Justine Youssef: ‘Somewhat Eternal’ at the Institute of Modern Art

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A parsley stem is placed over a Samsung mobile phone displaying an image of a pillow resting on a bed; detached from location and absent of body, the ritual endures.

This poetic action and hauntingly absent frame, captured in Darug/Sydney based artist Justine Youssef’s three-channel video work exhibited as part of the multi-sensory installation Somewhat Eternal (2023) at the Institute of Modern Art (IMA) in Meanjin/Brisbane, is a stark and timely echo of the ongoing impacts of colonialism. Somewhat Eternal grapples with questions concerning the displacement and attempted erasure of distinct global communities and the lasting effects this can have on diaspora peoples’ connections to their homelands.

Filmed in Lebanon, a multi-channel video work formulates the central focus of Somewhat Eternal. The video follows Youssef’s aunt performing R’sasa, an alchemic practice intended to ward off the evil eye in the pursuit of healing and repair from ailments and misfortunes. Due to their embodied knowledge of local ecologies, R’sasa has been practiced and sustained by generations of Youssef’s family, despite famine and military occupation. Reprised here, a mobile phone and WhatsApp video call become mediators of hybridity, enabling the ritual with parsley, water, lead and body to be shared, despite being fragmented and altered so as to traverse geographies. An uncannily familiar interaction for many migrant, refugee and Indigenous families who have formed an immediacy with the virtual to chart cartographies of the self despite, and within, the complexities of colonisation, globalisation and localisation. The persistence and resilience of Indigenous cultures to adapt to this networked connection stands in contestation to the changing cultural landscape and continues to press toward the decomposition of colonial power.

Filigree and embroidered text border the walls and suspended rose blankets rest in both gallery spaces. As our movement reveals the haunting histories contained in this text, we learn that the lead in R’sasa is reclaimed from the ammunition remains of AK-47 guns supplied by Australian weapons exports to Israel during their invasion of Lebanon between 1982 to 2000. A horrifying, yet unsurprising, parallel of our nation’s complicit action in upholding and promoting Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian land and genocidal practices against Indigenous communities both in Palestine and on our own soil, with police brutality and increasing black deaths in custody an enduring source of national shame.

Truth-telling is embodied in Youssef's exhibition, framed by object, relation and ritual, to supersede the reductive and bias accounts of history found in western archives. A subtle perfume distilled from blessed milk thistle, burnet rose, Damask rose and Lebanese cedar permeates from the blanket textiles located throughout the gallery. This complex blend of aromatics is brought together by histories of land subjugation and occupation, while balancing aspirations for renewal through resilience. The scent acts as a surrogate body, reflecting adaptations to conduit bodies as dates feed displaced Palestinian babies instead of their mother’s milk.

The cardinal coloured and hydrosols steeped gallery offers a space in which to build solidarity in this time of crisis. Through Youssef’s work of cultural persistence and resistance, we are urged to sustain each other in our collective education, protest and demand for the end of the siege on Gaza, and annihilating attacks on Rafah.

As the photograph of Youssef’s pillow is laid on the bed with the parsley stem, we see in the video that her aunt ensures the phone is placed on charge as it rests overnight. This common gesture becomes a poignant commitment towards cultural endurance and forges it as somewhat eternal. These virtual formations facilitate and transform the possibilities for diaspora affiliation and aversion to colonial regimes. Affirming an inherent belonging with their homelands across oceans, land and networks. Somewhat Eternal asks us to consider how we might sustain solidarity and actively seek alternative futures that break our acquiescence to the creation of displacement.

Georgia Hayward, Meanjin/Brisbane

Curated by Stella Rosa McDonald, Tulleah Pearce and Patrice Sharkey, ‘Somewhat Eternal’ is on display at the Institute of Modern Art until 7 April 2024.

Inside and out: Notions of interiority at the NGV Triennial

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The third NGV Triennial showcases international and local art, featuring new pieces alongside the National Gallery of Victoria’s permanent collection. Stemming from the curatorial prompt of ‘Magic, Matter and Memory’, the third NGV Triennial features more than 100 artists and interacts skillfully with the National Gallery of Victoria’s permanent collection.

The NGV Triennial features a range of international and local artists whose work spans installations, sculpture and portraiture, highlighting the interior and exterior elements of the human experience as well as the gallery’s architecture. Crucially, in an exhibition featuring the likes of Tracy Emin and Yoko Ono, the voices of local female artists are no less strong and no less resonant, and provide a piercing snapshot of the inner lives of the artist and the subject in time, space and dreams.

Prudence Flint’s series ‘Hunting and Fishing’ (2023) depicts the Melbourne artist’s feminist interiors. Interestingly, the curators positioned the meditative portraits in Flint’s signature pastel tones amidst the ruminative portraits of the Dutch Masters, thought to symbolise the birth of the individual subject in modern European life. It’s a juxtaposition Flint finds apt, as well as flattering. ‘I had no idea how it was going to look,’ remembers Flint. ‘They came to me about three years ago and told me I was going to be put in the Dutch Master’s section. The carpet hadn’t been put down and I really loved it. I thought the paintings looked beautiful there.’

Flint cites portraits like A Fine Romance (2005) which depicts a female painter sitting in front of an easel, as having the mirror-like effect of individual self-discovering, speaking not only of the self’s invention but what she calls ‘a sense of underplayed violence and implied threat.’

In the work of Kosovan artist Petrit Halilaj, the process of invention involves transforming war to whimsy. ‘The catalyst of Very volcanic over this green feather (2021),’ explains Halilaj, ‘was a series of drawings I made while I was living in a refugee camp during the Kosovo War (1989–99). I wasn’t able to go back to them until 2021, when I created the exhibition for Tate St Ives. So, this project emerged as an intimate response to particular events such as war and displacement. It was a reaction, not a discovery. Through time, I found art to be a potent tool for empowering through memory. Art gives me a sense of being able to alter the course of my personal history, and by consequence, that of collective ones.’ Indeed, the NGV Triennial can be seen as a historical document of how art practice contributes to collective histories.

Halilaj’s drawings are blown-up in size and hung in the centre of the gallery. The installation leaves a series of gaps and open spaces where people can walk amongst and interact with the images of birds, trees and people; depictions that reflect a distressing period in Halilaj’s war-torn childhood. ‘How do you translate your experiences once you lose a sense of home and then you have to invent your way of being in the world?’ Halilaj asks rhetorically as I speak to him one evening. ‘I made this series of drawings when I was 13, when an Italian psychologist arrived at the camps and asked us kids to express our memories and experiences with felt-tip pens. I have always drawn a lot, but in that context, drawing became a tool for survival. I drew the images that were sculpted in my mind. Most of them depicted scenes from the war I had witnessed or heard of. Others were my way to escape that situation, like a bird. I watched these flying beings and imagined doing the same, someday. The birds in my drawings are usually very colorful, extravagant creatures. They represent memory and the possibility for a better future.’

From the psychological interiors of the female experience to the creative rendering of one child’s experiences of war, the NGV Triennial represents a range of landscapes and dreamscapes, which turn matter, memory and subjects inside and out. Nowhere is this question of interiority and exteriority grappled with more thoroughly than in Sheila Hicks’s sculpture Nowhere to go (2022). A doyenne of modern feminist sculpture, Hick’s masterfully alludes to the ways in which textile arts can be a metaphor for lived experience; threads woven through and strengthened to speak of resilience, invention and the spaces inside and between us. Nowhere to go could be a landscape or a dreamscape and you can imagine yourself inside it as well as around it, an experience Hicks credits to the immersive nature of her practice.

Hicks sees her subject in bold terms as ‘building the future.’ She describes how ‘when people walk into the room, they lift their eyes and their chin and look upwards and then they scan and build colour and form. There’s so much going on in the world today that drags us downwards, so I like to keep looking upwards. My sculpture is additive, not subtractive. When I get to the top I keep going up. Each person has the privilege of seeing it in their personal way. But I’m adding to the history of art as I see it and I’m trying to be uplifting.’

The third NGV Triennial is rich with the possibilities of uplift. From feminist subjectivity to refugee stories extending hospitality in an existing museum space, the pieces featured in this exhibition show how art can take you everywhere, from places inside yourself to parts of the world where you’ve never travelled. These three artists prove that with bold colours, new perspectives and interesting compositions, the past and the present, memory and magic can interact symphonically and enrich our understanding of why art matters.

Vanessa Francesca, Naarm/Melbourne

The ‘NGV Triennial’ is on display at the National Gallery of Victoria until 7 April 2024.

Non-fungible movements: ‘Contact High’ at Gertrude Contemporary

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We’re told to shuffle backwards to allow more space for the performance. We hardly fit. Bunched up, curving along the back wall of the gallery, this is different from what usually occurs here; it matters more acutely when and where we are in the room. 

Piloted in 2022 by Performance Review and Gertrude Contemporary, Dance, dance is the final iteration of ‘Contact High’, a performance series that places the body transparently at the centre of practice. Of course, this always is the case in life and art, but other artforms such as object-based practice, film and writing can often obscure this fact by positioning the live body in the past. There is something brave about performance in the way it is created anew each time, making the possibility of failure feel raw. We’re quiet and we watch closely. 

We’re also more implicated in the process, attested to by the anticipatory flutter in many stomachs during Cold Tooth (2024) as Harrison Ritchie-Jones plucks an audience member from the crowd, who he continues to intimately roll on top of, cradle like a baby and whack against the wall. As Ritchie-Jones drags dirt around the space, spits wine dramatically against the wall and smears it with fake blood, I wonder whether I can start to eat the burrito hidden in my bag now the gallery decorum has been upended.  

In Mara Galagher’s piece with Andrea Illés and Nelly Clifton, titled unnamed work (2024), we are witness to bodies resting beneath an engine-ready van; a dangerous act heightened as cars move right next to the performers. A flock of birds fly behind Illés’s shoulder as she perches unflinchingly on top of the van looking down High Street, and I’m more aware than before of Gertrude Contemporary’s location and surroundings. Moving and moving outside opens the space of relation, extending audiences and negating the supposed neutrality of our art spaces. The context of the neighbourhood pours in and the smell of cooking lamb wafts out.

The night ends with Sarah Aiken’s Body Corp (iteration no.4) (2024), continuing her exploration of the fractured, incomplete selves we project through our screens. Objects are hidden, revealed, and mismatched as Sarah’s live body momentarily synchronises again and again with her body on the screen. What you see coming into alignment is dependent on your spatial relationship to the performance; a reminder of the multiple truths alongside the absolute; a complicated paradox often obscured in the era of self-branding, reshares and infographics on platforms owned and governed by increasingly wealthy billionaires.

Rather than relegating it to the sadly denigrated-in-the-eyes-of-the-institution public program, ‘Contact High’ progressively positions dance and performance as the main event. Walsh’s curatorial approach provides a deeper contrast to the traditional activities of the gallery and allows for a questioning of what usually occurs here. Dance and performance make the presumed mechanics of the gallery clearer and provide different, compelling, mirror neuron activating options. Instead of facing out to the walls, our bodies look at their bodies and there is something refreshing in the directness. It makes you think, could we have more of these cultural conversations without the collectable objects? 

Dance and performance have a harder time being purchased as an investment (or for lowering taxes) and are inherently more difficult to possess as production cannot be easily divorced from its maker. It is limited by the body which complicates unbounded trade and growth. This particularity of the form challenges pervading economic structures which repeatedly fail to recognise limits of people and ecosystems. The reflection of organic reality feels important as more of life becomes alienated, transactional, and objectified for the ungrounded notion of profit and status. It’s hard to put dance on a wall and it doesn’t easily match the curtains.

Despite a lack of support for dance and performance art, ‘Contact High’ sits as a testament to its popularity and critical function, and grounds the necessity for institutions to provide it with increased support. As we pay more, work more, and see each other less, live art and the gathering it precipitates feels potent. Changing, breathing bodies in the process of entrainment, possible only together and not to be owned or reproduced ad infinitum. 

Lana Nguyen, Naarm/Melbourne

Piloted in 2022, ‘Contact High’ is a three-year partnership between Gertrude Contemporary and Performance Review that interrogates the transference that occurs between performers and audiences, primarily within the gallery space. ‘Contact High’ is curated by Anador Walsh, Director of Performance Review.

The body that holds us: Jordan Wolfson’s ‘Body Sculpture’ at the National Gallery of Australia

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Deep within the brutalist confines of the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), an anticipated new artwork is unveiled. Commissioned in 2019 for the NGA’s permanent collection, Body Sculpture (2023) is an animatronic sculpture by prolific American artist Jordan Wolfson. Branded an enfant terrible early on in his career, Wolfson, now 43 years old, has seemingly entered a new phase, one defined less by transgression and more by abstraction.  

Body Sculpture blends person and object, minimalism and figuration, art and technology, and compels viewers to experience their own bodies and the consciousness it houses. The third in Wolfson’s series of animatronic sculptures after Female Figure (2014) and Colored Sculpture (2016), Body Sculpture is formally innovative and tonally distinct, squarely engaging with human practices such as introspection, spirituality, and, at times, agonizing cogitation. Not since Callum Morton’s Reception (2016), a sculptural installation featuring a robotic facsimile of Melbourne art dealer Anna Schwartz, has an animatronic artwork exhibited in Australia generated such interest. Like Morton’s work, Body Sculpture is capable of eliciting decidedly human responses including sadness, elation, and dread.

The NGA provides an atypical context for Body Sculpture’s inauguration. Despite being somewhat removed from the global contemporary art hubs of New York and London, Kamberri/Canberra and the NGA can provide the space, time, and resources for Wolfson’s ambitious sculpture to be realised, experienced, and maintained. The issue of cost has been the subject of debate since the commission was first announced, with some suggesting it was unwise for the NGA to make the reported $6.67 million investment, despite the potential upside. The debut of Female Figure for instance, saw people queuing for hours outside David Zwirner in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighbourhood. It will be interesting to see whether any snaking lines start to form within the Parliamentary Triangle.

As is typical of Wolfson’s work, meaning is undefined and is constructed by numerous formal elements and signifiers. Stripped of the pop-cultural associations of Female Figure and Colored Sculpture (including references to Alfred E. Neuman, Lady Gaga and Huckleberry Finn), Body Sculpture is ostensibly minimal by comparison. Despite the sculpture encompassing several mechanisms, a central 36-square-inch metal cube assumes the role of protagonist; its consciousness conjured by two jutting arms. Over approximately 25 minutes, the Judd-like cube and its extremities are manipulated by an additional robotic appendage wielding a leaden chain. Framed by an immense steel gantry, the cube performs a sequence of precise movements across three acts. Underpinned by a firm rhythmic quality, tender signs of prayer, meditation and self-care give way to motions conveying sensuality and playfulness, which evolve into a series of intensely sexual gestures before cutting to a stark expression of unfathomable shame. Body Sculpture culminates in simulations of violence, ferocity, and intractable rage as the sculpture thrashes wildly until, finally, it prepares to stage a suicidal action. The artwork is abundantly beautiful and incredibly sad.    

The technological sophistication of Body Sculpture facilitates the profound emotional capacity of what is, in essence, a faceless aluminium cube. It is important to highlight the rigorous collaborative processes that underpin Body Sculpture and allow for the artwork’s conscious faculty to be realised. Roboticist, artist, and software engineer Mark Setrakian, known for his work on films including How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000), Hellboy (2004), and Men in Black (1997), is Wolfson’s longstanding principle collaborator. Other notable consultants on Body Sculpture include composer and percussionist Eli Keszler, clown expert Stefan Haves, and choreographers including Adam Linder, Daphne Fernberger, and Irme and Marne van Opstal.

Whether or not Body Sculpture acts as a proxy for its audience, the elusive beauty of its scraped surfaces engages with broader notions of erosion and decay, acknowledging the constant abrasion of the body that holds us. Wolfson allows Body Sculpture to be scarred by the detritus of life, inviting audiences to hold communion with the affected artwork and, in turn, with themselves. 

Yarran Gatsby, Kamberri/Canberra

Curated by Russell Storer, ‘Jordan Wolfson: Body Sculpture’ is on display at the National Gallery of Australia until 28 April 2024. Jordan Wolfson lives in Los Angeles and is represented by David Zwirner, Gagosian, and Sadie Coles HQ.  

If the heart has an eye: Hoda Afshar at the Art Gallery of New South Wales

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It’s 1824 and we’re in the Caribbean, on the island of Trinidad to be precise. Marie-Ursule, queen of a secret society of slaves, is plotting a mass murder-suicide in an act of strategic revolt. Her plan unfolds but with one small hitch. Marie-Ursule can’t kill her daughter Bola; Bola refuses to die. And it so happens that when Bola escapes her mother’s murderous clutches, a new world opens. Bola’s descendants spill out across the Caribbean, North America, and out into the world. They wander inside a lyrical exile as their compasses point towards displacement.

Their journey is full of twists, turns and chance encounters. It’s a journey Dionne Brand renders in her novel At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999) with all the skills at her disposal. Brand’s novel is a cacophony of shifting moods, rhythms, and formal structures. Likewise, Hoda Afshar uses all the skills at her artistic disposal to cover similar terrain. Yearning, exile, estrangement, fleeting acts of freedom – this is the wellspring from which Afshar assembles her aesthetic sensibility. And if you didn’t know any better, you could easily mistake her for one of Bola’s wandering descendants.

In some respects, Afshar fits the bill. Born in Iran, she migrated to Australia in 2007. Like Bola’s descendants, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune have delivered her to a place of liminality. An outsider of sorts in her native Iran, she occupies a similar status in Australia. Afshar’s work leans into this displacement. The results of such a disposition, palpably evident in ‘A Curve is a Broken Line’ at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, allows for a glimpse inside a body of work saddled with noble ambition. As viewers, we’re invited to lurk inside a compelling displacement.

Art is at its most stimulating when unhinged. When it communicates wildly, in directions that institutions, despite concerted efforts, can never fully control. ‘A Curve is a Broken Line’ is testament to this truth. Here, the work does the talking. It’s lucid, possessed with compositional discipline. It’s at times opaque, oddly askew. It’s also a pleasure to visually behold.

I came to the exhibition with curiosity piqued. I had encountered Afshar’s work from afar, but never in person. From behind a computer screen, she appeared to be tapping into something I had long suspected – that reality is too surreal to comprehend without the aid of a poetic touch.

Walking into In the Exodus, I Love You More (2014–) my suspicions were reconfirmed. As portraits of Iran, this series can best be described as detours, digressions, open-ended gestures. They are the result of a trip Afshar made to her homeland after seven years abroad. There’s no allowance for restoration, for closure. In Shadow (2018), an impenetrable figure, clad in black, sits turned away from your gaze, centred in a naturally lit, tiled setting. Their only company is their shadow. You don’t know who they are, where they are coming from, or where they are going. Likewise in Surface (2014), another impenetrable figure stands facing a brick wall. You struggle to place them within a context. The landscape, both built and natural, is similarly imponderable. In Vault (2018), an octagon of blue-sky cuts into an obscure backdrop. Save for a pocket of light that reveals a stony surface, you don’t know what sits inside the capacious blackness. Under Afshar’s guidance there’s much you don’t see, and likely never will, when it comes to Iran. You can only see the fragments of a homeland, not the whole, variations of theme and form that spark connection and disconnection.

Variations of theme and form continued as I progressed inside the exhibition. In Turn (2023) presents a series of meticulous works of stately simplicity. Taken together, they evoke a delicate pas de deux between the seen and unseen, the revealed and concealed. Obfuscation emerges as a clear pictorial motif. Iranian women, dressed in black and, like Afshar, based in Melbourne, console, touch, and support one another. Through judicious cropping, their individual identities are concealed. Their faces, for the most part, exist out of frame, as if rejecting any effort to engage, to possess, to be seen. In a way, this makes perfect sense. The women are united in a collective grief, mourning, from afar, the death of Masha Amini at the hands of the Guidance Patrol. You can forgive them for not wanting prying eyes to pierce their sacred bubble.

In Remain (2019), a motley crew of displaced men languishing on Manus Island take centre stage. The previously stressed obfuscation is eased up a little. There are certain things you need to see in life. Afshar grants her subjects agency, inviting them to become collaborators. The resulting portraits, positioned across a towering wall, invite a studied viewing. You want to lean into them but can’t. The looking here must be accompanied by listening – stirring falsettos, desperate testimonies, and existential cries spill from videos of some of the same men projected onto two enlarged, slanted walls behind you. It was almost unbearable, their wounded kinship that carried the memory, at least within me, of an ineradicable and collective pain, a stark sense of something profoundly out of joint.  

The rest of the exhibition sees Afshar wandering with characteristic discipline across a disparate field, touching on the secretive desires of gay men in Iran, the dolorous agony of Australian whistle-blowers, and the otherworldly lives of Afro-Iranians in the Strait of Hormuz. The themes are not identical but linked by visual parallels, striking symmetries, and rhyming forms. A seeing guided by an inner attitude is encouraged. Afshar demands, in a most gentle way, audiences to meet and challenge her work on its own terms. It’s a welcome pleasure to be burdened so.

Brian Obiri-Asare, Warrang/Sydney

Curated by Isobel Parker-Philip, ‘A Curve is a Broken Line’ continues at the Art Gallery of New South Wales until 21 January 2024.

To rise and appear: Tarnanthi at AGSA

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In the language of the Kaurna people, the traditional owners of the area now known as the Tarntanya/Adelaide Plains, Tarnanthi means ‘to rise, come forth, spring up, or appear’. This is certainly true of the spirit of Tarnanthi 2023 as surmised by Western Arrernte/Yankunytjatjara artist Robert Fielding, who delivered a commanding keynote address at Tarnanthi’s official opening event. Robert declared that it was with grace and power that with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples had come together to celebrate Blak excellence in the immediate wake of Australians voting against First Nations people being recognised in the nation’s constitution. The message was clear: We’ve survived the adverse effects of the colony with grace before, and we will continue to do so again.

One of the great strengths of Tarnanthi is the group exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia (AGSA), and it opened with an extraordinary body of work by Djakaŋu Yunupiŋu (Gumatj), including paintings on found board, larrakitj, and bark. It’s no surprise that curator Nici Cumpston (Barkindji) installed the works here, as these are the first you encounter as you make your descent into the exhibition space. They are Djakaŋu’s sublime and unique renditions of the Djulpan story and the Seven Sisters, yet they retain subtle flourishes which acknowledge the creative and cultural influences that have impressed upon her, from her distinguished family of artists to other leading senior practitioners working out of Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka, Yirrkala’s art centre.

I had the great pleasure of travelling across the Pilbara with Nici in July of 2022, and while visiting Martumili Artists, I watched the art centre staff lay out a roll of unstretched canvas paintings by Martu artist Bugai Whyoulter. Nici was considering paintings for inclusion in this iteration of Tarnanthi, so it was a personal delight to encounter Bugai’s installation, seeing her works go from the art centre floor to the walls of AGSA. The selection of works is dreamy. Bugai is a master of gesture, constructing a soft palette of colours and laying down energetic marks to record the Country she belongs to. Bugai is focused on reinvention, of telling us about her relationship with the land in her terms. She should very much be credited as helping usher in a new phase of abstraction within the field of Western Desert painting, as evidenced by this exceptional body of work.

The following gallery space has a fun, playful installation of works that speak to and with each other, evidenced in a suite of beautiful bird paintings by Walmajarri artist Nyangulya Katie Nalgood, ceramics by Western Aranda potter Judith Pungarta Inkamala, and paintings, soft sculpture and video work by several artists who make through Tangentyere and Yarrenyty Arltere Artists. Judith’s ceramics, in the typical style of the Hermannsburg Potters, are joyful and capture her lived experience around Ntaria/Hermannsburg, but also reflect her knowledge of life experiences and her working as a potter. A detail of one work features artists from the studio firing their ceramics the ‘old ways’, over a fire, before they had a kiln. Across the works, Judith’s humour is evident, and she has a great style of painting that gives each work a sense of energy and drama.

The coveted solo exhibition at AGSA in this year’s Tarnanthi goes to the well-deserving Western Aranda artist Vincent Namatjira. This is Vincent’s first major survey exhibition in a state gallery and it’s incredibly varied. There are the important paintings one would recognise, such as Vincent’s winning work from the 2020 Archibald Prize, Stand strong for who you are, and Close Contact which won the 2019 Ramsay Art Prize. But to me, the best are also the new works made by Vincent with his friends, including a collaborative painting with Gundungurra-based artist Ben Quilty, the pair having painted themselves and their studio dogs, and a series of delicately playful pop-out books by Vincent and Kuku Yalanji/Girramay artist Tony Albert, that continue Vincent’s commentary on the Royal Tour.

The satellite shows for Tarnanthi are varied in medium and levels of success. The real triumph is the solo exhibition of Pitjantjatjara artist Timo Hogan, ‘Kumpilpa Ngaranyi – Unseen’ at Light Square Gallery. These are gorgeous large-scale works all depicting Lake Barker. In speaking to the sentience of his Country, Timo’s experimentation and the slight opening up of his palette is clever, helping his works take on an ethereal quality. They are epic works that requires one to stand in front of each canvas for some time. Even so, you will go away only just beginning to understand the unknown and unseen forces at play, which Timo knows intimately well and has attempted to reveal.

Tarnanthi continues until 21 January 2024 so there is plenty of time to visit Tarntanya to see the group and solo exhibitions at AGSA, but also some of the independent shows across the city.

Erin Vink, Tarntanya/Adelaide

What do you mean: James Nguyen’s ‘Open Glossary’ at ACCA

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James Nguyen’s ‘Open Glossary’ currently on display at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) provides a dazzling opportunity to think about which words are key to our lived experiences and to interpret those words for ourselves. Especially for those of us who grew up in households where dictionaries were sacred objects, able to transport an individual whose psychological life was confined to a small village, into a multicultural city and the opportunities and independence that entails.

For Nguyen, words have real power, and possess the capacity to dance in and out of their languages of origin and challenge the powers that keep them in their sway. Nguyen’s practice playfully integrates languages and artistic disciplines, and serves a social function by supporting marginalised voices, rich with insight about the nature of belonging in a pluralist society.

When viewing Nguyen’s work, I was reminded of Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1885-1975) work on the notion of heteroglossia, or the idea that different languages can be juxtaposed, contrasted, collaged, and contrasted to convey that a language is also a perspective. Nguyen’s work touches on these concepts while insisting on pluralities, underscored by the contribution of several guest artists in ‘Open Glossary’.

This plurality is evident from the initial gallery, where a tapestry of interlinked white shirts, sourced from all over Australia, are sewn together to form a kind of Praetorian Guard. The installation reminds viewers of the deregulation of the garment trade and the independence of women working in the industry. An audio collaboration between Nguyen and Budi Sudarto provides multilingual interviews reflecting on the provenance of the shirts. For this reviewer, whose Italian grandmother worked as a pieceworker, it’s a familiar and beautifully spot lit story.

The next gallery speaks most strongly to the concept of ‘open glossaries’ at the heart of Nguyen’s presentation. A series of angel costumes, a mainstay of queer rights protests since the Stonewall riots, have been embroidered with the words for ‘queer’ in different languages. Projected onto a screen, A Queer Glossary shows the evolving nature of sexuality and its languages, as a colorful spinning wheel belies a permanent stasis between struggle and change.

The adjacent gallery showcases a collaboration between Nguyen and Tamsen Hopkinson (Ngati Kahungunu, Ngati Pahauwera). The space offers an embodiment of the ‘Hui’ which is a word for ‘meeting space’ shared between Indo-Pacific and Moana Polynesian cultures. This meeting space is fringed with prayer mats, and shoes must be taken off to enter. It serves to reflect the value of community spaces that can provide a platform for cross-cultural encounters.

The final gallery was developed collaboratively by Nguyen and Kate ten Buuren (Taungurung) as a space where young folk can consider their relationship with Aboriginal and Torres Strait people in contemporary Australia. The interactive space contains a variety of hats styled after native animals, dioramas and materials to create drawings, as well as zines and the story of Lerty the Possum who just wants to sing, and to find and share her voice.

‘Open Glossary’ is an arresting exhibition that gives voice to a range of important perspectives and brings them together in a rich and euphonious chorus.

Vanessa Francesca, Naarm/Melbourne

‘Open Glossary’ is supported by the Copyright Agency Partnerships Commission and is on display at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) until 19 November 2023.

Please note macrons in the Te Reo Maori terms do not appear on this webpage.

Women’s work

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What is promised by exhibitions and books devoted exclusively to women practitioners? That work and artists that have previously been ignored or neglected will be acknowledged and celebrated? That the reasons for this neglect will be highlighted and condemned? That something specific to the gender of the makers will be identified in the stories of their careers, or even in their work? That the history of art being offered will be distinctively different from those without this particular focus? Through Shaded Glass, Lissa Mitchell’s assiduously researched and beautifully illustrated new book about women photographers in Aotearoa/New Zealand, carefully negotiates all these implied promises. Her project is described by the author as ‘revealing a multifaceted community of photographic production that shows who the women were, how they were involved and what factors enabled, prevented and limited them.’ This revelation is ably fulfilled. 

The book begins in the 1860s, when professional studios became firmly established in New Zealand, and finishes a century later, just before photography blossomed into a fine art in which many women were prominent. Mitchell organises her research into a series of chapters that proceed both chronologically and according to genres of practice, so that we learn about the role of women in professional studios but also in the world of amateur photography and clubs and societies. Much emphasis is placed on the business of photography, and for good reason: in the first few decades, far more women worked as mounters, retouchers or printers than as photographers. These are the women who have hitherto remained an invisible presence in histories of photography. Mitchell briefly traces the modernist version of that history, which she concludes has led to the privileging of male artistic figures and unmanipulated photographs. She argues that: ‘the skills employed in retouching, colouring, printing and mounting photographs became characterised as feminine roles associated with other activities done by hand, such as needlework, and [as a result were] increasingly devalued.’ This kind of denigration is revisited in later chapters. As Mitchell tells us, genres like portraiture, photojournalism and architectural pictures, the ones ‘in which most women involved in the medium work’, are ‘precisely those that have been marginalised in the histories of photography in Aotearoa’. Sexism is thereby shown to be systemic, not just a matter of personal prejudice.

To discover New Zealand’s women photographers and their stories, Mitchell has scoured a wide range of sources, including electoral rolls, classified advertisements, legal documents, street directories and newspaper stories. A similar degree of diligence was required to find the photographs that illustrate this book. They come from regional and private collections, as well as from Te Papa’s own capacious archive. But some of these illustrations are digital positives from surviving negatives, or are reproductions of images known only from their publication in vintage magazines or newspapers. As a consequence, we are provided with an illuminating array of hitherto unfamiliar pictures, from hand-coloured and embroidered photographs to album pages filled with still-life compositions to a variety of professional portraits or landscape views. Vernacular examples dominate but women also produced some notable artworks. A particularly striking image is a pictorialist work by Beatrice Mabel Gibson titled Winter Night and dated to about 1920. The photograph was exhibited widely, in both New Zealand and Australia, and much praised in the photographic press of the time. However, only one print has survived to the present, a gift by the photographer to a woman peer. Another example of pictorialism is the hand-coloured silver gelatin print titled Fire, made by Elin ‘Elfie’ Ralph in about 1929, and primarily comprised of a red-tinted haze of threatening smoke. These exceptional examples of photographic artistry are joined by a multitude of less innovative portraits and landscapes, proving that women practitioners were just as capable of bread-and-butter commercial work as their male counterparts.

In Through Shaded Glass, photographs tend to be described rather than interpreted. This is in keeping with the heavy emphasis the book places on the social context provided by biography and anecdote. We are told, for example, about an explosion that occurred in Dunedin on 17 May 1886 that resulted in rocks falling through the ceiling of the London Portrait Rooms, killing sisters Julia Finch and Louisa Irwin, who both worked there. Or we learn about the sexual harassment experienced by Minnie Hooper and Mary Ann Allison in 1888 while they worked at a factory that manufactured dry-plate glass negatives in Christchurch. The employment of all these women in the photography industry would be lost to history but for the legal traces left by their travails. Even more revealing are the stories of Austrian and German refugees from Nazism who arrived in New Zealand in the 1930s, some of them accomplished photographers. Irene Koppel, for example, settled in Wellington in 1937, at first working as a printer, before getting a job using her Leica to make candid portraits in the street. As a German Jew and therefore a suspicious foreign national, Koppel was, from October 1940, prohibited from possessing any camera without special police permission. Her marriage in February 1943 was considered sufficient reason to have that permission withdrawn (as, it was argued, she no longer needed to support herself). Mitchell recounts a number of similar stories about such women, a reminder of the obstacles that had to be overcome for these displaced harbingers of European modernism to practise their craft in Aotearoa.

Mitchell’s research makes it plain that women have always played a central role in New Zealand photography, as workers, photographers and clients (the book is enhanced by numerous photographs of women, including several self-portraits that showcase the skill of those taking them). By focusing on the lives of these women, Through Shaded Glass in effect offers a social history of the country in which they worked, at least as one half of the population experienced it. In the process, the book also documents a cavalcade of photographic practices usually ignored by other historians, including those conducted in the darkroom or the office rather than just behind a camera. The end result is an essential supplement to more conventional, more masculine, histories of photography, wherever they have been produced.

Geoffrey Batchen

Through Shaded Glass: Women and photography in Aotearoa New Zealand 1860–1960 by Lissa Mitchell: Te Papa Press, Te Whanganui-a-Tara/Wellington, 2023, 368 pages, NZ$75; Geoffrey Batchen is Professor of History of Art at the University of Oxford.

Crushed by waves: Reuben Holt in conversation with Marco Fusinato

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Marco Fusinato is an artist whose practice moves between performance and installation, photography and recording. Last weekend he premiered a live version of his ongoing project DESASTRES at Atonal, Berlin’s annual festival for sonic and visual art in a former thermal power station. Taking place within the venue’s 100-metre-long turbine hall, it’s an evolution of the monumental work Fusinato presented over 200 days at the Venice Biennale’s Australian Pavilion in 2022.

Reuben Holt (RH): How would you describe your work to someone who's never experienced it before?

Marco Fusinato (MF): I work as a contemporary artist and a noise musician, as an artist I work across a range of projects. Each project may be different but there's a sensibility that runs across all of them. Many of them focus on my interests around the tensions in opposing forces, for example, the underground versus the institution, noise versus silence, minimalism versus maximalism, purity versus contamination and so on. As a musician I use the electric guitar and mass amplification to create a physical experience for the audience.

DESASTRES is a culmination of many of my interests and previous projects - from noise improvisation, drone, down-tuned ‘corrupted’ chord progressions through to mass image archiving. DESASTRES uses the force of the sound and the power of the images to create impact on the audience - whether it's in the gallery or a festival situation.

RH: Marathon guitar performances have been a recurring feature in your work, from the Spectral Arrows series staged in various galleries around the world, to the 200 days of eight hour guitar sets at the Venice Biennale. What aesthetic role do they play?

MF: There’s a big difference exhibiting in a gallery compared to performing improvised music. The main one being time. An exhibition can last weeks, months, years, whereas a performance in a club or festival is usually under an hour. Over a decade ago I became frustrated with touring (travel time, hotels, transfers, waiting at the venue), only to be on stage for under an hour. Spectral Arrows began out of this frustration. I thought, well if I’m going to turn up, I’m going to stay all day. I perform for the entire opening hours of the space (gallery, museum, theatre, venue) which is usually between six to eight hours. It’s an occupation, a job. I set up facing the wall with a line of amplifiers facing out into the space. I have my back to the audience, so I’m not distracted by who is in the room. It allows me to concentrate on the sound and removes any desire to ‘entertain’. I let the physicality of the sound take me in directions that are unexpected. I’m constantly soaked in an overload of harmonics and clashing frequencies. I lose sense of time. It's like standing in the ocean all day being crushed by waves. The audience is free to experience the work from anywhere in the space, for as long as they want, although it’s impossible to grasp the whole due to the duration of the performance.

RH: What kind of impact is audience behaviour having on the evolution of your work?

MF: In Venice (at the Biennale) I could feel them. On average there were around two thousand people every day, on some days 5,000 – that’s around 400,000 in total. The installation comprised three elements - me, the amplification, and an LED screen. These elements are usually on the stage but now the audience is in amongst it all, they are active participants which leads to all sorts of unexpected encounters and friction. People wanted to engage, and express their opinions. At times that would affect what I would do, for example if it got too much for me, I’d clear the room with the harshest noise I could make. Berlin Atonal was more like a traditional concert setup, with a large stage, PA system and massive video projection screen. A separation from the audience.

RH: In DESASTRES, your guitar is connected to an interface that allows you to manipulate the duration of images projected on the video screen. But not necessarily the order or content of the images themselves. What is the significance of chance in your work?

MF: For DESASTRES the sound is always improvised, and the images are randomized. I never know what image will appear on the screen. The control unit decides whether to bring up an image as I've chosen it - or it can choose to bring an image up in negative, cropped, or as a double exposure. It’s a constant surprise for me to see what image comes up next. The chance element confuses meaning, what one person makes of a series of images is different to the person standing next to them. There are many ways to interpret the performance. Keep in mind it is difficult to have a conversation while the images are cascading due to the volume so it’s fascinating to hear what sounds and images stayed with people.

RH: My understanding is that you collected most of the images during the Melbourne COVID lockdowns and yet some of them seem prescient of political events that were yet to unfold, for example, the war in Ukraine. I wondered what impact unfolding political events have on the evolution of the work.

MF: The images I select are very particular as they must be open enough for multiple interpretations by a wide number of people with diverse backgrounds. I want the images to have resonance no matter where the work is experienced. For example, when I choose images of conflict, they tend to be cropped in a way that doesn’t specifically show the location. So, whether it’s an image from art history or the war in Ukraine there’s a consistency.

I don’t choose images of politicians, celebrities, and so on. I try to eliminate the personality. I went through a phase of photographing newsreaders’ ties and what their hands were doing. They look the same the world over. That kind of stuff is more interesting to me.

DESASTRES relies on hallucinations in disorientation and an exhaustion from confusion.

Death and forever: Daniel Mudie Cunningham at Wollongong Art Gallery

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From a position on the left-hand side of the gallery space, the soft glow of a neon sign is reflected in reverse on the glass surface of an archival frame, momentarily obscuring a poster citing funeral songs.

I travelled from Warrang/Sydney to Woolyungah/Wollongong to see ‘Are You There?’, Daniel Mudie Cunningham’s first career survey. Tenderly curated by James Gatt, the exhibition spans three decades of Cunningham’s practice and evidences a lifetime of performance and documentation.

Informed by the dove-tailing experiences of growing up in a conservative religious household and as a gay man in the 1990s, Cunningham’s cyclical artistic gestures respond in part to the promises of eternal damnation and death. A family photograph of the artist's younger brother, buried to the neck in sand, conjures David Wonarowicz's self-portrait Untitled (Face in Dirt) (1991), and reads here as a reflection on mortality. In Lonesome Cowboy (1993) an 18-year-old Cunningham riffs on the homoerotic imagery of Andy Warhol’s Lonesome Cowboys (1968), marking the sensuous debut of his queerness via referential identification. In defiance of death and damnation, queer genealogies of art and the technologies of film and photography offer salvation.

Salvation can be reclaimed by eschewing heterosexual chronopolitics in favour of queer temporalities, including the aesthetic tropes of drag. ‘Are You There?’ is filled with anachronistic performance, lip-syncing, cheap wigs, and diva worship. In Licycle (1995), a flickering Cunningham performs as Liza Minnelli at the iconic cLUB bENT. In addition to Minnelli, Cunningham has appeared as intimations of Cyndi Lauper, Tina Turner, Bette Midler, and others throughout his career. In Gender is a Drag (1993/2013), a split screen shows Cunningham applying makeup, while also shaving his shoulder-length hair to the scalp, staging a kind of gender autopoiesis through the act of becoming and unbecoming.

Reenactment is critical to Cunningham’s oeuvre. In a nod to Nan Goldin, The Ballad of Technological Dependency (1998) comprises audio taken from the artist’s answering machine, set to a slideshow of friends in varying degrees of drag speaking on the phone. This approach is later revisited in Repeats (2000), in which Cunningham references iconic scenes in cinema history, including Pillow Talk (1959) and Scream (1956), employing the same answering machine and slide-show arrangement.

Drawing from a 1995 entry in Cunningham’s art school journal, On a Queer Day You Can See Forever (2023) could easily read as idealism, particularly at a time when the politics of queerness feel watered down in semantic satiation. Reimagined and rendered as a neon signage artwork 30 years into the artist’s career, the text reads instead as an ode to the unique insights and understandings of youth.

Cunningham’s threads of reenactment, self-documentation, diva worship and the spectres of death come together in his seminal work Proud Mary (2007, 2012, 2017, 2022). Now incorporating its fourth iteration, Proud Mary sees Cunningham perform a lip-sync to his own funeral song, Tina Turner’s titular 1971 cover of ‘Proud Mary’ by Creedence Clearwater Revival. Informed in part by the loss of Cunningham’s brother in 2001, Proud Mary sits beside a poster listing funeral songs, inviting reflection on the ways we remember the dead and the ways we anticipate ourselves being remembered. The iterations will continue until, of course, they stop. ‘Are You There?’ reminds us to forge our own visions of forever.

Blake Lawrence, Warrang/Sydney

Curated by James Gatt, ‘Are You There?’ continues at Wollongong Art Gallery until 10 September 2023.

Watching, listening and acting: ‘Huarere: Weather Eye, Weather Ear’ at Te Tuhi

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We have lost control of the world. How do we know? Look to the weather. According to the United States’ National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the third, fourth and fifth days in July this year all consecutively broke records as Earth’s hottest day since scientists began recording in 1979. Where I was in Aotearoa/New Zealand, it was the coldest day of the year so far, and the rain was coming sideways, blown in from heavy grey clouds.

Of course, it was the ultimate hubris to believe that humanity had control of Earth’s environment at any place or point in time. With the scale and urgency of climate change as a global challenge, museums, galleries and cultural organisations have recognised the crucial role they can play in shaping and supporting, and I would add leading, society’s response to the crisis. The first museum dedicated to climate change was established in 2015, New York’s Climate Museum, and other initiatives include international collaborations such as the Museums and Climate Change Network, Museums for Future, the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art’s Toolkit on Sustainability in the Museum Practice and the activations of Climate Museum UK.

Tamaki Makaurau/Auckland’s Te Tuhi contemporary art space is part of the distributed association called the World Weather Network, promoted as a constellation of 28 ‘weather stations’ set up by arts agencies around the globe as an invitation to look, listen, learn and act in response to the climate emergency. This grouping of artists, writers, organisations and associations are also denoted as ‘reporters’, observing, documenting and reflecting imaginatively and objectively on climate. 

Te Tuhi’s recent exhibition ‘Huarere: Weather Eye, Weather Ear’ engaged with the context of overwhelming and unstoppable climate effects. Curated by Janine Randerson as a specialist researcher and artist working in the field, ‘Huarere’ was posited as an attempt to free exhibition-making from a human-centric perspective, prompting curiosity: Is it possible to overcome the subjectivities of curatorial and institutional purpose and artistic participation to achieve human critical distance, let alone aim for pure presence itself? Does it account for the subjectivity of the viewer? Such an aim was a thought-provoking contribution to the challenges that are part of a call to action for a sustainable future. 

FORECAST (2023) by Julieanna Preston, Layne Waerea and Mick Douglas on Te Tuhi’s outdoor physical and digital billboards signalled the project on approach to the building. Described as ‘a collaborative, durational performance writing work’, it is the outcome of engagement with Word Weathers, a 24-hour online performance last year for more than 55 writers. The static billboard display of three matrices of words, letters and punctuation created a puzzle that provoked interest.

Visitors might also have noticed aeolian harps on the roof by Phil Dadson and James McCarthy, titled respectively Nga-hau-e-wha and Tamanui. The sounds from these instruments haptically brought the weather into the gallery. Inside, Dadson’s compilation of mobile phone videos, Koea O Tawhirimatea – Weather Choir: Voicing the Wind (also 2023), created with content by Breath of Weather Collective, also immersed the viewer in nearly 20 minutes of wind-song. The work has been collected from eight collaborators around the Great Ocean of Te Moana Nui-a-Kiwa who placed one of Dadson’s DIY aeolian harps on their respective island. Recorded between the 2022 and 2023 solstices, the sounds of escalating winds and views of sea-pounded shorelines are memorable among the ambience arising from changing weather.

Before Koea O Tawhirimatea, viewers first encountered Kalisolaite ‘Uhila’s Sun Gate: Ha‘amonga a Maui (2023). Using footage from Andrew Kennedy and ‘Uhila’s body cam (with James Tapsell-Kururangi, Josh Savieti and Nonga Tutu acknowledged as technical crew), Sun Gate was recorded on the autumn equinox, 21 March 2023, just over a year after the eruption of undersea volcano Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha‘apai in the Tongan archipelago. In Sun Gate, the artist sits by the thirteenth-century limestone-coral trilithon Ha‘amonga a Maui in eastern Tonga, unmoving through sun, rain and cloud for over ten hours, creating a digital connectivity across the atmosphere of Te Moana Nui-a-Kiwa. The viewer can only observe ‘Uhila’s endurance, a similar sensation felt in Te Tuhi’s courtyard with the reprisal of Weather Stations (2009) by Paul Cullen (1949–2017). Accompanied by three watercolour drawings from the related series, Weather Stations had been reconfigured by artists J. A. Kennedy and Ammon Ngakuru (a former studio assistant). Hoses, pipes and glass vitrines sat atop steel frames on the work’s original concrete pavers, suggesting stalled attempts to assemble rain gauges. At Te Tuhi, the courtyard’s soil had also been laid bare, the living ground on which Cullen’s industrial relics sat as a symbol of redundant or misconceived hope.  

It was a new work commissioned from Maureen Lander (Ngapuhi, Te Hikutu, Pakeha) that centred the visitor on entry, grounding the exhibition through knowledge. Made from harakeke, muka and laser-cut ‘foam’ suspended at eye height, Wave Skirt (2023) drew the viewer in, surprised by the unexpected acrylic sparkles among the strands. An adjacent installation by Lander with video projection by Denise Batchelor and sound by Stìobhan Lothian, where the moving image of lapping waves on sand was projected onto dried flaxen strips, brought an additional affective complexity to the imminence of harakeke. For the artists, Ngaru Paewhenua (2023) references whakapapa and the sea that bought Ngapuhi ancestors to Hokianga, ‘their migrating waka assisted on the journey by three great waves: Ngaru nui, Ngaru roa and Ngaru Paewhenua’. Their work recalls the third wave that brought the waka ashore, as well as the myriad effects of climate change on today’s oceans and the resulting impacts of rising sea levels and increasingly severe storms.

The conceptual heart of the exhibition was MAKU, te ha o Haupapa: Moisture, the breath of Haupapa (2023), a collaboration between Ron Bull (voice), Stefan Marks (programming), Janine Randerson (video), Rachel Shearer (sound), glaciologist and adviser Heather Purdie, with a live data stream courtesy the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research. At an immersive scale, this video confronts the viewer with Haupapa (Tasman Glacier). This has been the longest glacier in Aotearoa, flowing down from the eastern side of Aoraki (Mount Cook). Purdie’s long-term research has revealed that the glacier is melting from within crevasses that retain the sun’s heat; and that there are submerged ice ramps in the lake at the end of Haupapa which cause large icebergs to split off that accelerate glacier recession.

This was the work that most tested the idea of curation or artmaking removed from a human-centric perspective. The artists state that they ‘relinquish the ordering and qualities of sound and video to the weather conditions of Aoraki’, recorded by the instruments placed near Haupapa. Video and sound were recorded by Randerson and Shearer in summer and winter 2022, along with atmospheric field and hydrophone recordings from 30 metres deep in the lake. Subsequently, Marks’s interventions ‘subtly alter the brightness, direction, and movement of the images and sounds according to the real-time weather conditions, and wind direction’. In addition, live recordings of Bull’s voice taken at the lake are woven through in acknowledgement of Kai Tahu matauraka (words and names of the elemental ancestors).

As I understand, the image and sound of MAKU vary according to the sun’s radiation and wind directions: the weather. The noise of cracking infers the movement and melting of the glacier into the lake, which is growing at such a rate that the glacier is expected to disappear within 20 years. Randerson and her collaborators bring us face-to-face with the glacier with all the microbiological contents and ancient breaths encapsulated in the ice over tens of thousands of years, which appear in hues of winter greys and summer blues. While digital manipulation evidences intervention in the creation of MAKU, the spirit of human embeddedness and respect is a meaningful part of its layered visual and ambient qualities.

‘Huarere: Weather Eye, Weather Ear’ came at a crucial time in our critical understanding of how we can look to be stewards of the future, including embracing racial and other forms of justice that are coincident with causes of climate change. Rather than be a witness of weather, the exhibition subtly prompted viewers to reflect on their own inseparable interconnectivity with weather worlds and hence its incorporation in subjectivity. Where viewers take this experience will only be evident in the future.

Dr Zara Stanhope, Ringatohu/Director of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery / Len Lye Centre, Ngamotu/New Plymouth 

Curated by Janine Randerson, ‘Huarere: Weather Eye, Weather Ear’ was on display at Te Tuhi, Tamaki Makaurau/Auckland, from 4 June until 30 July 2023.

Please note macrons in the Te Reo Maori terms do not appear on this webpage.

Vale: Jim Allen MNZM, 1922 – 2023

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Described by critic Wystan Curnow as Aotearoa/New Zealand’s ‘first contemporary artist’ and as ‘the local precedent for present day art practices’, Jim Allen is also renowned on both sides of the Tasman as a radical and transformative art educator, first as head of sculpture at Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland from 1960 to 1976, and then as founding head of art at Sydney College of the Arts (SCA) from 1977 to 1987. Allen, who died in Tamaki Makaurau/Auckland on 9 June 2023 aged 100, uniquely connected the tasks, responsibilities and creative possibilities associated with his multiple roles within an all-encompassing commitment to art as a form of dialogue in the employ of collective social and cultural advancement.

Following active service in the Second World War, Allen studied sculpture in Otautahi/Christchurch and then at the Royal College of Art, London. He taught in rural schools in the far north of Aotearoa through the 1950s, an experience critical to his growing conception of education as a process grounded in reciprocal relationships of exploration and exchange. By the end of the 1960s, and following a long sabbatical trip to Europe, the United Kingdom and the United States in 1968, which brought him into direct contact with new conceptual and performative practices as well as radical social movements and protest actions, Allen began to transform Elam’s sculpture department into a process-driven creative and intellectual environment. Learning was centred around experimentation and discussion. The cultural and environmental site-specificity of practice was highlighted. Performance, ephemeral installation, instructional work, sound and moving image all featured heavily in what rapidly became the heart of a new post-object art in Aotearoa, or simply the ‘new art’ described in the book of this title edited by Allen and Curnow in 1976.

Allen connected these developments with worlds outside the art school, setting up public presentations for artists at gallery and non-gallery locations alike, including within major events such as the Mildura Sculpture Triennial. This practical encouragement of the work of artist peers and a concern for building sustainable practical and critical support structures for experimental practice carried over to Allen’s subsequent work in the development of SCA (a decade-long commitment that he later described as an art project in itself); his critical role in the foundation of Artspace in Sydney in the early 1980s; and, following his retirement from SCA, in a major report he prepared on career opportunities and strategies for artists in Australia.

Allen’s own work evolved from a relatively traditional object-based practice of the 1950s and 1960s encompassing work in metal, wood, plaster, concrete, ceramics and stained glass, including major public commissions such as the Futuna Chapel altarpiece and windows (1961) and the Hocken Library mural (1967), to more process-focused experimental work following his 1968 sabbatical. Significant installation works such as the ‘Small Worlds’ project (1969), New Zealand Environment No. 5 (1969), Arena (1970), the two-part O-AR (1975), and the three-part performance work Contact (1974) all acted as participatory experiments in sensory experience, perception and cognition, investigating relations between bodies, materials and technology. These experiments were extended in a set of performance works Allen made in 1976 while on residency at the Experimental Art Foundation in Adelaide, including Poetry for Chainsaws, Newspaper Piece and On Planting a Native.

Allen eventually returned to live in Tamaki Makaurau in the late 1990s, continuing to make work across media through to the end of his life. He exhibited regularly with Michael Lett and, in addition to new work, remade and presented many of his installation and performance works from the particularly critical period of 1969 to 1976 across various exhibitions in Te Whanganui-a-Tara/Wellington, Ngamotu/New Plymouth and Tamaki Makaurau, as well as in Australia and Europe. All this activity ran parallel with the interest of new generations of artists, curators and art historians in Allen’s work, along with the 1970s moment of post-object practice in Aotearoa more broadly, evidenced most recently in ‘Groundswell: Avant-Garde Auckland 1971–79’ (2018–19) at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki curated by Natasha Conland. In 2014 Clouds and Michael Lett published a book of interviews with Allen undertaken by artist Phil Dadson and art historian Tony Green, Jim Allen: The Skin of Years.

Allen’s legacy is not to be found in work long since deposited in any archive, but in work itself remade and regenerated by both the artist and others over recent decades. It is to be found in a practice that continued an explorative and socially informed trajectory until the end; in an evident influence on artists of subsequent generations seeking precedents for contemporary attitudes and practices; and in the forms of and spaces for art he helped create on both sides of the Tasman.

Blair French

Retooling the conventions of value: An Indigenous perspective at the Museum of Sydney

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At the far eastern corner of the ‘The People’s House: Sydney Opera House at 50’, a seductive shimmer of silver glints out from a darkened black-box space. Esme Timbery’s shellworked opera house is a wonder to behold in any context. But here, floating atop a bay of tinsel sparkling under a bright spotlight, it is breathtaking. According to curator Tess Allas (Wiradjuri), the idea for this presentation is one that has percolated over the three decades she has been working closely with the Bidjigal artist. It is a dream manifested and, to my mind, speaks to a much bigger world-building dream – one that not only contests First Nations genocide, but imagines a world in which such contestation no longer requires repetition.

Timbery’s work, commissioned by the Sydney Opera House in 2002 and borrowed by the Museums of History NSW for this exhibition, is flanked by four posters of shows presented at the opera house from the State Archives of New South Wales. The most salient of these features a black screen-printed portrait of Truganini, accompanied by a title in bright red capitals, ‘THE LAST TASMANIAN’, and a subtitle in black, ‘A STORY OF GENOCIDE’. The poster is shocking and demands closer inspection, in which a clever retooling of the object is revealed. To spite its problematic message, the poster was chosen by Allas to illustrate an unbroken, ante-colonial and cross-continental practice of shellwork carried through countless generations of Aboriginal women. Below her arresting gaze, Truganini’s neck is adorned with an abundance of strung shells. The creation of shell necklaces is continued by contemporary shell workers, such as Lola Greeno, who prove the ongoing and thriving presence of palawa women and their cultural practices. Timbery’s shellwork was also passed through generations of Bidjigal women as both a way to continue cultural knowledge and as a means of gaining economic independence. The dialogue created between Truganini’s necklace and Timbery’s opera house, as such, contests the historic and ongoing efforts of genocide, which include the mythologisation of Truganini as ‘the last Tasmanian’ and gives testament to how First Nations cultures survive and thrive through creative practice grounded in Country and informed by savvy contemporary sensibilities.

This dialogue continues in the exhibition’s adjacent room. On a bed of shell grit sits a striking woven rendering of the opera house featuring predominantly undyed cotton woven over the sails, and hand-harvested, dyed and woven Lomandra longifolia grass for the base. The work was made by master weavers Steven Russell, Timbery’s son (Bidjigal/Dharawal/Wadi Wadi), and his partner Phyllis Stewart (Yuin/Dharawal), and commissioned for the exhibition. Within the conversation of contesting genocide through cultural practice created through the adjacent room, the woven opera house both nods to and demonstrates the radical work institutions can do in supporting the continuation of such Indigenous practices. This support continues to shift the representation of First Nations cultural practices through contesting conventional exhibitionary traditions and retooling or developing new models. As such, Allas’s commissioning and curation remind us that, without the critical intervention of First Nations curators, museums would still be denigrating Indigenous cultural production as craft, kitsch or, at worst, ethnographic specimen.

The conversation I raise here is old news for those familiar with discourses on exhibitionary models. But the relevance of repetition is clearly demonstrated by the rest of ‘The People’s House’, which presents material in an aesthetic firmly seated in anthropological, archaeological and ethnographic styles. In its first room, for example, a Mei mask from the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea is presented within a clear perspex box typical of conventional museological displays. The aesthetic is not self-reflexive, as we might expect in a post-1990s new institutionalism cultural climate, but earnest. It is this earnestness that worries me. Not only because it is a litmus test for the institution’s relationship with contemporary cultural practices, but also because it indicates the persistence of an ideology harking back to the museum’s history as the site of the first Government House. Museological models that prioritise the display of Indigenous cultural objects as specimens casually reproduce an aestheticisation of genocide. This is not hyperbole. It is for this reason that the use of contemporary art exhibitionary aesthetics by Indigenous curators, especially in traditional museum spaces, is so important. The retooling of the conventions of value developed after the dematerialisation of art, to reinsert and assert value for Indigenous culture, is nothing short of revolutionary.  

Given the reported intent to render the Museum of Sydney a First Nations space, I anticipate a difficult conversation ahead as to the ways in which the exhibitionary models of the institution speak to its strategic goals. The interventions of the shellworked and woven opera houses, however, give me tentative hope and I look forward to seeing such curatorial interventions expanded.

Aneshka Mora, Warrang/Sydney

Co-presented by the Sydney Opera House, ‘The People’s House: Sydney Opera House at 50’ is on display at the Museum of Sydney until 12 November 2023.  

Imagined encounters: Haegue Yang at the NGA

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‘Changing From From To From’ celebrates the National Gallery of Australia’s ongoing commitment to gender equality, through the presentation of an intimate yet intellectually and visually impressive body of work by renowned South Korean contemporary artist Haegue Yang. Based in Seoul and Berlin, Yang’s borderless approach to her practice traverses geographic regions, artistic genres and historical and cultural contexts resulting in a fluid and ever-evolving output.

Curated by Russell Storer, Head Curator of International Art, and Beatrice Thompson, Associate Curator of Asian and Pacific Art, the exhibition comprises four key works, two of which have recently been acquired for the collection. Mobile sculptures, digital wallpaper and a sound piece – all rich in material contrasts – present different modes of Yang’s practice. The title of the exhibition is sourced from a poem by the late conceptual artist Li Yuan-chia and captures Yang’s ongoing exploration of transformation, migration and abstraction – both as a language and means of open-ended interpretation. At the media preview in late May, Yang further elaborated during a conversation with me. She referred to concepts of ‘movement and vibration’ and acknowledged the starting point of the exhibition was ‘the changing nature of water as a central motif’.  

Mobility and transmuting forms, histories and memory, and the permeability of these concepts, have long been an interest in Yang’s meticulous research and practice. Large-scale sculptures and installations often comprise disparate materials from industrially manufactured objects such as venetian blinds or steel frames juxtaposed with handcrafted techniques of knitting or weaving, to straw, sound or scent and, recently, artificial intelligence. Objects are often intended to be moveable or enacted with choreographed invigilation; the tension of a sculpture moving through space takes on a performative human quality.

The installation Sonic Intermediates – Three Differential Equations (2020) individually represents sculptural portraits of three pioneering modern artists. Here, Naum Gabo, Barbara Hepworth and Li Yuan-chia are shamans acting as intermediaries between the human and spirit worlds. These anthropomorphic sculptures – steel-framed intricate objects made of mesh, bells, plastic twine resembling fur, and zip ties – jingle and vibrate when playfully activated by invigilators. Yang described these works as ‘historical creations … honouring not yet happening, imagined encounters’. Yang’s exploration of migration, energy (nature and people) and rituals come to life when these passive sculptures become active.

Developed using sophisticated artificial intelligence, Genuine Cloning (2020) comprises two interwoven sound elements – a replica of Yang’s voice whispering a pre-written script and a partial recording of the 2018 DMZ Summit when then-president Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un held a private conversation. Amusingly, this historic interaction was subdued by the sounds of ambient birdsong in the nearby nature areas. The audio permeates the exhibition space and spans topics including language, weather systems, the naming conventions of typhoons, and observations on life and ethics. In conversation, Yang observed that the voice, when listened to closely, is ‘cynical, cold, not human’ in its construction.

Continuing Yang’s fascination with natural phenomena and extreme changes of weather, Non-Linear and Non-Periodic Dynamics (2020), an immersive wallpaper that wraps the exhibition space, uses technology to layer imagery and motifs. Inspired by Edward Lorenz’s mathematical modelling of chaotic weather patterns, the work was made in consultation with Ngambri Elder Paul Girrawah House to incorporate local motifs including the kurrajong tree, bogong moths and the nearby lakes George and Burley Griffin. Acknowledging her position as an outsider, since her first visit to the Australian desert in 2017, accompanying artistic director Mami Kataoka on a research trip for the 21st Biennale of Sydney, Yang’s desire to connect to place and deepen her understanding of Indigenous culture and Country is authentic and stems from her rigorous approach to research. Visually dynamic and energetic in its shifting and enveloping quality, the wallpaper belies the flatness of its digital origins and wall-based installation. Intentionally, the audience is just as swept up in the movement, or vibration of the piece, as the chaos theory represented within the work.

Each installation is as considered as the artist herself. In conversation, Yang speaks eloquently on topics including climate change and the formation of cyclones, migration, future projects and previous visits to Australia. Yang is part of a generation of groundbreaking contemporary artists from South Korea. Research-based and often esoteric concepts could result in an alienating output, however this is simply not the case for Yang. Mesmerising in their detail, complexity and structure, the work and conversation remain with you long after.

Sarah Hetherington, Kamberri/Canberra

Curated by Russell Storer and Beatrice Thompson, ‘Haegue Yang: Changing From From To From’ is on display at the National Gallery of Australia until 24 September 2023.

A revealing darkness: ‘Shadow Spirit’ at Flinders Street Station

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Rarely do I walk into an exhibition and find that I am instantly awed. Or, that I put my phone away and just experience the show. But in the case of Yorta Yorta curator Kimberley Moulton’s ‘Shadow Spirit’, I am, and I do. 

‘Shadow Spirit’ is presented as part of the RISING festival in Naarm/Melbourne and is housed in the dilapidated top floor of Flinders Street Station. It is an immersive exhibition of 15 new commissions – a major selection being time-based art – by 30 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists who explore Ancestral knowledges and Indigenous epistemologies. Unknown and unseen to all but the First Peoples of so-called Australia, these Indigenous spirits of memories, and indeed spirits of Country, have been generously brought together by Moulton and the exhibiting artists to teach non-Indigenous audiences the multiple realms of Indigenous comprehension which cannot be defined.

As a Ngiyampaa person, it is not lost on me how, despite the settler-colonial power dynamics at play inside the old Federation-era building-cum-art space, Moulton has shaped the exhibition into a space of Indigeneity, rather than just for Indigeneity. For non-initiated non-Indigenous audiences, what I am speaking about is how Moulton’s curatorial decision to position artists of material, spiritual and intellectual Indigenous knowledges into clusters is a purposeful act to counter the settler-colonial architectural features of specific exhibition zones. Within this Indigenous sovereign display space, the arched windows and pressed tin (or otherwise moulded) ceiling panels lose their power. Artworks rise from darkness to embody that energy, where they encourage the unfolding of truths.  

There is an implied route for audiences to take when they emerge from the lift. First is left, where the artworks are a little more in conversation with each other and where the rooms are more open and connected. It would be remiss of me not to mention the ambitious projection by Brian Robinson (Kala Lagaw Ya/Wuthathi) in this area, Zugubal: The Winds and Tides set the Pace. The work is in a room by itself and bleeds from the walls onto the floor and ceiling. It is an enveloping display that heavily draws on Robinson’s linocut prints, including the one shown in the opposite room, and gives particular emphasis to his technical skill as a printmaker. The animation sees Zugubal, or celestial beings, begin life and move through the space, dictating life on earth. They navigate and shape cultural practice under the watchful eye of Tagai, a star constellation which moves across the ceiling.

Nearby is Wiradjuri artist Karla Dickens’s Deeply Rooted, an incredibly moving comment on the destruction of Country, our trees, and an Indigenous ecology that has been connected to place since time immemorial. The upturned roots that form major parts of this series of works were sourced by Dickens following the destructive Lismore floods of 2022. Joining Dickens in this area is a sculpture by Vicki Couzens (Keerray Wooroong/Gunditjmara) and paintings by John Prince Siddon (Walmajarri), and tucked away in a separate room, watershadow, an installation of various media by Judy Watson (Waanyi). Combined, these are the few exceptions to the time-based artworks that unfold throughout the rest of the exhibition.

Within the right wing of the show, the first work viewers encounter is The Umbra by Hayley Millar Baker (Gunditjmara/Djabwurrung). The sound of heavy rain drew me into Millar Baker’s display, but it was the tender and slow pacing of the noir film that had me seated quickly. The film explores witching hour, when the veil between the spiritual and physical worlds is at its thinnest. There is a beautiful scene where The Umbra’s protagonist sits by the fireplace, mostly still, and in near silence. Opposite her is an empty armchair, but that is not really correct: an unknowing spirit sits alongside the protagonist, also warming herself by the fire. This is the second film from Millar Baker, following the success of her previous work Nyctinasty (2021), which continues to champion ideas of female magic and spirituality. As a young filmmaker, I am invested in seeing her practice continue and, with time, broaden.

While much of the exhibition releases haunting or sometimes distressing truths, there are elements of playfulness which reveal themselves through this section of the show. Moving along the hallway one encounters Way of the Ngangkari (2015) by Warwick Thornton (Kaytej), which likens the practice of ngangkari (healers) and their spiritual connections to Country to the school of force-wielding Jedis who originated in the movie franchise Star Wars. Nearby, Tiger Yaltangki (Pitjantjatjara) and Jeremy Whiskey (Pitjantjatjara/Yankunytjatjara) present ROCK N ROLL, an installation of Yaltangki’s painted guitars mounted as a framing device around the pair’s joint video work. Further down the corridor is a new animation by Dylan Mooney (Yuwi/Meriam and Australian South Sea Islander) that brings to life his digital drawings of plants, spirits and a young Aboriginal man. It is a welcome reprieve to encounter after the high-energy projection by Yaltangki and Whiskey. This is an astute decision on the part of Moulton, as curatorially she gives the viewer time to prepare for the introspection needed to encounter the final work in the ballroom. 

Rarrirarri could arguably be considered the magnum opus of The Mulka Project with Mulkun Wirrpanda and of the exhibition itself. The work features a large termite mound sculpted from fibreglass in the centre of the room, with projections of Wirrpanda’s artworks that serve to document all the plants and insects from Yolngu Country, while exploring the cyclical nature of unseen ecologies. It is an exceptional installation, paired with a soundtrack of song and storytelling which reveals to an uninitiated and non-Indigenous audience that something spiritual and intellectual is happening. The work is both about sharing the unknowable and the championing of a Yolngu epistemology. It becomes a reflection on an Indigenous world of living where culture always comes first and where the unseen is sacred.

I believe ‘Shadow Spirit’ to be the most comprehensive showing of contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art that Naarm has seen in the last five years. It has so much to bring to light, with all the artists doing special and important work in speaking to the in-between and how this informs, shapes and changes the way Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people see the world. In such a divisive year of politics, non-Indigenous viewers can learn perspective through visiting the exhibition, to understand Indigenous knowledges and histories that they do not know or have not attempted yet to realise.

Erin Vink, Naarm/Melbourne

Curated by Kimberley Moulton and presented by Metro Trains Melbourne for this year’s RISING festival, ‘Shadow Spirit’ is being exhibited on Level 3 of Flinders Street Station until 30 July 2023.

Filling a cup in a river / working in the open: Lachlan Thompson in conversation with Stolon Press’s Tom Melick and Simryn Gill

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Started on Gadigal and Wangal land in 2019, Stolon Press was conceived by Tom Melick and Simryn Gill as: ‘a way to publish texts and images that might easily fall through cracks or remain in boxes and bottom drawers ... Like the plants from which it takes its name, Stolon Press works close to the ground, opportunistic in modest terrain and untended places.’ The following conversation took place over a period of two weeks or so this year. We initially arranged to meet in person, but ultimately decided that written correspondence would be best. The text has been passed back and forth, circulated, mulled over, written across weekends, during commutes and between deadlines. 

Lachlan Thompson (LT): In thinking about publishing, I often find myself circling back to ideas around culture. When you write, make books, pamphlets and/or photocopies, is there a specific image/definition of culture that you have in mind? 

Tom Melick (TM): Defining culture isn’t something we specifically think about when we’re making books, but you’re right to link the production of images and text (publishing) with the question of ‘culture’ more broadly. I’d say we try to get close to the word’s early usage, ‘to tend and cultivate’. Simryn likes to say we grow books, and I like that as an image and a method, because it implies an ecosystem. We work closely with the people we publish so the books come about through proximity, intimacy and persistence. An important aspect for us is that who we publish may not necessarily think of themselves as writers or artists, or perhaps do not even think what they do is publishable. But this isn’t charitable labour. We work with people we want to work with and want to read. So much of it is about what can come from conversation, and a book – even if it’s two pages stapled together, or one page folded in half – can be an excellent way to talk about something, to clarify, to organise, to combine, to compare, to record, to recover, to translate, to hold and then, eventually, to share. This places distribution – or a better word may be circulation? – at the very heart of publishing.

Since the 1990s, Arjun Appadurai has encouraged approaching culture not as a noun but as an adjective. As a noun, ‘culture is some kind of object, thing, or substance, whether physical or metaphysical’, whereas its adjectival use turns it into a heuristic device, ‘a dimension of phenomena, a dimension that attends to situated and embodied difference’. Publishers come in all shapes and sizes, and their motivations and aims are usually calibrated to certain authorships and readerships. Often, say in academic publishing today, those doing the writing and the reading are restricted by the professionalisation of language or by financial models, such as paywalls. The consequence of this is that academic discourse becomes less and less accessible; it partitions and divides between those who do research and writing and those who do not; those who study and those who are studied; those who operate within institutions and those who don’t. In other words, it loses its heuristics. Although we are still working this out, we want our books to travel and to find writers and readers who we couldn’t even imagine. Although the books we make are very simple, often photocopied and stapled, they are all carefully worked out in the making, and, ideally, they would travel like seeds, sprouting and growing in places we could never predict.

LT: Do you think there is a distinction constructed between conditions of production and content, and does a specific structure, type of content, aesthetics or poetics (maybe even politics) emerge from your publishing approach?

Simryn Gill (SG): The ‘content’ of what we do is held as much in the method of working – ‘conditions of production’ if you like – as in the address and subject matter of our publications. For us they’re impossible to separate.  

Tom has described our approach to publishing. Think of it as a praxis. In our way of working, without planning to do this, praxis is a kind of reverse engineering – of theory; of ‘what is our politics’; of ‘how to be political’. We’re not so much putting some principles into practice, as figuring out our methodology through our activities. For us, being political in our time lies in thinking about how we live, thinking about what we do, the choices we make. Tom and I are drawn to working with people in an ecosystem (as our friend Khaled Sabsabi said of us) of friendships, connections and collaborations; tapping and sharing – pooling/pulling – skill, passion and our time. Inevitably this approach requires patience, flexibility, compromise, opportunism, slowness. We work slowly, at our pace and our authors’ and makers’ paces. We look for ways to fund our books, case by case, often choosing modesty as a solution to cost, but also because we learn a lot from putting the books together ourselves. As I’ve said, and it’s worth repeating: we learn from doing. Heuristics + Praxis. The books come out of this: are they by-products, manifestos, guidebooks? A way (for us) to live/make a living?

What I’m describing are high ideals. To work in the open, and openly, but still serious and generous to our authors and collaborators, our readers and ourselves. We often fall short, get frustrated, get things wrong; we are well aware that we are working from our own limitations (from our foibles, opinions, desires, egos). We also publish our own materials at Stolon Press. We make the frame, it also frames our own works – writings and images.

So what does this say about our ‘conditions of production’ and ‘content’? Messy and tangled, but also, we hope, clearly visible in their continuity and mutual dependence.

LT: I like the possible description of your books as by-products, something marginal, coming out of a larger or centralised process. Do you think that the book, as either an object or form, is capable of holding these conversations, friendships and ecosystems that grow/make them?

TM: A book can never hold the entirety of its process, or the conversations that go into its making. It’s a small part that you come away with, like filling a cup in a river. We often choose to work with people on multiple books, because it allows us to engage with different aspects of what they do over time, hopefully opening up new areas for them and for us. Form speaks directly to the experience of reading. We think a lot about the ‘objectness’ of a book (size, extent, paper, font, font size, margin size, cover and so on), but we’re not interested in fetishising print. Publishing can be an anxious business, and looking at the design of many books today this anxiousness creates a form that is both cautious and overdressed.

How do you trust a reader to find a book? To pick it up and be held by what’s inside? What books are capable of taking the full weight of our curiosity?

LT: At university, I remember being told that books can be thought of as a kind of architecture. Are there ways that you try to expand the ecosystems and structures that make up and surround books?

TM: I like the idea of thinking about a book’s conceptual and physical structure, and how the two can merge, so that the concept is experienced in the reading of the book rather than left as an abstraction. A book often brings with it a host of heterogeneous and contradictory parts, some of which are made visible through the process of making while others stay hidden ‘behind’ the face of the text like the cogs in a clock. There is no right way to go about it.  

Simryn and I have chosen to place ourselves in the middle of these entanglements. We don’t have one method or process for bringing a book to print, common in trade and academic publishing. How can we translate a literal stolon collected from Botany Bay into a book (Coasting)? How can we combine text with images already painted and printed by an artist, such as William Eric Brown, into a story (A Sentence for the Sun, also 2022)? We approach the making of a book as a live event; we have to think on our feet and figure out how all the parts come together.

There are other models I admire, like the books my friend Elisa Taber shows me from her part of the world – from Cartonera Publishing. The books are bound together from recycled cardboard bought from cartoneros (‘garbage pickers’) and then handpainted. The books are sold at the cost of production, and they can be ‘ordered’ by readers like a pizza.           

So perhaps we can think of books as different kinds of architecture? Some are houses, shelters, sheds, tents, skyscrapers, ruins. There are books with big wide hallways and others with narrow passages. Some books open interior spaces we’ve been in before, are familiar to us, while others surprise us.

Stolon Press’s most recent publications include Lee Weng Choy’s Hours, Accidental and Arbitrary: A Year of Writing Lonely, Aveek Sen’s Picture Book and Xenia Cherkaev’s St. Xenia and the Gleaners of Leningrad (all 2023); for more information, see Stolon Press.

A spectrum of disgust, celebrated: Juan Davila at Foxy Production

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An alien in the colonial outpost, Juan Davila has sewn seeds of discontent via a discombobulating process of abject humour and history painting for five decades. A small selection of these works are on view at Foxy Production in Manhattan as part of Davila’s first solo exhibition in the United States.

The Santiago-born, Naarm/Melbourne-based painter is an idiosyncratic elder of critique. I like to think of his belated United States debut as one that coincides with the fading superpower’s festering empire, because Davila is a connoisseur of nation-bashing. Nation-bashing comes in many forms, one of which is creating the conditions that stimulate the slipperiness of interpretation, where confusion is a guiding force, freed of the colonial imagination by indecipherability.

There have been past attempts to censor Davila’s work, most notably from the Hayward Gallery in London in 1994 and the 4th Biennale of Sydney in 1982. If censorship is based on a culture’s fear of its own interpretation, how do these images, rooted in the subconscious and the poetic traversing of time, land outside the settler-state?

Davila straddles numerous modalities, from subtle gestures to blunt caricatures, in which humour can be seen as a call to consciousness, such as in Crocodile Dundee (1988). Is there anything as uncomfortably fun than a gay man depicting two of Australia’s most treasured heterosexual men engaging in sodomy at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic? Elsewhere on the same plane of Crocodile Dundee is a naked Queen Elizabeth II, the original Bankcard logo, a pissing boy with a condom dangling from his mouth, a cartoon of a few cavorting crocodiles, and a small Parliament House in Canberra with a bent flagpole bearing the Union Jack. Placing Parliament House beside the Bankcard logo is one way of conflating the nation-state with big business (1988 was Australia’s Bicentenary). There is also a tiny clump of fingernail clippings and hairs, adhered with dollops of thick oil paint. To attempt to decode the symbols, appropriated moments, disorganised gender and sexuality and allusions to repression and oppression, is to submit to the burden of history. There is no escape, only voice and tone where viewers can open themselves to the vagueness of textures of discontent. A spectrum of disgust, celebrated.

Somewhere between 1988 and 2003 Davila shifted from bombastic compositions of ridicule to whimsical depictions of figures in the Australian landscape that cradled critique via references to art history. Davila is said to have disagreed with modernism impeding on figurative painting as a tool for political stimulation, and subsequently worked to rectify that interruption. Meandering through styles is a way of resisting the singular cohesion of modernism. This intention feels almost quaint amid the deluge of AI and the gentrification of our imagination.

Two women on the banks of the Yarra (2003) is a direct response to Gustave Courbet’s The Origin of the World (1866), reversing the gaze of the viewer over a pair of female figures and driven by a lack of reverence towards the way women have been depicted throughout art history. Perplexing is the insertion of two found portraits, collaged onto the painting, and sitting above the women. One is of an Indigenous man and the other is of a white man in smart casual attire holding a book. The women look upwards, towards the sky, and the men return the gaze of the viewer. While the title of the painting only refers to the two women, and the Yarra which is abstracted in the background, the inclusion of the male portraits reinforces references to nineteenth-century female objectification and the othering of Indigenous Australians through primitivism.

Naarm/Melbourne’s Yarra was once renowned as the world’s muddiest river. Since European settlement, land clearing and development have meant that a layer of silt is permanently suspended on its surface. So, to emulate nature’s response to duress is to muddy the waters. Much of the pleasure of such work is leaked through contradiction: the abstraction that surrounds the figures, who of course benefit from a kind of ocular supremacy, is as important as any centre of interest. The painterly brush marks at the edges of the canvas are an analogy for what exists at the borders of comprehension, in the often-misinterpreted edge lands of the Australian landscape.

One of the most recent paintings, Untitled (2022), is much more economical. The diptych consists of a cubed figure with coronavirus-shaped genitalia stepping in an abstract yellowed landscape, next to a naked transmasculine person suspended in a lime-green background, staring blankly at the viewer, their withholding and simplicity bewitching.

To interpret Davila is to walk into the prison of one’s own conditioning, wading through the murky areas of subjective subconscious and the wild zones of the colonial imagination. His work resembles a directive but would never dare to tell us what to think. Instead, it socialises us with the anxieties, celebrations and shame of each era, stitching together elements of populism and the fringe, testing their compatibility. To wander through different times, styles and ideas is a way to avoid the singular narratives of nationhood or modernism. These works transcend their original indictments through their emphasis on the magic and the friction that occurs when someone punctures the horizon line, muddying the waters.

George Egerton-Warburton, New York City 

Co-presented by Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art, ‘Juan Davila’ is on display at Foxy Production in New York City until 25 June 2023.

Grace Culley’s ‘Surprised face; Heart eyes’ at West Space

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Day to day we operate within the unspoken norms of society: don’t stare, be quiet on public transport, look both ways, smile back. We endeavour not to rock the boat, but when we do we spiral, replaying situations over and over in our minds.

Mistakes = regret. Regret = sadness. Sadness = a loss of dopamine.

As humans we try to avoid this loss by taking on a dopamine-centric worldview, chasing validation and approval at every turn. How, then, are members of the neurodiverse community – whose experience of dopamine, desire and control differ – expected to assimilate? Grace Culley’s exhibition ‘Surprised face; Heart eyes’ unpacks this concept and how it collides with the expected societal notions of acceptable behaviour.

Tucked away on Level 1 of Collingwood Yards, West Space is unexpectedly lofty. As you enter the gallery a thin structure comes into view, its rough black body leaning against the wall. Titled The Gate, the carbon fibre and steel sculptural assemblage takes a moment to grasp, its exaggerated Gothic font creating an anamorphic illusion. ‘Heavn’ it reads, the gate to heaven.

An ambient guitar track loops in the background, circulating from the two large speakers in the corner of the room. Its easy mellow tune rubs against the industrial materials of Culley’s sculptures, imbuing a sense of poetic duality. In many ways this exhibition pays homage to the aesthetics of Naarm/Melbourne’s inner north. Padlocks, steel, newspaper and resin adorn Golden Brown and you know you love me (both 2023), visually referencing the area’s architectural landmarks and ubiquitous iron fencing in an expressly rough style that invokes niche Melbourne sentimentality.

In Fallen from Grace (2023), these aesthetics are laid bare through the tenacious repetition of ballpoint pen on paper. The artist kneels at the centre of the drawing, her hands pressing against her thighs and her back arched. She is facing away from the viewer, her long hair tossed over her shoulders, adorned in a cropped sweater and tight thong. It resembles the type of softcore pornography we might see on Instagram. However, the enraptured face of a demon disrupts this fantasy, its eyes fluttered back in ecstasy, an engorged tongue rolling down the lower back. This disturbance is not a mere commentary on women’s bodies or the oversexualisation of the female form. Rather, as informed by Culley’s experience of Tourette’s syndrome, this drawing acts as a self-portrait merging feelings associated with the loss of control with the societal judgments surrounding the condition. It focuses on the way in which these judgments have proliferated in online spaces and how the artist, as a young woman, responds.

‘Surprised face; Heart eyes’ explores Tourette’s syndrome both conceptually and physically. The audience can feel the laborious repetition of the artist’s hand, identifying the many loops, hatches, scrunches, mouldings and welding that occurred to produce them. The exhibition catalogue includes a conversation between Culley and West Space Curator Sebastian Henry-Jones, in which the artist addresses why repetition is so integral to this exhibition, stating: ‘Sometimes it’s nice to repeat things that are causing me physical strain and stress but aren’t tics.’  

Alongside the artist’s own circumstances, the exhibition draws from the extensive body of preparatory research conducted by Culley concerning others living with dopamine imbalances. Beautiful and haunting, the exhibition asks its audience to reflect on their experience of dopamine, how they chase it, wield it and judge others who differ.

Lily Beamish, Naarm/Melbourne

‘Surprised face; Heart eyes’ by Grace Culley is being exhibited at West Space in Naarm/Melbourne until 29 April 2023.

Linear invention: Nonggirrnga Marawili and Leo Loomans at the Drill Hall

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This unusual exhibition brings together the work of two artists, previously unknown to each other, whose media and materials, cultural heritage and artistic formation are vastly different. Yolngu painter Nonggirrnga Marawili is a revered Elder of the Madarrpa people in Yirrkala, Northeast Arnhem Land, and underwent a long apprenticeship in painting, traditionally a male preserve in Yolngu culture, as part of a distinguished family of artists. Sculptor Leo Loomans, New Zealand-born, of Dutch heritage, educated in Warrang/Sydney and based in Kamberri/Canberra, works at the intersection of two distinct sculptural traditions: a process in which found fragments of machinery are cut, twisted and welded together in improvised assemblages; and the tradition of ‘drawing in space’ pioneered by Spanish sculptor Julio González, in works produced in collaboration with Picasso around 1930.

Putting these disparate works side-by-side, as curator Terence Maloon has acknowledged, carries risks. Not only the risk of insensitivity in juxtaposing Indigenous and settler cultures, but the risk of consigning their works, as Maloon writes in the exhibition catalogue, ‘to an illusory, false friendship, or to two solitudes’. But what speaks across these spaces, as the title ‘FLUENT’ suggests (it also references the landmark exhibition of contemporary Indigenous women artists in the Australian Pavilion at the 1997 Venice Biennale), is a quality of linear invention. This perception arose from the happy accident of their works being pictured on facing pages in the catalogue of a 2019 Drill Hall exhibition of the Geoffrey Hassall and Virginia Milson collection. Both artists are extensively represented in that collection, so this exhibition was a way of further teasing out and exploring this chance revelation of a mysterious affinity.

Marawili’s paintings frequently involve large circular or rectangular masses connected and crisscrossed by strings of dots, or ribbons of parallel lines suggesting, in a loosely pictorial way, rivulets of rainwater, or jags of lightning, the stippling of sand along a shoreline, or the movement of woven fish traps in water. Marawili has said that her works are conceived for ‘outsiders’, that she paints only subjects that interest her, that are devoid of the sacred. Yirrkala tradition stipulates that sacred stories can only be told using material that comes from the land; for male painters, charged with passing down lore, this has meant strictly replicating clan designs painted in ochre on bark. As a woman, Marawili is under less strict cultural obligations; not only is she freer to improvise with design and subject matter, she has been granted permission by Elders to supplement natural pigments with ink from discarded toner cartridges from the local print workshop, while the wooden boards she paints on were originally brought to Yirrkala to be laid over the basketball court for dances. Marawili’s works thus fluently combine both natural and artificial materials ‘from the land’, combining veiled acknowledgements of sacred designs with pictorial elements such as cloud patterns reflected in water, or the movement of water against rocks.

Loomans’s work with found metal similarly pays respect to its origins, while shifting functional forms towards becoming aesthetic or design elements. For instance, the teeth of interlocking cogs are elsewhere figured in an improvisatory register as a formal design of parallel ribs or grooves, articulating a push-and-pull between the restrictive precision of engineering and the freer aesthetic of line and gesture. Indeed, for an artist working in the apparently rigid medium of steel, Loomans is known for revisiting and revising his sculptures, returning to them again and again to shift and realign, add and cut away, a drawing in space that includes erasures and palimpsests. Compositionally, the sculptures often enact this tension between given and improvised, with the base sections more obviously collages of heterogenous found elements, sutured with visible welds, while the upper sections are looser and more linear, metal traceries that lift the mechanical components into rhythmic suspensions, or enclose and enfold shaped and articulated voids. This open structure of loops and struts and anchor points uses empty space and the light that passes through it as one of its materials.

This is an exhibition that responds to the viewer’s movements through the gallery: just as Marawili’s compositions subtly shift their balance when seen from different angles, their masses and lines releasing different energies of movement and stillness, Loomans’s sculptures not only dramatically change shape when viewed from different angles, but take on from close-up sculptural qualities of weight and tactility, and from a distance the lightness of drawing and mark-making.

What resonates between these works is the power of invention in the tracing of a line. Even as each artist works respectfully within the constraints of given materials and inherited traditions, their works convey a profoundly spiritual experience of both discipline and freedom.

Russell Smith, Kamberri/Canberra

Curated by Terence Maloon, ‘FLUENT: Nonggirrnga Marawili and Leo Loomans’ is on display at the Drill Hall Gallery, Kamberri/Canberra, until 16 April 2023.

Algorithmic shifts: ‘Data Relations’ at ACCA

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Having recently played at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), ‘Data Relations’ was an innovative, international and often introspective look at how technology’s collection of information transforms our relationships within and between cultures. The media theorist Alexander R. Galloway, quoted by artist Zach Blas in his three-channel video on the troll as a figure of enchantment and entrapment, writes that data from its Latin root means ‘the things having been given’, and this exhibition showed that the ways in which we relate to data as individuals and cultures can, like a Trojan Horse, be a dubious gift.

The exhibition began by drawing lines from the past to the present. These lines, drawn by New York-based Nigerian artist and researcher Mimi Onuoha, set a tone of insightful inquest about how social bias and power dynamics are perpetuated by contemporary technological systems and networks. Her video These networks in our skin (2021) depicts four women braiding technological cables; in The cloth in the cable (2022), these braided cables were installed alongside custom-designed fabrics and spices by Naarm/Melbourne-based African homewares entrepreneur Dinzi Amobi-Sanderson. The works evoke the fact that the cables which power our split-second searches span along the same routes which powered the slave trade. This piece of critical context highlights Onuoha’s notion of ‘algorithmic violence’ and the way in which automated decision-making systems prevent human beings from exercising agency by anticipating, blocking and sometimes even meeting their needs.

It was a timely motif that ran through an exhibition that sought to ask how we understand the phenomena of these evolving, enframing and perhaps entrapping technologies. A work like the multi-channel sound installation After words (2022) by international collective Machine Listening emphasises not only that the internet is always listening and learning from human beings, but also how automated systems are actively trained to speak our language through sound recordings performed by actors.

It is a question that has relevance across languages and cultures, and this is also clear in Winnie Soon’s investigation into free expression and censorship, Unerasable characters I–III (2020–22), a software installation which shows how Chinese surveillance technologies censor social media in a series of artefacts that progress from the book to the screen. These pieces are based on Weiboscope, a website from the University of Hong Kong that monitors posts on the Chinese-language social-media website Weibo, both for their content and for the duration of time they exist online before they are erased. Soon’s trilogy emphasises the way data relates to political agency, and the way the transient pleasures of online engagement can lead to an overall erosion of our freedoms. It is a subtle and provocative exploration.  

The political scope of the exhibition extended to the inaugural commission on ACCA’s new ‘Digital Wing’ platform: Offset 2023: Alternate carbon credit registry by New York-based artists Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne. The website proactively intervenes in the carbon economy by allowing activists to calculate the carbon offsets from direct action, emphasising how the political burden of intervening to stop climate change has been displaced onto the individual. Brain and Lavigne’s works are as playful as they are elegant, and the website is still accessible.

An intimate and arresting coda to the exhibition was provided by Lauren Lee McCarthy’s performance piece Surrogate (2022– ), an ongoing conceptual work where the Los Angeles-based artist allows prospective parents to control all aspects of a potential surrogacy using existing apps that raise questions about technology and agency at this most fundamental human level.

Vanessa Francesca, Naarm/Melbourne

Guest-curated by Miriam Kelly (with coordinating curator Shelley McSpedden), ‘Data Relations’ was exhibited at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Naarm/Melbourne, 10 December 2022 – 19 March 2023.