2023 Artistic Program
This year ACCA celebrates a 21st and a 40th: 21 years in our iconic building designed by Wood Marsh, and 40 years as a platform for artists to make new, risk-taking and experimental work that resonates and connects, challenges our thinking, and encourages new perspectives.
ACCA’s 2023 program includes the following keynote exhibitions, as well as a series of events and programs to mark this milestone year and our rich history as a platform for artists and a centre for the exchange of ideas.
Data Relations
Until March 19
Artists: Zach Blas, Tega Brain & Sam Lavigne, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Machine Listening, Mimi Onuoha, Winne Soon, and the Digital Relations Summer School
Curator: Miriam Kelly
Coordinating Curator: Shelley McSpedden
Data Relations brings together artist-led projects that lyrically wrestle with some of the key issues and challenges of our contemporary data-driven society. The exhibition includes major new commissions and site-specific installations by Australian and international artists and collectives who critically and speculatively engage with the ways in which the data economy and related technological developments manifest in inter-personal and wider social relationships.
Lucy Guerin: NEWRETRO
March 25–April 2
Curator: Elyse Goldfinch
Artistic Director: Lucy Guerin
Part of Frame: A biennial of dance, this major new durational performance by leading contemporary choreographer Lucy Guerin reconstructs twenty-one existing dance works from the past twenty-one years, and relearnt by an ensemble of twenty-one dancers.
NEWRETRO takes the form of a site-responsive choreographic work and installation occupying ACCA’s galleries. The work’s score is both retrospective and speculative, condensing choreography from different time periods into the same temporal space, creating a living archive of new, corporeal gestures.
Mithu Sen: mOTHERTONGUE
April 22–June 18, 2023
Curator: Max Delany
Continuing the ACCA International series of solo exhibitions by influential artists on the international stage, ACCA presents a major solo exhibition featuring new commissions and existing work by New Delhi-based artist Mithu Sen.
Constructed as a cartographic installation that charts the paradoxical and contradictory impulses and trajectories in Mithu Sen’s work, mOTHERTONGUE explores the ways in which language, drawing, media and performance are employed by the artist to create complex artworks which resist definitional categories and elide institutional power structures related to patriarchy, nationalism, caste and class, race and gender, and geo-political location.
Between Waves: 2023 Yalingwa Exhibition
July 1–September 3
Artists: Maree Clarke, Dean Cross, Brad Darkson, Matthew Harris, James Howard, Hayley Millar Baker, Jazz Money, Cassie Sullivan, this mob, and Mandy Quadrio
Curator: Jessica Clark
Between Waves is the the third edition of the Yalingwa exhibition series that supports the development of outstanding contemporary First Peoples art and curatorial practice in Southeast Australia.
Between Waves explores and experiments with the visible and invisible energy fields and flows of material memory to illuminate an interconnected web of shapeshifting ecologies within, beyond, and between what can be seen. The exhibition presents ten ambitious new commissions by emerging and established artists working at the intersection of material and immaterial realms of knowledge and knowing.
James Nguyen: Open Glossary
September 16–November 19, 2023
In collaboration with Tamsen Hopkinson, Budi Sudarto, Kate ten Buuren and Chris Xu
2023 Copyright Agency Partnership Commission
Curator: Shelley McSpedden
The second edition of the Copyright Agency Partnerships Commission, supporting mid-career and established visual artists to produce a major new commission, in Open Glossary James Nguyen collaborates with Tamsen Hopkinson, Budi Sudarto, Kate ten Buuren and Chris Xu on a new multi-lingual installation.
Born in Vietnam and based in Narrm/Melbourne, Nguyen’s interdisciplinary, collaborative practice examines strategies of decolonisation, while interrogating the politics of family history, language, displacement and diaspora. Open Glossary interrogates the language and terminologies that permeate contemporary art and society more widely. It includes a series of multilingual glossaries and language toolkits to bring non-English and plain-English speaking communities into artworld discourse through socially-engaged installations, videos, performances and events.
From the other side
December 9, 2023–March 31, 2024
Curators: Elyse Goldfinch and Jessica Clark
A group exhibition that brings together Australian and international artists to unsettle the tropes of the horror genre and its relationship to vulnerability, anxiety, rage, and revenge. The exhibition centres the monstrous-feminine, her desire for consumption and dual role as temptress and castrator.
From the other side draws upon horror’s shared cultural imaginary and its ability to transgress and destabilise institutions of power, conjuring counternarratives and alternative mythologies that challenge the assumed boundaries of the body, gender, the self and the ‘other’.
ACCA’s Digital Wing is now live
A flexible, iterative constellation of digital initiatives, ACCA’s Digital Wing features artistic commissions, creative development, knowledge-sharing and publishing.