Tag: Contemporary Art

Boiler Room Lecture | Jalal Toufic Which Is the More Difficult in the Christian Era: to Resurrect or to Bury? | State Library of Victoria

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Monash University Museum of Art [MUMA] in partnership with Monash Art Design & Architecture [MADA] are pleased to co-present a keynote lecture by Lebanese artist, writer and thinker Jalal Toufic, whose influence in the Beirut artistic community over the past two decades has been immense. The lecture will be introduced by Callum Morton, MADA Head of Department, and will be followed by a screening of Toufic’s video Attempt 137 to Map the Drive (7 minutes, 2011; made in collaboration with Graziella Rizkallah Toufic). Jalal Toufic is a thinker and a mortal to death. He was born in 1962 in Beirut or Baghdad and died before dying in 1989 in Evanston, Illinois. His books, many of which were published by Forthcoming Books, are available for download as PDF files at his website: www.jalaltoufic.com. He was most recently a participant in the…

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Event | Flinders Lane Artwalk for NiteArt 2015

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As part of Nite Art 2015 exhibition spaces along Flinders Lane will be open from 6pm until late. Eight venues on Flinders Lane will show photography, video, paintings and site-responsive installations. At Flinders Lane Gallery Jon Eiseman and Josh Robbins will be working on new pieces in the gallery space, and Melinda Schawel will guide visitors through creating their own paper-based art. Karen Woodbury Gallery will have an exhibition by Philip Wolfhagen called Other Worlds, a new collection of landscape works that are inspired by the artist’s experiences in Tasmania’s Skullbones Plains. Blindside ARI (in the Nicholson Building) and the Chin Chin Wall of Art will show video art. Blindside’s Screen Series is curated by Xanthe Dobbie and Anabelle Lacroix and will explore the potential of ‘the object’ in works by five artists and collectives. At Cnin-Chin Taiwanese-born artist Roy…

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Exhibitions | Kate Newby, Sean Peoples, Ishmael Marika | Gertrude Contemporary

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New exhibitions opening at Gertrude Contemporary this Friday 17th July. Exhibition opening: Friday 17 July 2015, 6–8pm Exhibition dates: 17 July–29 August 2015 Main galleries: Kate Newby, Always humming Gertrude Contemporary is pleased to present a new, major exhibition by New Zealand artist Kate Newby, featuring a newly commissioned collaboration with composer Samuel Holloway. Titled Always humming, the exhibition takes over both downstairs galleries and extends to the rooflines of buildings on Gertrude Street, and into its back alleyways, creating a fluid relation between indoors and outdoors. Always humming is an exercise in creating an atmospheric experience rather than a series of discrete objects. Its force is anti-climactic, continuous, infectious; what Jennifer Kabat has described as ‘radically slight.’ In contrast to Newby’s recent series of puddle works, which draw viewers’ attention to the pavement underfoot, all the works in this…

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Boiler Room Lecture | Raqs Media Collective

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MUMA in partnership with AsialinkArts and IMA are pleased to co-present a keynote lecture by Raqs Media Collective members Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. The lecture will be convened by Natalie King, Senior Research Fellow, Victorian College of the Arts/Senior Curator MPavilion. Date: Tuesday 7 July 2015, 6.00-7.30pm Venue: Village Roadshow Theatrette, State Library of Victoria Conference Centre, 179 La Trobe Street, Melbourne FREE event but bookings essential: muma.rsvp@monash.edu or ph. 03 9905 4365 The Raqs Media Collective enjoys playing a plurality of roles; often appearing as artists, occasionally as curators, sometimes as philosophical agent provocateurs. They make contemporary art and films, curated exhibitions, edited books, staged events, collaborated with architects, computer programmers, writers and theatre directors and have founded processes that have left deep impacts on contemporary culture in India. For more information see the website. Raqs Media Collective‘s Australian…

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News | NGV announces Andy Warhol | Ai Wei Wei Summer Exhibition

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The National Gallery has announced that their summer exhibition this year will feature Andy Warhol and Ai Wei Wei. The exhibition has been developed by the NGV and The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, and Ai Wei Wei himself. The exhibition will open in December at the NGV and then at The Andy Warhol Museum in June 2016. From the NGV  Andy Warhol | Ai Weiwei, developed by the NGV and The Warhol, with the participation of Ai Weiwei, will explore the significant influence of these two exemplary artists on modern and contemporary life, focussing on the parallels, intersections and points of difference between the two artists’ practices. Surveying the scope of both artists’ careers, the exhibition at the NGV will present over 300 works, including major new commissions, immersive installations and a wide representation of paintings, sculpture, film, photography, publishing and social media. Presenting the work…

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Exhibitions | Linda Marrinon and Dominik Lang | MUMA

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Two new exhibitions opening next week at MUMA. Exhibition Dates: 11 July – 19 September 2015 Opening function Wednesday 15 July 2015, 6-8pm. With remarks by Robyn McKenzie, writer and art historian Linda Marrinon: Figure Sculpture 2005-2015 A key figure in Australian art since the mid-1980s, Linda Marrinon has developed an idiosyncratic language of painting and drawing steeped in postmodernist irony and feminist wit. Over the last decade, Marrinon has concentrated her attention on a significant body of entrancing and enigmatic figurative sculptures, forty-eight of which are brought together from public and private collections around Australia at the Monash University Museum of Art for Linda Marrinon: Figure Sculpture 2005-2015. Like many of her peers who established their reputations in the 1980s, Marrinon draws her references from both ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, presenting a series of archetypes, intermingling soldiers, maids, matrons, ingénues, twins, travellers,…

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Tracey Moffat Talk at CCP

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“I would rather talk to another artist about their art practice than discuss my own work”, Tracey Moffatt said in a recent interview published in the Spirited catalogue for the Queensland Art Gallery. This is an extraordinary opportunity to hear directly from Tracey Moffatt, one of Australia’s best known and most influential contemporary artists. In conjunction with her exhibition at CCP, Moffatt will give an exclusive public talk at the gallery. Join us for an evening of information sharing and discussion around Moffatt’s enduring and wide reaching practice. As an artist within the VCE syllabus in 2015, this is a valuable opportunity for educators to hear, first hand from Moffat. Date: Tuesday 7 July, 6pm—7.30pm Venue: Centre for Contemporary Photography, 404 George Street, Fitzroy Tickets: $10 students and CCP members, $15 non-members. Bookings essential. Book here > Website: http://www.ccp.org.au/lecture_series.php Born in Brisbane in 1960, Tracey Moffatt studied…

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Review | David Hansen on Danh Vo’s Slip of the Tongue in Venice

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Slip of the Tongue, Punta della Dogana, Venice 12 April-31 December 2015 Curated by Danh Vo in collaboration with Caroline Bourgeois Venice: home of Marco Polo; key entrepôt on the Silk Road; the heart of a great and glittering maritime and mercantile empire. For hundreds of years the Most Serene Republic reached out across the Adriatic and the Mediterranean to the Eastern Empire and beyond, trading and plundering; the famous lion of St Mark atop the right-hand column of the Piazzetta, next to the Doge’s Palace, is probably 4th century BC Persian-Hellenistic; the Byzantine water-marble facing of the basilica of San Marco was stripped from Hagia Sophia during the sack of Constantinople at the time of the Fourth Crusade. Yet the city also has an intense historical and cultural specificity: an essentially Græco-Roman and Roman Catholic identity that underpins all its…

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Talk | Stein Rønning | CCP Australia

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Resituating time, lost time re-embedded, or how Chronos eats his stone Since Bernd and Hilla Becher, fine art photography has been practiced with great fervour. It has been disseminated and analysed, and as an art form, it has become an auto-critical practice. It’s even started to find its own way of dying as its very mode of existence, in much the same way as painting has for quite some time. Modern photography appeared as a potential artistic medium (plate photography in the 1820s) much at the same time as a modern systemic concept of art is settled (Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics delivered between 1818—29 and the famous notion that art is something of the past). Now with photography’s referent being diffused, its indexical capacity blurred, and its re-materialization through digitization, the very material condition of the medium has changed. It…

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News and Writing on Art and Art History | June 9th 2015

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A round-up of some of the news and stories on art and art history from the past week. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney has cancelled their Marina Abramovic retrospective that was planned for 2016. In a comment made to Fairfax Media Abramovic  said ‘They say that it is complicated. One reason was there were two exhibitions in Australia. It was too much to make a third one. The trustees they didn’t want any more.’ Her work is the focus of two upcoming exhibitions, one in Sydney at Kaldor Art projects, and another at MONA. Is one reason (or even the main reason?) for the cancellation a symptom of our museums wanting exclusives? A great article by Griselda Pollock in The Conversation UK that addresses the recent ‘Inventing Impressionism’ exhibition at the National Gallery (in London) and the ‘disappearing…

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Boiler Room Lecture | Ryan Gander | State Library of Victoria

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MUMA and Monash Art Design and Architecture [MADA], in association with Australian Centre for Contemporary Art [ACCA] are pleased to co-present a keynote lecture by renowned UK artist Ryan Gander. The lecture will be introduced by Charlotte Day, Director MUMA, and followed by a discussion and Q&A with Hannah Mathews, Associate Curator, ACCA. Ryan Gander was born in Chester, UK in 1976 and lives and works in London and Suffolk. He has established an international reputation through artworks that materialise in many different forms, including sculpture, film, writing, graphic design, installation and performance. Through associative thought processes that connect the everyday and the esoteric, the overlooked and the commonplace, Gander’s work involves a questioning of language and knowledge; a reinvention of the modes of appearance and creation of an artwork. His work can be reminiscent of a puzzle, a network…

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Gertrude Contemporary–Discipline 2015 Lecture #4 | David Raskin – Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Inhuman Photographs

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In asking why responses to Sugimoto’s photographs turn on a dime from awe to scorn, I suggest that these strange works of art manage to escape human desires. My hope is that by moving the conversation away from entrenched dichotomies such aesthetics or anti-aesthetics and toward an analysis of the nature of objects and feelings, I can suggest the ethical and practical consequences of inhuman art. David Raskin is Mohn Family Professor of Contemporary Art History at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Editor-in-Chief of caa.reviews. He is author of Donald Judd (Yale University Press, 2010), and other scholarly publications, including essays on Noriyuki Haraguchi, Ad Reinhardt, Jo Baer, Olle Baertling, Enrique Martínez Celaya, Carl Andre, and pragmatic aesthetics. He is currently Visiting Fellow at the United States Study Centre, University of Sydney, Australia. Date: Wednesday, 20th May…

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Boiler Room Lecture | Charles Esche | Artistic freedom and cultural critique in the context of corporatism in the art world

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Monash University Museum of Art [MUMA] and Monash Art, Design and Architecture [MADA] are pleased to co-present in partnership with the Research Unit in Public Cultures [RUPC] and the School of Culture and Communications at the University of Melbourne, a keynote lecture by Charles Esche, Director, the Van Abbemuseum, the Netherlands. This lecture will be introduced by Charlotte Day, Director MUMA, and followed by a discussion and Q&A with Charles Esche convened by Nikos Papastergiadis, Professor, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne. For almost two decades, Charles Esche has been a protagonist in reshaping the curatorial landscape. His work as a director of important European institutions, curator of major biennials and both writer and publisher of critical texts have sought to investigate the role of art as a catalyst for social change and the societal or political…

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Lecture | Gertrude–Discipline Lecture #3 | Timothy Moore

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The third Gertrude Contemporary–Discipline lecture for 2015 will be given by Timothy Moore on Tuesday the 28th of April, at 6pm for a 6.30pm start. Please N.B. the change of venue to Kalex at 166 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy. ABSTRACT Temporary architecture — that forms a community pavilion or event, a communal working space, artistic intervention, cultural platform or gastronomical destination — has had increased attention in wealthy economies in the twenty-first century. The pop-up project soon pops-down, however its effects are far from temporary. This is the screensaver, where a temporary project acts as a transition slide for a city yet to come. Screensaver architecture can be read cynically as low-cost aesthetic camouflage that may disguise speculative development to follow. Or it may provide fleeting moments to create new civic meaning and forms outside of market-driven property and planning frameworks.…

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Exhibition | Brook Andrew – Sanctuary: Tombs of the outcasts | Ian Potter Museum of Art

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A new exhibition at the Ian Potter Melbourne-based multi-disciplinary artist Brook Andrew explores an additional understanding of the ANZAC story, in a major new exhibition at the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne. Sanctuary: Tombs of the outcasts challenges popular narratives around the ANZAC legend to reveal and highlight stories hidden over time. The exhibition seeks to give voice to other histories such as Indigenous and immigration that have become silent, and reveals Australia as a place of sanctuary.  It asks questions about what we remember, personally and collectively, and how we commemorate.The exhibition features new sculptural work from Andrew, as well as items selected by Andrew from his own archives and from the University of Melbourne Collections, including the University Art Collection, Archives, Maps, Rare Books, Zoology and the Baillieu Library Print Collection. For each day of…

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