Exhibitions | New exhibitions at MUMA Liquid Archive and Pretty Air and Useful Things

MUMA exhibitions July to September 2012

Liquid Archive | Pretty Air and Useful Things

Liquid Archive

Exhibition Dates: 19 July - 22 September 2020

Opening Function: 3.00 - 5.00pm, Saturday 21 July 2020 Monash University Museum of Art, Caulfield Campus

Opening remarks at 4.00pm by Nikos Papastergiadis, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne

Pre-opening: A welcome and blessing of Joyce Campbell’s project Te Taniwha will take place at 2.30pm

See the website for more detail http://www.monash.edu.au/muma/exhibitions/

About the exhibitions

Liquid Archive

Curator: Geraldine Barlow

Artists: Laurence Aberhart | Bashir Baraki | Adam Broomberg & Oliver Chanarin | Joyce Campbell Zoe Croggon | Mathew Jones | Leah King-Smith | Nicola Loder | Maha Maamoun | Ricky Maynard Tom Nicholson | Patrick Pound | Raqs Media Collective | Xochitl Rivera Navarrete | Zineb Sedira [The User] | Kit Wise

Archives allow us to measure the flow of time, to find patterns in the way time eddies, echoes and repeats.

Liquid Archive traces a series of connections between traditional notions of the archive, emerging technologies and questions around the ways in which memory and personal experience are incorporated into larger histories. The exhibition explores how contemporary artists are working with the archive as well as seeking to understand how technological and cultural transformation impact upon knowledge and memory.

Liquid Archive aims to reflect something of the archive as we experience it today: between analogue and digital, in a state of escalating movement and flux.

Curated by MUMA’s Senior Curator Geraldine Barlow, Liquid Archive brings invited projects together with key works from the Monash University Collection, and features the work of eight international artists/artist collectives and nine artists from Australia. Liquid Archive continues MUMA’s ongoing series of thematic survey exhibitions exploring specific discursive trajectories of relevance to wider social and political contexts.

Pretty Air and Useful Things

Artists: Dan Bell | Sanné Mestrom | Alex Vivian

Focusing on the invisible forces, transgressive processes, and anarchic approaches to materials in sculptural practice, Pretty Air and Useful Thingsinvokes the magnetism and friction of objects, and our relationship to them. Featuring artists Dan Bell, Sanné Mestrom and Alex Vivian, Pretty Air and Useful Things presents sculptural and installation works that reference the body through form, clothing, stains or scent; and the utilitarian via elements of design and commodity. In the spaces between are processes of speculation, transference, fermentation, connection, function and distortion. Using a combination of found, adapted and handmade materials, the intangible, perhaps mystical, qualities of objects are suggested.

Dan Bell’s object and installation work is informed by an anarchic approach to materials and his parallel practice as a jewellery maker. His work conjures the unseen processes of magic, transformation and interstitial states. Referencing the visual language of commodified desire and lifestyle, Bell’s work complicates notions of value.

Sanné Mestrom’s work with objects often involves invisible forces, references to art and cultural history, and explorations of the psychological or emotional significance attributed to objects. Her recent sculptural installations have included a mix of found objects, casts and copies, bringing the context and meaning of objects and materials into play.

Alex Vivian makes installation works that typically involve domestic objects and items of clothing that, having been altered via transgressive processes, are removed them from their original function. Whether installed in sprawling arrangements scattered throughout the exhibition space, or, as in more recent works, displayed as singular sculptural elements relying on the visual language of museum plinths, Vivian’s work is steeped in references to the body.