Tag: Contemporary Art

Lecture | Djon Mundine OAM: A Personal History of Aboriginal Art | La Trobe University

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The history of Aboriginal art has a number of overlapping, blurred edge phases; it is market driven and of European historical conceit on one side, and the offering up of icons, ideas, and possibly a moral-memory insistence on the (Aboriginal) other side. Djob Mundine is a member of the Bandjalung people of northern New South Wales. With an extensive career as a curator, activist, writer and occasional artist, Djon worked in Arnhem Land as Art Adviser to the Milingimbi, Maningrida, and Ramingining Aboriginal communities for sixteen years. Djon was concept curator of The Aboriginal Memorial, 1987-88, now on permanent display at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Over 1993-4 he was travelling curator for the important Aratjara exh., that travelled to Dusseldorf, London, and Danmark. Djon And Natalie King are co-curators of ‘Whisper in My Mask’, 2014 Tarrawarra Biennal, Healesville. Djon has…

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Exhibition | Art as a Verb | MUMA

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Art as a Verb at Monash University Museum of Art. Exhibition Dates: 3 October - 16 December 2020 Opening function: Saturday 4 October 2014, 3-5pm About the Exhibition | Art as a Verb is a major thematic exhibition that takes as its departure point the concept of art as action, both inside the gallery and beyond. Drawing upon the unbridled energy and anarchy of fluxus and happenings, and looking back to a moment when art dematerialised, Art as a Verb presents a range of projects from the 1960s to today that challenge the traditional role of the artist and the site of the museum. What constitutes the work of an artist? How do the varying roles of an artist (as instigator, facilitator, teacher, performer, consumer or visionary) fit within broader society? And how does the museum support art forms that…

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Conference | Contemporary Outsider Art: The Global Context

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The University of Melbourne - 23 – 26 October 2020   Forty years after the term ‘Outsider art’ was coined by Roger Cardinal to encompass works by untrained artists who work outside the established art world, new paradigms and definitions are being sought. The current enthusiasm for these forms of expression culminated in Massimiliano Gioni’s 2013 Venice Biennale, which dedicated several exhibits to self-taught or Outsider artists. Reviewing the Biennale in Art and America, Travis Jeppesen wrote ‘the success of Gioni’s bold production signals a move beyond ‘the contemporary’ as the default category we have relied upon for far too long’. Such comments demonstrate the timeliness of this topic and the potential for this conference to contribute to and enrich our understanding of contemporary culture at the broadest level. The increased interest in Outsider art, however, has also raised a…

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Exhibition Review | TarraWarra Biennial 2014: Whisper In My Mask | Denise M. Taylor

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TarraWarra Biennial 2014 | Whisper In My Mask | AT TWMA until 16th November 2014 Reviewed by Denise M. Taylor Face masks of dough, wire and the Australian flag; portraits of royalty dripping with black paint; veils, dots and paper cut-outs masking memory and identity; videos hinting at masked abuses in Australia’s history—these are a few of the contemporary art works by approximately 20 Australian artists on display at the TarraWarra Museum of Art (TWMA) Biennial 2014 exhibition, ‘Whisper in my Mask’—a clever take on a line from Grace Jones’ 1981 song ‘Art Groupie’: Touch Me in a Picture, Wrap Me in a Cast, Kiss Me in a Sculpture, Whisper in My Mask As Deborah Cheetham AO pointed out in her remarks at the opening of the exhibition on August 15th, the mist that most of us encountered across the…

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Lecture | Sound Matters: One Energy Among Others - Douglas Kahn

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Gertrude, Discipline and Liquid Architecture - Theories and Histories of Sound Douglas Kahn will give the second lecture in a series presented by Gertrude Contemporary, Discipline and Liquid Architecture festival on the theories and histories of sound. This exploratory talk will follow from Douglas Kahn’s most recent book, Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts (University of California Press, 2013). The book, over a decade in the making, is a fundamental reworking in the histories of science, communications, music and the arts to account for the incursion of electromagnetism into culture from the nineteenth century to the present. It covers such figures as Thomas Watson, Henry David, Thoreau, John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, Joyce Hinterding and Alvin Lucier, Kahn’s former teacher. Investigating the trade between acoustics and electromagnetism in aesthetics and the arts poses questions for new…

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Free Lunchtime Lecture at Homlesglen | Noël Skrzypczak

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Noël Skrzypczak (pronounced Scrip-jack) is a Melbourne artist whose work has consistently addressed the materiality of painting and surface. Her wall paintings, a major one of which was commissioned for the lobby of the Melbourne Crown Metropole Hotel, recall the expressive spontaneity of surrealism and the pour and drip of action painting. The Holmesglen Collection includes three early works by the artist – these are currently installed in the Information Commons, Moorabbin campus. Noël is represented in significant public and private collections throughout Australia and will be speaking at the Chadstone campus in a free lunchtime lecture. Please join us for what promises to be an inspiring discussion. Date: 12.30 – 1.30pm, Thursday 21 August 2020 Venue: Holmesglen, Room C.1.1.33, Chadstone Campus, Batesford Road, Chadstone, Melways ref: 69F1 Bookings are essential Please contact Anna Long E: artcollection@holmesglen.edu.au T: 9209 5605

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Update Lecture Booked Out | World Art Now, The Provincialism Problem Then: 40 years of contemporary art | Terry Smith

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Update: Please note this talk is booked out. In September 1974, the New York magazine Artforum published Terry Smith’s article The Provincialism Problem. Among the first to question the concentration of modernist values in artworlds in cities such as New York, Paris, and London. The essay was immediately pirated in Brazil and South Africa, has been constantly reprinted, and continues to be frequently referred to by artists, critics, theorists and historians around the world, making it one of the most cited texts by an Australian writer on art. In this lecture, Terry Smith will describe the circumstances of writing this article, and trace responses to it (including his own changes of mind) up to the present day. He will consider how the problems and possibilities identified in the 1970s have fared since then, and how world pictures changed during the shift…

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Exhibitions currently on at MONA - Museum of Old and New Art

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Permanent exhibition | MONANISM - Evolving | Curated by David Walsh, Olivier Varenne and Nicole Durling and the MONA team   The permanent collection exhibition continues; however, it keeps changing.   Some of the works currently on display:  Gelitin, Locus Focus (2010); Anselm Kiefer, Sternenfall (1999) and Sternenfall/Shevirath ha Kelim (2007); Christian Boltanski, The Life of C. B. (2010); Chris Ofili, The Holy Virgin Mary (1996); Wim Delvoye, Cloaca Professional (2010). Favourites - love/hate: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Pulse Room (2006), Brigita Ozolin’s Kryptos (2008-2010) and Wim Delvoye’s Cloaca Professional (2010). THE RED QUEEN | Art that shows why art is made | curated by Olivier Varenne, Nicole Durling and the MONA team Until September 8, 2020 The Red Queen is a character from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. She’s a sinister mixture of power and futility: even as she doles out…

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Lecture | Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev | Boiler Room Lecture at Monash

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Monash University Museum of Art [MUMA], in association with Monash Art, Design and Architecture [MADA], present a special lecture by Italian-American curator, author and researcher Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Artistic Director of the 14th Istanbul Biennial 2015 and Visiting Professor in Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University, Illinois, USA. Christov-Bakargiev was named 2012’s most powerful person in the art world by Art Review’s Power 100 listings. She was Artistic Director of dOCUMENTA (13), which took place in Kassel, Germany, and extended to workshops, seminars and exhibitions in Alexandria, Egypt; Kabul, Afghanistan; and Banff, Canada. Her stewardship of dOCUMENTA (13) renewed one of the exhibition’s principal intentions, to enlist culture as an agent of reconstruction, healing and dialogue. For the 14th Istanbul Biennial, in keeping with her Documenta strategy of hiring agents to advise on the show—she will draft the exhibition with…

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Exhibition | Fiona Connor: Wallworks | MUMA

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Fiona Connor: Wallworks at MUMA from 18 July – 20 September 2020 Opening event: Saturday 19 July 2014, 3-5pm With opening remarks by Professor Edwina Cornish, Provost and Senior Vice-President, Monash University at 3.30pm Presented across the entire museum, Wallworks is the first major solo exhibition in Australia by New Zealand-born, Los Angeles-based artist Fiona Connor. The exhibition sees Connor work with the Monash University Collection and associated works to recreate the location and installation of a number of artworks that hang in offices, lecture theatres and public spaces across Monash campuses, bringing the various architectures of the University into the museum along with the artworks themselves. For Wallworks, Connor turns her attention to the everyday settings of Monash University to provide an intimate look at the life of an artwork after it has entered an institutional collection. Having spent…

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Public Lecture | Wreckage and Reclamation: Politics and Art in Brisbane 1987-1997 | Doug Hall

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“The greatest thing that could happen to this State - and the Nation - is when we can get rid of the media. Then we could live in peace and tranquility, and no one would know anything.”  Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, former Queensland Premier, the Spectator, London, 12 December 1987. “This, December 2, 1989, is the end of the Bjelke-Petersen era.” Wayne Goss, election victory speech, 2 December, 1989. The one-liner, ‘it could only happen in Queensland’, is now but a well-worn and a meaningless cliché. The conduct that it supposedly represents has now become established as a trans-state phenomenon. Queensland has long-struggled to shake off its reputation as a haven for vulgar hedonism, being intellectually thin, culturally remote with an inglorious history of political corruption, often underpinned by the obligatory acquiescence of its public institutions. This lecture is a personal…

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Lunchtime Artist Talks at MUMA exhibition ‘Concrete’

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Artist talks at MUMA’s new exhibition Concrete About the Exhibition | MUMA’s second exhibition for 2014, Concrete brings together the work of sixteen artists, both Australian and international. The exhibition explores the concrete, or the solid and its counter: change, the flow of time. As we prepare to mark the centenary of the First World War, the exhibition considers the impact of time upon built and monumental form, reading between materiality and emotion, form and memory Callum Morton and Nicholas Mangan Date: Tuesday 13 May 2020 Time:12.30-1.15pm Venue: Monash University Museum of Art, Caulfield campus FREE event, no bookings required Join MUMA Senior Curator Geraldine Barlow and exhibiting artists Callum Morton and Nicholas Mangan as they discuss duration, materiality, provisional architecture, modernity and Maya ruins in the context of the current MUMA exhibition Concrete. Duration: approx. 45mins Lunchtime Artist Talk: Saskia Doherty and Tom Nicholson Date: Tuesday 27…

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Artist Talk | Standing Stone - Catherine Evans | BLINDSIDE Gallery

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STANDING STONE: An exhibition of new artwork by Catherine Evans at BLINDSIDE Gallery Artist talk, Saturday 10th of May at 2.30pm. Venue: BLINDSIDE, Level 7, Room 14, Nicholas Building, 37 Swanston Street, Melbourne VIC 3000 Exhibition Dates: 30th  April – 17th May 2014 | Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 12 – 6pm Standing Stone is an exhibition of photographs and sculpture that transposes the marks on our own bodies into a large-scale map using basalt boulders, sticky tape and the raw materials of photography, such as unprocessed photographic paper exposed to ambient light. In this exhibition the artist has created a large-scale constellation where precariously suspended volcanic rocks collected from the Western Victorian Volcanic Plains mark the positions of moles on the artist’s own back. With reference to the Indigenous stone arrangement, Wurdi Youang, that is situated on these plains, Standing Stone encompasses both the geographic and the…

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Artist Talk | William Mackinnon | Holmesglen

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Art Talks Free Lunchtime Lecture William Mackinnon William Mackinnon is a Melbourne artist who graduated with a Master of Visual Arts at the VCA in 2008. As the recipient of the prestigious Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship in 2008, the artist used the two year bursary to travel through the Kimberley; working for Papunya Tula Artists as a Field Officer serving the Kintore (NT) and Kwikurra (WA) communities and as artist in residence at Mangkaja Arts, Fitzroy Crossing. Mackinnon has presented an uncompromising version of indigenous community life - one that finds human strength and dignity amongst a bleak landscape where two cultures collide. The artist will talk about his experiences as a Field Officer, how they are manifest in his work and about his life back in Melbourne as a practising artist. Date: 12 noon – 1pm, Wednesday 7 May…

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Exhibition | Concrete | Monash University Museum of Art

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Exhibition Dates | 3 May – 5 July 2020 Curator | Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow Opening event: Saturday 10 May 2014, 3-5pm at Monash University Museum of Art, Caulfield campus Concrete: a solid state, a construction material, something known or true. MUMA’s second exhibition for 2014, Concrete brings together the work of twelve artists, both Australian and international. The exhibition explores the concrete, or the solid and its counter: change, the flow of time. As we prepare to mark the centenary of the First World War, the exhibition considers the impact of time upon built and monumental form, reading between materiality and emotion, form and memory. Monuments reflect a desire for commemoration, truth, honour and justice. Equally, they may function to consolidate political power and national identity. Works in the exhibition locate the monumental in relation to longer cycles of construction, displacement…

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