About the Exhibition: Stuart Ringholt is one of Australia’s most fearless contemporary artists. His practice has involved leading audiences on naturist gallery tours, anger workshops, and participatory performance works that place the artist in embarrassing situations. He also makes video, absurdist sculpture, painted mirrors and collage. In 2006 he published the autobiographical book Hashish psychosis: what it’s like to be mentally ill and recover.

The museum-wide exhibition at MUMA will present two ambitious new commissions shown in context with a selected survey of recent video, drawing, collage and sculptural works. Ringholt’s practice addresses personal themes such as our fear of embarrassment and the pressure to conform to social norms, with the role of art cast as a potentially cathartic and re-energising force.

Generously supported by the Catalyst: Katherine Hannay Visual Arts Commission, Ringholt’s new work – a monumentally scaled and temporally askew clock – will have a singular, powerful presence in the museum, provoking a disorientating and uncanny sense of time and an associated reconsideration of how time may be measured and spent.

In this new world of altered time, MUMA premieres Ringholt’s Club Purple – a nude daytime disco situated within the museum. Featuring mixed and solo dance days, ‘ladies days’, and an endless playlist to choose from, Club Purple will offer a unique experience for audiences who choose to participate. It will entail a dramatic reinvention of the museum as an embodied space.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a substantial monograph featuring interviews and essays on the artist with contributions by Carolyn Christov Bakargiev, Artistic Director, Documenta 13 and Amelia Barikin author of Making Worlds: Art and Science Fiction (Surpllus, Melbourne, 2013) amongst others.

The exhibition will travel to City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi, New Zealand and the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane in 2014.

A grant from the Katherine Hannay Estate enabled the creation of Catalyst: Katherine Hannay Visual Arts Commission. The Commission is a unique charitable grant that supports Australian visual artists to work in partnership with a cultural not for profit organisation to realise a major new work at a pivotal moment in their career. Katherine Hannay’s legacy is contributing to fostering the careers of artists seeking freedom to create influential and personal work without restraint. The Commission recognises, and supports, the key role of cultural not for profit organisations in promoting artists and exhibiting their work.

This exhibition is a joint project by Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne; Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane; and City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi.