Future Remains: The 2024 Macfarlane Commissions is the fourth edition of a multi-year partnership that supports ambitious new projects by emerging to mid-career artists. This edition showcases seven artists from across Australia – Kim Ah Sam, Andy Butler, Teelah George, Alexandra Peters, Nicholas Smith, Joel Sherwood Spring and Salote Tawale – who variously reclaim, restage and reframe specific material, cultural or ideological inheritances in an effort not only to better understand the past but open up new possibilities for our current and future worlds.
Engaging a broad range of historical reference points, from idiosyncratic personal and familial narratives, cultural and artistic lineages, to more official archives and collections, Future Remains reflects on the ways that the past reverberates in the present. The exhibition invites us to contemplate the gifts and burdens of these legacies, alongside the promise of their reconfiguration for the future.
Exhibition dates: 29 June – 1 September 2024
Curator: Shelley McSpedden
The Macfarlane Commissions is supported by The Macfarlane Fund to encourage the production of ambitious new work by emerging to mid-career contemporary artists. Each artist is offered a generous artist fee and production budget, with the intention of commissioning a major new body of work especially for the exhibition.
The Macfarlane Fund is a philanthropic initiative established in 2017 to honour the life of respected Melbourne businessman Donald (Don) Macfarlane, who throughout his life took immense pleasure in the arts. The Macfarlane Fund’s primary focus is to offer financial support across the career span of artists, with programs developed to support graduate, mid-career and senior artists. Underpinning the development of The Macfarlane Fund is a rigorous approach to decision-making, and a commitment to being flexible, effective and responsive to artistic practice and initiatives in a way that challenges established modes of giving and serves as a role model for contemporary art philanthropy.
