collaborative practice. Their work is driven by a curiosity about listening in human and non-human ecologies and seeks to evolve and engage with new processes and audiences through public and participative interventions. They work with emerging technologies, cultural groups, sites, and experts across practice and ensemble-made processes. Their current creative obsessions include acoustics of the dark, existential risk, and ecological and cultural impacts of practice. Maddie and Tim are based in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. Maddie and Tim’s works have been presented by major festivals and contemporary art spaces, including Setouchi Triennale and Kinosaki Arts Centre (Japan); Busan Sea Art Biennale, Ansan Arts Festival, and Seoul Street Arts Festival (Republic of Korea); Brighton Festival and Science Gallery London (UK); Sonica Festival ; Edinburgh Festival and Counterflows Festival (Scotland); ANTI Festival and Oulu Capital of Culture (Finland); Prague Quadrennial (Czech Republic); Theatre der Welt (Germany); Ars Electronica (Austria); Melbourne Festival, Perth Festival, Sydney Festival, MONA FOMA, ACCA, ArtsHouse, Melbourne Recital Centre, Substation, Sydney Opera House and Bundanon, and Science Gallery Melbourne (Australia).

Madeleine and Tim met Lyno at ADAM, Taipei in 2019, and the three worked together at Lyno’s invitation to create Wave Gate: A Shrine Passage for the Busan Sea Art Festival in 2021. Alongside Bureau of Works, they created Thinking and Acting Time, an online initiative in 2021-2022 to connect fifteen artists across the Asia-Pacific region in practice-sharing. The artists recently were in residence at Phnom Penh (June 2024) where they presented a workshop in Sound in Art Practice and researched their joint project, supported by Playking Foundation.

Vuth Lyno (b. 1982, Phnom Penh) is an artist, curator, and educator interested in space, cultural history, and knowledge production. His artworks often engage with micro and overlooked histories, notions of community, place-making, and the production of social relations. He works across various media including photography, video, sculpture, light, and sound, often constructing architectural or spatial bodies as situations for interaction. He believes in the potency of collectivity, storytelling, and the agency of cultural objects as potential pathways to reimagine our sociality. Lyno was a member of Stiev Selapak collective which founded and ran Sa Sa Art Projects, a 15 years initiative supported the development of contemporary visual arts landscape in Cambodia.

Lyno has presented his artworks in Cambodian and international venues, including at major exhibitions and festivals such as the Documenta Fifteen, Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Biennale of Sydney, Singapore International Festival of Arts, Gwangju Biennale, and Thailand Biennale. His artworks have appeared at institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei; Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; Metropolitan Museum of Manila; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; the National Gallery of Indonesia, Jakarta; Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw; Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou; Osage Gallery, Hong Kong; and Chiang Mai City Arts & Cultural Centre.

Whalers Tunnel

13 Mrs Trivett Pl,
Fremantle

More information coming soon…

More information coming soon…

More information coming soon…