Milestone

Creator/Performer/Co-director: William Yang

One of Australia’s most celebrated artists, William is a trailblazing photographer and performance artist. His acclaimed performance works, presented at major Festivals and Arts Centres across Australia and the world, draw from his vast photographic archive to tell powerful stories about immigration, culture, sexuality and creativity.

His photographs are held in major Australian gallery and museum collections, including the National Gallery of Australia and the Museum of Contemporary Art. He is hailed as a leading influence on subsequent generations of Australian artists. Through his work, William specifically explores issues of cultural and sexual identity, integrating this practice with writing, performance and film to create unique performance pieces.

Beginning as a playwright, he turned to photographing parties and social events to earn a living. His 1977 exhibition, Sydneyphiles, and 1984 book Sydney Diary, recorded the emergent gay community and Sydney party scene of the 1970s and 1980s. In the 80s, he began to explore his Chinese heritage, and his themes expanded to include landscapes and the Chinese in Australia. He began performing monologues with slide projections in theatres in 1989. These slide shows were recognised as a unique form of performance theatre and have become his preferred way to show his work. He has toured Australia and the world to acclaim with shows such as Sadness, Friends of Dorothy, The North, Blood Links and Shadows.

Most recently, in 2018 he created PARTY (verb) about the 80s queer party scene in Sydney (Liveworks Festival), transferring the work in 2019 to Sydney Opera House (UnWrapped Festival). In 2021 he was honoured with a retrospective exhibition at QAGOMA, Brisbane. For this the gallery commissioned a new performance piece, In Search of Home. In 2023 he created Gay Sydney a Memoir for Sydney WorldPride.

A featured artist in the upcoming Biennale of Sydney: A Thousand Suns (March-June 2024), William has held significant solo and group exhibitions at the National Gallery of Australia; National Library of Australia; Queensland Art Gallery, Gallery of Modern Art; National Gallery of Victoria; Museum of Contemporary Art Australia; Higashikawa Arts Centre (Japan); San Diego Museum of Art (USA); and Art Gallery of NSW. His work is held in numerous major public and private collections nationally and internationally.

Composer/Pianist: Elena Kats-Chernin AO

One of Australia’s foremost contemporary composers, Elena Kats-Chernin's vibrant and distinctive music across all genres has reached millions worldwide.

Among her extensive oeuvre are works in nearly all genres: instrumental solo and ensemble pieces, symphonic, chamber orchestral and concertos, for plays, ballet and musical theatre, choral and other vocal music for such organisations as Australian Chamber Orchestra, the Australian World Orchestra, the Symphony Orchestras of Adelaide, Tasmania, Melbourne, Perth and Sydney, the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra, the City of London Sinfonia, the Swedish Chamber Orchestra, as well as the opera houses of Berlin, Antwerp, Stuttgart, as well as Luxembourg Philharmonie and the Opera Australia. She has collaborated with well-known artists such as Meryl Tankard, Barrie Kosky, Richard Tognetti, Michael Collins, Katie Noonan, Tamara-Anna Cislowska, Benjamin Northey, Marin Alsop, and many more.

Elena has composed scores for 4 feature length silent films, the most recent of which, Variete, was recorded by the Cologne Radio Orchestra, and premiered live to the film by the Belgian National Orchestra in 2023.

Elena’s recent score for the Golden Globe/Oscar-nominated and award-winning claymation Memoir of a Snail from Oscar-winning Melbourne director Adam Elliot, was performed by Jane Sheldon and the Australian Chamber Orchestra. It’s also nominated for AACTA 2025 in the category Best Score for a Feature Film.

Elena collaborated for the first time with William Yang on his 2012 Sydney Festival project, I am a camera, and recently with the world premiere of Milestone for Sydney Festival and AsiaTOP.

Performing without a conductor, Camerata – Queensland’s Chamber Orchestra’s Artistic Associates and their guests proudly take full ownership of their music-making in the spirit of chamber music to form a thriving, refreshing and acclaimed voice to empower artists, inspire audiences, and enrich communities through music.