Monash Museum of Art Exhibitions open Feb 2012: Hany Armanious, Adrian Paci and Contemporary Portraiture
Three new exhibitions opening at Monash University Museum of Art | MUMA in Melbourne on 1st February 2012
Exhibition Dates: 1 February to 7th April
Opening Function: Saturday 4 February 2012, 3.00 - 5.00pm, Monash University Museum of Art, Caulfield Campus.
Hany Armanious Azdeena Persius 2010 (detail) Australian Pavilion, 54th Venice Biennale 2011; photo: Mara Comin, courtesy of the Australia Council for the Arts
Hany Armanious: The Golden Thread
Hany Armanious: The Golden Thread is the Australian premiere of works shown at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011, presented alongside a suite of new works and an artist’s book developed for MUMA. The first major exhibition of Hany Armanious’ work in Melbourne, The Golden Thread builds upon a burgeoning critical reception that has grown around the artist’s work internationally over the past decade.
Born in Egypt in 1962 and migrating with his family to Australia six years later, Sydney-based Hany Armanious was the sole Australian representative at the Venice Biennale in 2011. Hany Armanious: The Golden Thread was developed by the Australia Council, with Doug Hall AM as Commissioner, and Anne Ellegood as Curator. Armanious’ critically acclaimed exhibition at Venice – arguably the most prestigious visual arts event on the international calendar – builds upon a burgeoning critical reception that has grown around the artist’s work internationally over the past decade.
Examining the relationship between readymade and figurative sculptural traditions, The Golden Thread presents cast sculptural forms that are simultaneously archaic and modern, formal and informal, uncanny and concrete. Hany Armanious creates works that reveal the energy, sensation and perversity embedded within inanimate things. His interest in bringing ‘nothingness into being’, and exploring the passage between the mythical and the mundane, are just some of the complex twists and inversions that abound in his sculptures. More on MUMA website.
Adrian Paci: Per Speculum
A profoundly thought-provoking 35mm film installation that draws upon cinema and myth to reflect upon narratives of exile, flight and resistance. An Albanian artist based in Milan, Adrian Paci addresses themes such as mobility, displacement, globalisation and cultural identity as a way to explore how personal histories are defined by social and political circumstances.
Originally a painter, Adrian Paci works in film, photography, sculpture and installation. Having fled his homeland Albania in 1997 during the civil war, his practice regularly explores the experience of exile and immigration. Paci addresses themes such as mobility, displacement, globalisation and cultural identity as a way to explore how personal histories are defined by social and political circumstances. His works are both private and universal, and present a complex synthesis of autobiography and collective narrative, documentation and dramatisation, fiction and reality. More at MUMA website.
Self Conscious: Contemporary Portraiture
Featuring a range of works drawn from the Monash University Collection, this exhibition explores some of the many ways in which artists approach contemporary portraiture and represent different modes of identity.
Portraiture allows us to dwell on one of the most fascinating of subjects - ourselves. The act of self reflection and the study of others can be fraught, humourous and enlightening, whilst also revealing artistic processes and modes of philosophical address, laid bare in the work of art.
Artists include Donna Bailey, Mutly Çerkez, Simryn Gill, Ronnie van Hout, Eliza Hutchison, Linda Marrinon, Fiona McMonagle, Mike Parr, David Rosetzky, and others. MUMA website.
A catalogue and series of public programs and artist talks will accompany each exhibition.
