Greater Together

GOLDIN+SENNEBY
Formed 2004
Live and work in Stockholm

Standard Length of a Miracle 2016–17 With Jonas Hassen Khemiri (author); Annie Wu and Rosanna Hall (costume designers); Simon&Jacob (woodworkers); Arini Byng, Maya Chakraborty, Hanna Chetwin, Ruth Cummins, Dean de Landre, Sean Miles, Anna Parlane, Lauren Ravi, Jacqui Shelton, Ella Shi, Hana Vasak and Agnes Whalan (gallery attendants) Michael Storåkers Collection, Stockholm. Courtesy the artists. Photograph: Andrew Curtis

With special thanks to Ruth Cummins, Dante’s Fairway Dry Cleaning, D&M Cleverclean, Rose Valet Fine Drycleaning, South Melbourne Dry Cleaners and Wash House Laundry.

At 2.12pm daily, beneath the branches of a towering oak tree, a Gallery Attendant pauses to read aloud a text by the writer Jonas Hassen Khemiri. Commissioned by Goldin+Senneby as a meta-fictional response to their artistic collaboration, Khemiri’s text, Standard Length of a Miracle, weaves together a complex and fast-paced narrative about a protagonist who, under the false name of ‘Anders Reuterwärd’, applies for a job at an art gallery in the hope of leaving his life as a worker at his uncle’s dry cleaning store behind him. Throughout the course of Greater Together, the oak functions as a common space and a meeting place for ACCA’s public and education programs, with offcuts from the tree being fashioned into functional furnishings on an ongoing basis.

‘Anders Reuterwärd’ is also the name of a conceptual clothing line, developed by Melbourne-based artist and designer Annie Wu, constructed from clothes that have been left uncollected at dry cleaners. A reference to the protagonist’s employment at a dry cleaning store, the outfits are worn on a daily basis by ACCA’s Gallery Attendants and also illustrate the collaborative working methods, outsourcing of production, and intentional blurring of authorship that are inherent ideas within Goldin+Senneby’s practice.

Since 2004, Simon Goldin and Jakob Senneby have collaborated to examine juridical, financial and spatial constructs, frequently through performance, fictional enquiries, magic and the construction of digital or virtual worlds.

C.T. JASPER AND JOANNA MALINOWSKA
C.T. Jasper: Born 1971 in Gdansk
Joanna Malinowska: Born 1972 in Gdynia
Live and work in New York
Halka Haiti 18°48’05”N 72°23’01”W 2015
multi-channel video projection
82:00 mins.

Project produced for the Polish Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale, curated by Magdalena Moskalewicz. Courtesy the artists

In early 2015, in the Haitian village of Cazale, a group of Polish opera singers and Haitian dancers and musicians came together for a one-off performance of Stanisław Moniuszko’s opera Halka. A tragic, if universal, story of the futility of love across class divides, the opera, despite being little known internationally, as been considered a part of Poland’s national canon since it premiered in Warsaw in 1854.

With Halka Haiti 18°48’05”N 72°23’01”W being first presented at the Venice Biennale, Polish artists C.T. Jasper and Joanna Malinowska made use of the system of national representation to illustrate a complex intermingling, and briefly shared colonial history, between Poland and Haiti. In 1802 and 1803, Polish soldiers were sent by Napolean Bonaparte to the former French colony of Saint-Domingue (now independent Haiti) in an effort to curtail the slave’s rebellion. A number of Poles – themselves understanding of the need to fight for national independence – defected to the side of the Haitian revolutionaries, with many remaining in the country indefinitely. In choosing to present a Polish opera in Haiti, Jasper and Malinowska question both the relevance of opera as a form, and whether the evocation of traditional Polish values bears any relevance in Cazale today.

Life partners and occasional collaborators, C.T. Jasper and Joanna Malinowksa also maintain independent practices as artists. Here, they come together in a truly collaborative undertaking with the local people of Cazale, together with musicians from Poland, a director and choreographer.

CÉLINE CONDORELLI
bau bau bau 2015
colour inkjet print on paper
300.0 x 785.0 cm
Courtesy the artist

The Company She Keeps 2014
two colour printing designed by An Endless Supply using Bembo Book MT and Bery Roman, printed on Munken Pure 100 gsm and lnvercote G 240 gsm, 120 pp. 22.0 x 14.7 cm Published by Book Works, London; Chisenhale Gallery, London; and Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. Courtesy the artist

Plant generously provided by The Plant Society

Céline Condorelli works across art, design, publishing and architecture in her ongoing investigation into the possibilities of supporting frameworks and the question of ‘support’. Her projects – which encompass exhibitions, fiction, politics, discussion, publishing, installation and interventions into public space – are linked by questions of commonality, how to live and work together.

Condorelli’s installation takes the form of a common space or reading room, in which visitors are welcome to sit, read and discuss her 2014 publication The Company She
Keeps. In this book five conversations with friends explore friendship as a form of solidarity, which may take place between people, but also with ideas, with books and other things material and immaterial, present and absent.

Installed within the reading room is a large drawing work, bau bau bau, 2015, which serves as both a visual score and documentation of previous elements of Condorelli’s practice. The word ‘bau’, German for ‘construction’, has its origin
in the Old High German ‘buan’ – ‘to dwell’, and the Italian onomatopoeia, ‘bau’ – or ‘woof’. In this three dimensional landscape, various elements, techniques and influences
cohabit, are layered upon, and enact possible stories.

ANTOINETTE J. CITIZEN AND COURTNEY COOMBS
Antoinette J. Citizen: Born 1982 in Brisbane
Lives and works in Melbourne
Courtney Coombs: Born 1981 in Sydney
Lives and works in Brisbane

Performance for activities that require two people 2017 performance and object
dimensions variable
Courtesy the artists

Furniture for the opening night performance generously provided by Dowel Jones.

Independent artists in their own right, Antoinette J. Citizen and Courtney Coombs have been friends and occasional
artistic collaborators since their days as undergraduate students at the Queensland University of Technology. While their individual practices respectively focus on ideas relating to technology, and negotiating patriarchal, heteronormative society, their collaborative relationship often centres on ideas of conversation and communication as a means to overcome their physical distance.

Activities that require two people 2016–17 is a performative extension of Citizen and Coombs’ working relationship, in the compilation of a list of activities that require two or more people to be realised. Working in conversation with one another, as well as with visitors to the opening night of the exhibition, the artists have collated a list of activities – productive, destructive, pleasurable or otherwise – that speak to both the positives, as well as the inherent challenges, of engaging with other people.

CLARK BEAUMONT
Formed 2010
Live and work in Brisbane and Berlin

The O zone 2017
live performance and three-channel HD video installation
30:00 mins (approx.)
Courtesy the artists

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government
through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

In The O zone 2017, presented as both a live performance and as documentation on video, collaborative duo Clark Beaumont explore various relationships between climate change and sex – using the seductive taboo of the latter to draw attention to the devastating reality of the former, allowing each subject to disarm the other, and opening up complex issues and competing perspectives surrounding both. Through a script comprised of both found and original texts – including facts, estimations, intimate thoughts and personal anecdotes – along with movement designed by experimental choreographer Mirjam Sögner – The O zone seeks to stir us into sense, drawing attention to our relationships with the environment and one another, and encouraging realisation of how our individual desires and actions have potential collective, and lasting, affects.

Sarah Clark and Nicole Beaumont have been working together as Clark Beaumont since 2010. Through a shared interest in performance, the pair collaborates to investigate ideas of identity, female subjectivity, intimacy and interpersonal relationships.
The O zone extends Clark Beaumont’s interest in the overlap between the visual and performing arts, with a new emphasis on the collaborative potential that working within theatre inherently requires.

This work contains sexual references.

BIK VAN DER POL
Formed 1994
Live and work in Rotterdam

Letters to the Land 2017, red soil from Hanson Quarry in Lang Lang, daybeds, theatre lights and seven voice recordings of letters written by Justin Clemens (read by Bryan Cooke), Evelyn Araleun Corr, Dermot Henry, Justine Poon, Michael Short, Nurin Veis (read by Karen Berger) and Aunty Joy Wandin Murphy AO
6.0 x 15.0 m (approx.)
Courtesy the artists

This project has been assisted by Mondriaan Fonds.

In 1983, the year of ACCA’s inauguration in a small cottage
in the Domain, a red dust storm hit Melbourne: a dramatic and unusual meteorological phenomenon that saw over 50,000 tonnes of topsoil stripped from Victoria’s Mallee and northern Wimmera regions and deposited across the state and beyond. In its current location, clad in rust-coloured Corten steel, ACCA is impervious to the elements – a quarantined gallery space, in which Dutch collaborators Bik Van der Pol have brought the outside back in, presenting an expansive field of red soil, latent with potential.

Letters to the Land 2017 takes inspiration from Plato’s philosophical text Symposium, in which a group of seven distinct thinkers converse on the topic of love. Taking the form of a sound installation, the perspectives of seven Australian thinkers including Aunty Joy Wandin Murphy AO (the host, or traditional owner), Evelyn Araleun Corr (the writer or poet), Justin Clemens (the philosopher), Justine Poon (the legal expert), Nurin Veis (the educator), Dermot Henry (the scientist) and Michael Short (the rhetorician) are brought
together as a chorus. Each have written letters to the Land, to be heard individually, and in dialogue with one another, with their voices eventually absorbed back into the soil.

Liesbeth Bik and Jos Van der Pol have worked together as
artistic collaborators since 1994. Their mode of working – a collaborative and consultative process – consists of setting up conditions for encounter, to encourage communication and exchange.

FIELD THEORY
Jackson Castiglione, Martyn Coutts, Jason Maling, Sarah
Rodigari, Anna Schoo, Lara Thoms
Intern: Christiana Garvie
Formed 2010
Live and work in Melbourne and Sydney

Final visions –
Bunker 2017
assorted survival food and equipment
dimensions variable
Courtesy the artists

This project is presented in association with Aphids and assisted by the City of Melbourne and the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body. Food provided by Foodbank Victoria, the leading provider of food relief during and after an emergency. Foodbank also feeds 135,000 struggling Victorians via 450 charity partners each month

Field Theory is the collective name of a group of six predominately Melbourne-based artists, who – through a combined background in both the visual and performing arts – have established a practice of making, performing, curating and producing that responds to the unique conditions of specific times, places and communities.

Final visions – Bunker 2017 imagines ACCA as an inner city survivalist storeroom – the ultimate place in which to take shelter in the event of an approaching apocalypse. Fortnightly, on Saturdays over the course of the exhibition, Field Theory will invite special interest clubs, groups and individuals from around Melbourne to participate in skillsharing sessions focused on ACCA as a site of refuge and survival.

Taking place in a time of major geopolitical change, with anxiety a pervasive modern condition or malaise, Final visions – Bunker imagines a glimmer of hope in the diversity of communities, alliances and associations that continue to function as a form of social glue. Through dialogue, skillsharing and exchange, Field Theory raise important questions about the potentials (and pitfalls) of collective action.

PATRICK STAFF
Born 1987 in Bognor Regis
Lives and works in Los Angeles

The Foundation 2015
HD video
30:00 mins
Commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery, London; Spike Island, Bristol; Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane; and Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver
Co-produced by Chisenhale Gallery, London and Spike Island, Bristol
Courtesy the artist

At 1421 Laveta Terrace, in the Los Angeles suburb of Silver Lake, a neat hedge and benign suburban façade masks the entrance to The Foundation: a not-for-profit, community-run initiative that, since 1984, has functioned as an archive for the art of Tom of Finland, and a safe haven for the local gay community. Run from the support of a membership program, and with the voluntary contribution of a network of peers, The Foundation is a form of self-organisation: an institution in, of and for a particular community.

In their work across film, installation, dance and performance, Patrick Staff frequently examines ideas of labour, dissent, and the queer body. For The Foundation 2015, Staff considers the house as a starting point for an exploration of queer intergenerational relationships, in relation to their own identity as a non-binary, transgender, and comparatively young artist. For Staff, who spent months volunteering at The Foundation in the making of the work, the centre functions as a set of relations: as both a community of men, and a collection of material objects and cultural artefacts. These two ideas are here brought together, in a consideration of ideas of ownership, appropriation, cultural legacies and generational change.

This work contains nudity and sexual references.

WORK/SHOP 2017, installation view, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. Photograph: Andrew Curtis

Developed by Laura Couttie as a corresponding project for Greater Together, WORK/SHOP is a relational retail space in ACCA’s foyer.

Engaging four artist practitioners and collaborators who have developed conceptual retail projects, WORK/SHOP draws out themes from the exhibition, exploring alternative modes of authorship, production and labour; the concept of art as commodity; and the retail space and gallery as sites of exchange. All of the artist projects ­­­­incorporate object-based products, available to purchase throughout the duration of the exhibition.

Envisaged as a physical and metaphorical extension of the exhibition, and a way of including a greater number of artists in the program, this temporary, bespoke retail space will be set up in the foyer, separate to the ACCA’s permanent bookshop and situated near the end of the exhibition, intentionally alluding to the well-worn practice of the ‘exit through the gift shop’.