The STARE
What does it mean to truly be seen?
The STARE is a long-form, evolving project by Second Echo Ensemble that began as an act of radical visibility and has grown into an international conversation about presence, representation, and connection.
At its heart, The STARE is simple and confronting: a series of portrait photographs and video works in which SEE artists look directly at the viewer. No performance. No explanation. Just time, attention, and the invitation to stay.
Origins
When Stages Disappeared
The STARE emerged during COVID, when theatres went dark and gathering became impossible. With traditional stages unavailable, SEE asked a different question:
If we can’t invite audiences in, where can we meet them instead?
The answer was everywhere.
Portraits and video works appeared on television screens, airport monitors, social media feeds, telephone poles, civic activations and the backs of buses. The work lived in public space, domestic space, and digital space. It met people while they were waiting, scrolling, passing by. These were not advertisements. They were interruptions. Moments of mutual attention.
The gaze was steady. Unapologetic. Human.
Experiment
From Interruption to Encounter
As restrictions lifted, The STARE shifted again, moving from dispersed public visibility into shared physical space.
In 2022, the work was presented as an experimental exhibition at Salamanca Arts Centre, installed in the Long Gallery as a testing ground. Audiences were invited to linger, to move slowly, and to experience what happens when looking becomes reciprocal.
The response was immediate. People stayed longer than expected. Conversations formed quietly in the room.
Exhibition
A Complete Exhibition
In 2023, The STARE was realised as a full exhibition at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.
Installed across multiple spaces, the exhibition brought together photographic portraits, moving image, sound, and spatial design. Visitors encountered SEE artists at scale and at eye level, held in a sustained exchange of looking and being looked at.
The exhibition was extended due to popular demand, affirming what SEE had sensed from the beginning: audiences were hungry for work that asks for time, presence, and ethical attention rather than spectacle.
The Next Evolution
In 2026, The STARE enters a new phase reimagining the tour.
Rather than asking how the exhibition can tour in conventional ways, SEE is asking harder, more necessary questions:
How can work travel ethically, without extracting from artists or communities?
How can touring be sustainable, environmentally and financially?
What does it mean to send work digitally, to be locally installed and locally held?
How can conversations be provoked across distance without defaulting to Zoom?
This next iteration explores distributed presence. Digital works that can be installed across Tasmania, Australia, and internationally. Localised public programs shaped by place.
Conversations that unfold in rooms, libraries, galleries, foyers, and outdoor spaces. Moments of shared attention that are both intimate and global.
Action Research and New Models
In collaboration with Contemporary Art Tasmania, SEE will undertake a period of action research to develop an audacious new touring model for 2027 and beyond.
This phase will test:
Remote installation models supported by artists and communities
Hybrid public programs that privilege local facilitation over centralised delivery
Scalable formats that allow The STARE to exist simultaneously in multiple places
New ways of measuring impact beyond attendance numbers
The aim is not just to tour The STARE, but to redesign how intimate, access-led work moves through the world.
Past partners
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If you are anywhere near Nipaluna in the coming days you must get yourself down to @tasmuseum and see the current exhibition in the Bond Store basement! It’s quite simply the best use of Video Art that I have EVER seen and it is imbued with a profound message. It’s moving and magical and you need to do yourself a Molly Meldrum level favour and see it before it closes on December 10th. Hats off to @secondechoensemble for creating such powerful work 🙌🙌🙌
Visitor, Tasmanian Museum & Art Gallery, 2023
Still Looking. Still Becoming.
The STARE is not finished. It is a living project that continues to change as the world changes.
It asks us to slow down.
To meet another person’s gaze.
To consider what it means to be visible, and who gets to decide.
This next chapter invites partners, communities, and audiences to take part, not as spectators, but as co-holders of the work.
Stay with us.
