ACCA, CARRIAGEWORKS AND MONA ANNOUNCE DETAILS OF NEW WORK BY THREE WOMEN ARTISTS, MADE POSSIBLE BY THE KATTHY CAVALIERE FELLOWSHIP
In an unprecedented collaboration, ACCA, Carriageworks and Mona will present concurrent exhibitions of new work by three women artists: Frances Barrett (ACCA), Giselle Stanborough (Carriageworks) and Sally Rees (Mona), from March 2020.
Announced in October 2018, Suspended Moment: The Katthy Cavaliere Fellowship awarded $100,000 to each of the three artists to create new work. Made possible by the estate of the late, Italian-born Australian artist, Katthy Cavaliere (1972-2012), each artist’s ambitious new project is focused at the intersection of installation and performance art practice.
The Katthy Cavaliere fellowship works are as follows:
GISELLE STANBOROUGH: CINOPTICON
27 March – 14 June 2020
Carriageworks
“When they see me, I see me.” – Giselle Stanborough
At Carriageworks, Giselle Stanborough’s Cinopticon will contemporise philosopher Michel Foucault’s theory of the ‘panopticon’: instead of the few watching the many, today we watch each other and the few. In Cinopticon, Stanborough will examine web-based narcissism, corporate surveillance and the opacity of social media algorithms to explore how these coalesce to lead us through problematic terrain. Stanborough will work with her own personal online archive to create an immersive performance installation where audiences will see their reflection in unpredictable ways.
Cinopticon will employ sensory affective elements to observe how people experience stimulations for the gaze, the voice and the body. It will mimic the threshold between the pleasure and pain of the sensation of being watched and of watching others.
Searchlights, sculptural forms, diagrams, and digital and mirrored surfaces reflect a sensory iteration of the social media experience drawing on performative online platforms such as TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram. Cinopticon will incorporate a series of performance activations by Stanborough, and an invitation to take selfies.
Carriageworks Director of Programs and the curator of Cinopticon, Daniel Mudie Cunningham, says: ‘The work of Giselle Stanborough probes technology’s unsettling mediation of self in an age of image saturation and algorithmic manipulation. With an affinity for Katthy Cavaliere’s performance of self, Cinopticon is her most ambitious presentation to date and promises to be an experimental performance installation questioning the power dynamics of spectatorship between self and other.’
FRANCES BARRETT: MEATUS
4 April – 8 June 2020
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA)
A project led by Frances Barrett with Nina Buchanan, Hayley Forward, Brian Fuata, Del Lumanta and Sione Teumohenga.
At ACCA, Frances Barrett will extend the parameters of the Fellowship’s solo commission to present new sonic compositions and live performances by multiple artists. Drawing on her background in performance, curating and collaborative models of making, Barrett will create a major sound installation in collaboration with Hayley Forward and Brian Fuata. It will be presented alongside specially-commissioned sound compositions by artists Nina Buchanan, Del Lumanta and Sione Teumohenga, whose works collectively address concepts including community building, healing and new environmental consciousness.
A ‘meatus’ is an opening or passage leading to the interior of the body, such as the ear or mouth – a juncture between the internal and external, where the body opens itself to the world. For this project ACCA’s galleries are conceived as a form of meatus for the audience to enter; a passage in which to experience multiple voices, embodied knowledges, affective territories, deep listening and relational practices.
Meatus can be understood as concrete flesh, raw speculation and a hole poetic: it is a performative restaging of the body that pushes beyond the visual and representational. Composed as an immersive installation of sound and light, Frances Barrett’s exhibition constructs the gallery as a body that echoes, bleeds and leaks. Through the active, attentive and embodied presence of the audience, listening becomes the primary mode for this body to be encountered and felt. Within the context of Meatus, this form of deep listening makes porous boundaries between bodies, inside and outside, the self and surrounds.
‘Whilst developing an intensely sonic and polyphonic installation as the lead commission for the Katthy Cavaliere Fellow at ACCA, Frances Barrett is also using the opportunity as a platform for her curatorial practice, and in the spirit of collaboration and generosity has extended the invitation to other artists and musicians to create new work in dialogue. The result, Meatus, will be an audacious, experimental engagement with sound and performance within the context of the gallery,’ said ACCA Senior Curator, Annika Kristensen.
SALLY REES: CRONE
8 April 2020 – 10 August 2020
Mona
At Mona, Tasmanian artist Sally Rees will exhibit a new body of work centred around the ‘crone’. Adopting this folkloric archetype, Rees will challenge the perceived invisibility of ageing women in contemporary society, seeking to redefine the female elder as a powerful, aspirational and transgressive figure.
In the development of this project, Rees has called upon her network of ‘crones’—her mother, friends and colleagues—who have inspired and forged a path for her. Being vulnerable and seeking support is a source of strength for Rees, something that she took for granted in her younger years.
The exhibition is made up of series of videos that are transformed using hand-painted animations. This includes video portraits of her ‘crones’ placed throughout the gallery, whose bird-like calls create a fearless chorus, and a large, double-sided projection showing video portraits of the artist in full Crone attire—one alone and one with her mother. The artist will also undertake a durational performance that will end at the museum, marking her 50th birthday, in August 2020.
Mona Collections and Exhibitions Director, and curator of Crone, Nicole Durling said: ‘Sally Rees is fearless in using herself as the central material for her art, which is reminiscent of how Katthy Cavaliere approached her work. With Crone, Sally is actively engaging with her own ageing process, using it as a source of power, creating work that harnesses the senescent self. It is inspiring to see someone facing the world so bravely, confidently and honestly.’
The artists in the Katthy Cavaliere Fellowship were selected by a panel comprised of leadership and curatorial representatives from the presenting institutions, including Daniel Mudie Cunningham (Director of Programs, Carriageworks), David Walsh (Founder, Mona) and Nicole Durling (Director, Collections and Exhibitions, Mona) and Max Delany (Artistic Director/CEO ACCA) and Annika Kristensen (Senior Curator, ACCA).
In announcing the individual projects for the Suspended Moment: Katthy Cavaliere Fellowship exhibitions, the Panel noted: ‘Each of these works are immensely brave, ground breaking and career defining, and each are fitting of the legacy of Katthy Cavaliere, who was determined to push the limits in her own career in a way that was raw and deeply emotional. For audiences, this suite of exhibitions offers an insight into the practices of some of the most exciting artists working at the nexus of performance and art in Australia.’
MEDIA CONTACTS
Carriageworks: Articulate Julia Barnes julia@articulatepr.com.au 0402 678 589 or Kym Elphinstone kym@articulatepr.com.au 0421 106 139
ACCA: Katrina Hall katrina.hall@acca.melbourne 0421153046
MONA: Emily Philippou emily.philippou@mona.net.au 0418 666 529
EXHIBITION DETAILS
Carriageworks Giselle Stanborough: Cinopticon 27 March – 14 June 2020
ACCA Frances Barrett: Meatus 4 April – 8 June 2020
Mona Sally Rees: Crone 8 April 2020 – 10 August 2020
ABOUT KATTHY CAVALIERE
Katthy Cavaliere was born in 1972 in Sarteano, Italy, and migrated to Australia with her family when she was four years old. She attended UNSW Art and Design in Sydney. The recipient of the Helen Lempriere Travelling Art Scholarship in 2000, Cavaliere studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti, Brera, Milano. During this time in Italy she studied under Marina Abramović. Upon returning to Australia in 2004, Cavaliere staged an early career survey exhibition called Suspended Moment, which toured to regional galleries in NSW. The fellowship has been named to honour Cavaliere’s practice and this landmark touring exhibition.
Created at Artspace in Sydney, her video performance, Loved, was included in the 54th Venice Biennale, 2011. Following her death in January 2012, Mona presented her retrospective survey Loved in 2015-16. Curated by Daniel Mudie Cunningham, the exhibition toured to Carriageworks in 2016 and was accompanied by a career-spanning monograph.
It was Cavaliere’s desire to bring to light what she did not remember of her early years in Sarteano that motived her lifelong project of packing, storing and transporting the wreckage of her personal possessions, and transforming it into performance installation works that have been exhibited in solo and group shows internationally.
Cavaliere’s work is held in the collections of Mona, Art Gallery of NSW, National Gallery of Victoria, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Artbank, UQ Art Museum, Monash Gallery of Art and numerous regional galleries. www.katthycavaliere.com.au
ARTIST BIOS
FRANCES BARRETT is an artist and curator who lives and works on Gadigal land in Sydney (b.1983, Sydney). Her practice extends the paradigms of performance and conceptual art, meditating on issues of ephemerality, duration and historicity, as well as intimacy and care. Guided by a queer-feminist ethic, much of her work pivots around the modalities of listening and touch. Barrett’s recent projects include All Ears: A listening party, Campbelltown Arts Centre, 2018; Into My Arms, Ace Open, 2018; and Handle, CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, 2018. She was a studio artist at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art for the duration of 2018, and is one member of art collective Barbara Cleveland, who in 2019 will present a new project, Thinking Business, at Sullivan + Strumpf, Sydney. Barrett is currently a PhD candidate in Curatorial Practice at Monash Art Design and Architecture.
GISELLE STANBOROUGH is an intermedia artist based in Sydney who lives and works on Gadigal land (b.1986, Waratah, NSW, Australia). Her works combine online and offline elements to address how user generated media encourage us to identify and perform notions of self, and the relationship between connectivity and isolation. Motivated by a curiosity in the increasing indeterminacy between the private and public spheres, Stanborough’s work often addresses contemporary interpersonal experiences in relation to technology, feminism and consumer capitalism. Her work has featured in the Washington Post’s “Pictures of the Day” and has been shown at major venues such as Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Melbourne, Australia (2018); Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Sydney, Australia (2017); Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, Australia (2015) and Next Wave Festival 2014, Melbourne, Australia (2014).
SALLY REES (b. 1970, Burnie, lutruwita/Tas, Australia) is an artist living and working on palawa country in nipaluna/Hobart who works across time-based, static, live and hybrid artforms. Rees is motivated to explore similarities between modes of clinical psychology, occult practice, meditation and protest. Rees holds a PhD from University of Tasmania, her exhibitions includes Australian Centre for Photography (ACP), Sydney (2010), Artspace, Richmond, VA, USA, (2012), Contemporary Art Tasmania (CAT), Hobart (2011, 2014, 2016, 2018).
ABOUT ACCA
A leading producer of contemporary visual art in Australia, ACCA is a centre for the artistic and wider communities to participate in a critically engaged contemporary art culture. Situated in an iconic, award-winning building in Melbourne’s Southbank arts precinct, ACCA is known for its outstanding programs, its capacity to bring inspiring Australian and international art to wide audiences and its focus on commissioning new works by Australian and international artists. www.acca.melbourne
ABOUT CARRIAGEWORKS
Carriageworks is the largest and most significant contemporary multi-arts centre of its kind in Australia. Engaging artists and audiences with contemporary ideas and issues, Carriageworks presents ambitious, artist-led programs that emerge from Carriageworks’ commitment to reflecting social and cultural diversity. www.carriageworks.com.au
ABOUT MONA
The Museum of Old and New Art (Mona), Australia’s largest private museum, was built by David Walsh to house his collection of ancient, modern and contemporary art. www.mona.net.au
Katrina Hall
Publicity/Communications
0421153046 kathall@ozemail.com.au