Monday 16 December, 2024: Dr Terry Wu, Chair of The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) announced today that leading Australian museum director Charlotte Day and arts philanthropist Lisa Fox will join the ACCA Board in 2025.
Charlotte Day is Director of Art Museums at the University of Melbourne, with oversight of Buxton Contemporary and The Potter Museum of Art. Previously Director of Monash University Museum of Art, Charlotte has more than twenty-five years’ experience as a curator and arts manager. She was formerly an Associate Curator at ACCA, a Director for Centre for Contemporary Photography and has held positions on several arts boards and local, state and federal government arts and funding panels.
Philanthropist Lisa Fox is a dedicated advocate for contemporary art and artists. Having driven several major artist commissions, her passion for supporting Australian First Nations art and work by women has been transformative in the Melbourne landscape. Lisa divides her time between Melbourne, Paris, and New York, and has facilitated several exchange programs for Australian artists in France. As the Chair of the Musée Picasso Foundation and a board member of the Fox Family Foundation, Lisa plays a key role in the philanthropic efforts of both organisations and her own initiatives.
Terry Wu said Charlotte and Lisa bring deep understanding and extensive international and national connections within the visual arts and philanthropic sectors to the ACCA Board. “Both are highly respected within their fields, and have demonstrated an unwavering commitment to advancement within the visual arts industry. Charlotte has worked across all levels of visual arts, including as curator of two of Australia’s presentations at the Venice Biennale, and Lisa has played a critical role in driving, shaping and supporting the Australian cultural and social landscape. We look forward to Charlotte and Lisa’s contributions as we continue to embrace new art and ideas, support artists to push the boundaries of their practice, and welcome diverse audiences to share in the appreciation of contemporary art and culture.”
Charlotte and Lisa join the ACCA Board as the Southbank gallery embarks on a period of significant change under new Artistic Director/CEO Myles Russell Cook. “Myles has brought a renewed sense of ambition and purpose to his role at ACCA, and the Board and ACCA team are excited to embrace this new era with vigour.”
“ACCA has a celebrated forty-year history at the helm of visual arts in Australia, and the inclusion of Charlotte and Lisa on our Board will enhance our long-term plans to extend our delivery across all aspects of our operations – from exhibitions, education programs and in providing vitally important opportunities for artists to make career-defining work of ambition and scale.” Terry said.
Charlotte Day and Lisa Fox join existing ACCA Board Members Sarah Lynn Rees, Andrew Taylor, John Tuck and Gordon Thomson.
ACCA acknowledges the Wurundjeri Woiwurrung people as sovereign custodians of the land on which we work and welcome visitors, along with the neighbouring Boonwurrung, Bunurong, and wider Kulin Nation. We acknowledge their longstanding and continuing care for Country and we recognise First Peoples art and cultural practice has been thriving here for millennia. We extend our respect to ancestors and Elders past and present, and to all First Nations people.
ACCA Summer Season exhibition: The Charge That Binds
7 December 2024 – 16 March 2025
Celebratingthe dynamism, vitality and power of natural phenomena and the more-than-human world, The Charge That Binds is a major new exhibition reminding us of what is at stake at a time of ecological emergency.
Infused with both optimism and grief, the exhibition draws together works that celebrate a world composed of multifaceted, multispecies relations and pulses – foregrounding and reimaging modes of relationality and connection beyond the disruptive, extractive logic of capital.
Featuring recent artworks by Australian and international artists, alongside several key new commissions, the exhibition traverses a broad range of media including painting, sculpture, moving image, sound and choreography. This lively assembly of practices celebrates and cultivates interdependency and reciprocity across difference in both a poetic and pragmatic register.
Grappling with the entwined issues of ongoing climate change and entrenched social inequity, works presented conjure new (and old) stories about our interconnectedness with the living world and each other, underscored by a recognition that natural exploitation, cultural domination and territorial occupation are often part of ongoing colonial processes and thinking.
The Charge That Binds adopts a collective curatorial model, with oversight from a curatorial advisory group including Associate Professor Michelle Antoinette, Art History and Theory program, Monash University; Professor Brian Martin, artist and Director of Wominjeka Djeembana Indigenous Research Lab; Professor Peta Rake, Director of University of Queensland Art Museum; and Professor Naomi Stead, Director of the Design and Creative Practice Enabling Capability Platform, RMIT University.
Projects include:
An immersive soundscape from Wurundjeri educator, language worker and artist Brooke Wandin, presented in dialogue with a large-scale drawing by Quandamooka (Stradbroke Island/Minjerribah) artist Megan Cope.
Brook Wandin’s biiknganjinu ngangudji– hear our Country 2023 features environmental sounds recorded on Country intermingled with community members enunciating Woiwurrung language place names from across the breadth of Wurundjeri Country. Brooke also sings lyrics from All Gone Dead (1998), a song with includes the clan names of 14 mountains in the Yarra Valley identified by Kurburu, an elder of the Boonwurrung people, and recorded in the 1840s by William Thomas.
Megan Cope’s accompanying wall drawing, biiknganjinu ngangudji – see our Country 2023,
is derived from drone footage capturing a 360-degree view of the horizon line at View Hill near Healesville. Cope’s illustration wraps around three walls of the entrance to ACCA’s main gallery and is rendered over rich golden ochre taken from Coranderrk, an important cultural site for peoples of the Kulin nation.
Large-scale mobile sculptures by Naarm/Melbourne artist Francis Carmody explore the impact of geomagnetic reversal events on the evolution of life on Earth. Taking inspiration from the Laschamp event –a magnetic anomaly that occurred around 42,000 years ago – these works examine how shifts in the Earth’s magnetic field could have led to increased surface radiation, triggering genetic mutations and influencing the course of evolutionary history.
A newsculptural installation by multidisciplinary artist Alicia Frankovich intersects references to advanced astronautical technology with organic life. A model of a NASA starshade, an apparatus designed to help view yet unseen exoplanets and stars, is grafted with exploratory sculptural 3D prints of underwater invertebrate known as a Crinoid or feather star, an ancient marine creature whose rhythmic movement through the ocean resembles a kinetic unfurling of plumage.
Relational Ecologies Laboratory is presented by the Climate Aware Creative Practices Network – an Australia-wide alliance of creative arts educators, researchers and practitioners working in tertiary education, established to deepen engagement with the challenges posted by climate change. The laboratory is a relational artwork encompassing installations, workshops, reading groups and other activities staged over the three months of the exhibition, in which network members build an inventory and do what climate aware artists do best: work across precarious platforms, sharing, reworking, collaborating and understanding the materiality of artistic circular economies.
A major sculptural installation by Māori artist Brett Graham that reexamines the civic monuments and historical legacy of colonial aggressions in the Waikato War of 1863-64. The formreplicates the shape of the gun turret which sat atop New Zealand’s first purpose-built war vessel, the ‘Pioneer’.
Associated programs:
The exhibition will be accompanied by a series of experimental workshops, discussions, performances and pedagogical investigations addressing the role of artists and art institutions in fostering collaboration, collective action and new imaginaries in response to our planetary emergency, including:
Relational Ecologies Intensive
Fri 21 – Sat 22 February 2025
Relational Ecologies Intensive is a two-day program presented in partnership with the Climate Aware Creative Practice Network and will consist of workshops, reading groups, panel discussions, walk-shops, speculative design workshops, and performances drawn from the nation-wide network and the artists in The Charge That Binds. The intensive questions how we study and teach climate aware creative practices, with a special focus on practices that attend to Indigenous land justice.
Alicia Frankovich – Feather Star
Sat 22 February 2025 at ACCA
A major new live performance by Alicia Frankovich, Feather Star, co-commissioned with The University of Queensland Art Museum (UQAM), supported by Creative Australia.
Alicia Frankovich has established a highly regarded practice that engages living human and non-human entities to reveal the limits of how we understand notions of nature, with projects presented in major exhibition and institutions throughout Australia and overseas. The pairing of a newly commissioned installation with the major new choreography, Feather Star, in ACCA’s exhibition will allow audiences to experience the vibrant intersection and dialogue of the various registers of her multidisciplinary practice, while expanding conversations and understandings of both the climate emergency and the scope for performance with the gallery context.
The Charge that Binds
7 December 2024 – 16 March 2024
Artists: Zheng Bo, Francis Carmody, Climate Aware Creative Practices Research Network, Megan Cope & Brooke Wandin, Alicia Frankovich, Brett Graham, Jack Green, Mel O’Callaghan, Izabela Pluta, Tita Salina and Irwan Ahmett, Emilija Škarnulytė and Sorawit Songsataya Curator: Shelley McSpedden Curatorial Advisory Group: Associate Professor Michelle Antoinette, Monash University; Professor Brian Martin, Wominjeka Djeembana Indigenous Research Lab; Peta Rake, UQ Museum; and Professor Naomi Stead, RMIT
ACCA acknowledges the Wurundjeri Woiwurrung people as sovereign custodians of the land on which we work and welcome visitors, along with the neighbouring Boonwurrung, Bunurong, and wider Kulin Nation. We acknowledge their longstanding and continuing care for Country and we recognise First Peoples art and cultural practice has been thriving here for millennia. We extend our respect to ancestors and Elders past and present, and to all First Nations people.
Myles Russell-Cook appointed Artistic Director & CEO of ACCA
Myles Russell-Cook. Photograph: Kyle Archie Knight
ACCA Chair Dr Terry Wu announced today that leading Australian curator Myles Russell-Cook has been appointed Artistic Director & CEO of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA).
Currently Senior Curator of Australian and First Nations Art at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), Myles Russell-Cook has contributed to and curated numerous significant and internationally recognised projects for the NGV, including the NGV Triennial, Melbourne Now, and the landmark collection exhibition, QUEER: Stories from the NGV Collection.
Born and raised in Naarm/Melbourne, his maternal Aboriginal ancestors come from the lands of the Wotjobaluk people, and throughout his career he has lived and worked in various communities throughout Australia. Recently Russell-Cook’s curatorial work has led him to spend significant periods of time in North-East Arnhem Land, The Kimberley, and throughout the Torres Strait.
A key figure in driving new developments and initiatives in First Nations art both locally and internationally, Russell-Cook reintroduced First Peoples art back to the ground floor of The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia with the launch of Wurrdha Marra, and is the curator behind the recently announced exhibition The Stars We Do Not See: Australian Indigenous Art, the largest ever travelling exhibition of First Peoples Art from Australia, set to open in October 2025 at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.
“We are very excited to welcome Myles to the role,” Terry said. “As a curator, he has a proven ability to transcend the boundaries of what contemporary art can do and be, and has created numerous successful exhibitions that are progressive and scholarly, whilst also accessible and inclusive. He is a leading light within the next generation of Australian arts practitioners, with boundless ambition and energy, and an expansive vision that will steer ACCA into the next period of success and growth.”
Myles Russell-Cook has been part of the curatorial team at the NGV for over eight years, most recently overseeing the NGV’s collections of Australian Art, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art, and Art by Global First Nations Communities. He has worked across a broad range of exhibitions and projects, including Colony: Frontier Wars (2017), DESTINY (2020), Maree Clarke: Ancestral Memories (2021), Found and Gathered: Rosalie Gascoigne and Lorraine Connelly-Northey (2022), and the upcoming REKOSPECTIVE: The Art of Reko Rennie (2024). Internationally, he has curated several exhibitions including a series in collaboration with the Australian Embassy in Paris, the most recent of which, La terre est bleue, is scheduled to open in October 2024.
“I have always loved and admired ACCA, and I am so excited to take on this new position,” he said. “Since its inception, ACCA has been transformative for Australian art, particularly by creating opportunities for artists to make daring and ambitious new work, much of which goes on to be acquired by important state and national collections,” he said.
“What’s more, ACCA has always provided audiences with experiences that are utterly of the time, rapidly responding to new artistic developments both locally and internationally. That’s perhaps what I love most about ACCA, the way it has always been ahead of the conversation. I am excited to continue to deliver and expand on this remit and lead such a vitally important institution into the future. The next decade or so in Naarm/Melbourne is filled with opportunity, and I see ACCA as a leader in the newly developed Melbourne Arts Precinct, and beyond.” he said.
Myles will begin his new role in November following the departure of much-loved Director Max Delany. “Max’s achievements at ACCA are numerous, but one of his defining contributions is a consistent amplification of First Nations art and artists. We know that Myles will continue to do this, and more broadly, to champion local and international artists from all walks of life,” Terry said.
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art 111 Sturt Street, Southbank VIC 3006 Melbourne, Australia acca.melbourne
Tennant Creek Brio: Juparnta Ngattu Minjinypa Iconocrisis
ACCA presents the first major survey of Tennant Creek Brio, an artist collective living and working on Warumungu Country. Fusing First Nations cultural traditions, the industrial materiality of the mining industry, and regional and global art influences, the exhibition asserts and re-imagines the artists’ cross-cultural identities, drawing upon the haunting wounds of post-contact histories, the renewal and remaking of cultural practices, and the collaborative resilience and audaciously punk attitude of a frontier community.
Encompassing contemporary artists from Northern Central Australia and Melbourne, Tennant Creek Brio includes key members Fabian Brown Japaljarri, Lindsay Nelson Jakamarra, Rupert Betheras, Joseph Williams Jungarayi, Clifford Thompson Japaljarri, Jimmy Frank Jupurrula, Fabian Rankine Jampijinpa, Marcus Camphoo Kemarre, and collaborators including Eleanor Jawurlngali Dixon, Lévi McLean, and Gary Sullibhaine. The group first converged in 2016 when the artists initiated an outreach program at the local men’s centre, Anyinginyi Health Aboriginal Corporation.
Tennant Creek Brio: JuparntaNgattu MinjinypaIconocrisis references The Brio’s practice of reinscribing their experiences, cultural identity and mark making onto salvaged found materials such as oil barrels, car bonnets, solar panels, poker machines, television screens, and geological maps from the abandoned Warrego mine. Confronting the current state of polycrisis, of belief systems in conflict, and contested and scarring histories, the exhibition stresses an urgentneed for truth-telling, future-thinking, collectivity and action. Exploring themes of extraction, reclamation and collaboration, The Brio’s artworks reveal the deeply personal and complex intergenerational influences that continue to shape and entwine the artists’ lives, identities and future-thinking.
Warumungu, Warlpiri and English languages converge in the exhibition title JuparntaNgattu MinjinypaIconocrisis, which is indicative of the complex intercultural context of Tennant Creek, and The Brio methodology of collaborative creolisation and bricolage.Opening in Warumungu, JuparntaNgattuconjuresnotions of ceremonial strength and power through image-making, while the Walpiri term that follows, Minjinypa, means ‘cheeky one’ or ‘trouble(maker)’. Paired with the neologism Iconocrisis, this gathering of multiple languages attests to the formal, linguistic and material collisions inherent to Tennant Creek Brio’s creative and cultural practice, while highlighting their irreverent approach to bringing images, icons, and ideologies into question.
Alongside the presentation of significant works created over almost a decade, the exhibition at ACCA presents an ambitious, industrially-scaled scenographic assemblage that channels the power and strength of The Brio’s image-making, centring a pertinent critique on colonial extraction, capitalism, and the subsequent social, cultural and political complexities and negotiations that stem from this. The Brio’s signature-style mark-making features across a range of painterly, sculptural, installation, video, drawing and performance practices that highlight the cultural power and rebel-rousing attitude of Tennant Creek Brio’s contemporary art practice.
Since 2016, Tennant Creek Brio has exhibited widely with recent solo exhibitions including Tennant Creek Brio: Cross Section, Cassandra Bird Gallery, Gadigal Country/Sydney, 2024; Remember Now Old Man Nomad, cbOne Gallery, Naarm/Melbourne, 2023; Papulu-ku Nyinjjiki (seeing houses), OFFICE, Naarm/Melbourne, 2023; Radioactive Anomalies, Niagara Galleries, Naarm/Melbourne, 2023; Shock and Ore, Charles Darwin University, Garramilla/Darwin, 2023; and Tennant Creek Brio: The Myth Makers, Chapman & Bailey Gallery, Naarm/Melbourne, 2022.
Significant group exhibitions include Black Sky, Berndt Museum, University of Western Australia, Boorloo/Perth, 2023; NIRIN: 22nd Biennale of Sydney, Artspace and Cockatoo Island, Gadigal Country/Sydney, 2020; Control Point: The Tennant Creek Brio, RAFT Artspace, Maparntwe/Alice Springs, 2023; King of the Roosters, Raft Artspace, Maparntwe/Alice Springs, 2023; Tennant Creek Superstars, Nyinkka Nyunyu Art and Cultural Centre, Tennant Creek, 2019; and Present Tense, Northern Centre for Contemporary Art, Garramilla/Darwin, 2017.
Artists Fabian Brown Japaljarri, Lindsay Nelson Jakamarra, Rupert Betheras, Joseph Williams Jungarayi, Clifford Thompson Japaljarri, Jimmy Frank Jupurrula, Fabian Rankine Jampijinpa, Marcus Camphoo Kemarre, and including Eleanor Jawurlngali Dixon, Lévi McLean, Gary Sullibhaine
Cultural Advisors Joseph Williams Jungarayi, Jimmy Frank Jupurrula
Curatorial Advisor Dr Erica Izett
Curators Max Delany, Dr Jessica Clark, Elyse Goldfinch and Dr Shelley McSpedden
TENNANT CREEK BRIO: JUPARNTA NGATTU MINJINYPA ICONOCRISIS 21 SEPTEMBER – 17 NOVEMBER 2024
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art 111 Sturt Street, Southbank VIC 3006 Melbourne, Australia Opening hours: Tuesday – Friday 10am–5pm, Weekends 11am–5pm, Free entry acca.melbourne #accamelbourne #ArtStartsAtACCA #ArtAtTheDeepEnd
For further media information:
Katrina Hall Publicity/Communications 0421153046
Max Delany announces plans to step down as ACCA Artistic Director & CEO in November
Announced today: ACCA Artistic Director and CEO Max Delany has shared his intention to step down from his role in November 2024 with ACCA’s Board and colleagues.
ACCA Chair Dr Terry Wu said Max’s contributions to ACCA have been immense and profound. “While we are all deeply saddened to hear this news, we know Max leaves ACCA in incredible shape after nine years delivering a dynamic and ambitious curatorial vision.
“Max’s time at ACCA is marked by many accomplishments. He has welcomed strong engagement with First Nations communities and programming, expanded the reach of our education programs, and embedded diverse artistic and curatorial voices in ACCA’s programs and vision,” he said.
Max took on the position of Artistic Director and CEO of ACCA in early 2016, following leadership roles at the National Gallery of Victoria, Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) and Gertrude Contemporary. His achievements at ACCA are extensive, and include landmark exhibitions exploring contemporary art’s relation to wider social, cultural and political contexts, including Sovereignty, Unfinished Business: Perspectives on art and feminism, On Vulnerability and Doubt, and Who’s Afraid of Public Space?, among others.
“Throughout his time at ACCA, Max has amplified ACCA’s role as a leading platform for contemporary artists, delivering an influential commissions program, ambitious annual solo exhibition projects with Australian artists, and an annual series of major exhibitions which has seen the work of leading international artists shown here in Australia, often for the first time,” Terry said.
“Max has also been instrumental in embedding First Nations voice and self-determination through exhibitions such as Sovereignty, the Yalingwa series, and major solo projects with artists Yhonnie Scarce and Tennant Creek Brio (opening this September). Under his leadership, ACCA is also proud to have established a dedicated First Nations curatorial position, with Hannah Presley inaugurating the role in 2018, now held by Dr. Jessica Clark since 2022.”
Terry said Max is an unrivalled leader and community builder, and today ACCA has the support and involvement of an exceptionally dedicated group of artists, colleagues, donors and collaborators locally, nationally and internationally.
“Max’s enthusiasm and dedication to art and artists has never wavered, and we wish him the best of times as he embraces new horizons in the next chapter in his career,” Terry said.
Max Delany said: “It has been a privilege to lead ACCA over almost a decade. It has been an honour working with such an outstanding, dedicated, and inspiring team, and members of ACCA’s Board, whose vision, support and counsel has been courageous and unwavering, motivating and enabling. The work of artists lies at the heart of what we do, and I am immeasurably grateful for their collaboration and trust, and for the visionary, philosophical and transformational role that artists play in our society.
“ACCA’s role is amplified by dedicated philanthropy, and I extend sincere thanks and appreciation to our wonderful and loyal community of donors and supporters, and our government partners, who make such an important contribution to what we do.
“I’m proud of our collective achievements and remain confident and convinced of ACCA’s necessity, impact and potential in a rapidly and radically transforming world and cultural sector. Thank you to the many artists, colleagues, supporters, partners and friends who have guided, contributed to and supported ACCA over the past decade – more power to you!”
ACCA’s Board will begin the recruitment process for a new Artistic Director/CEO for ACCA shortly.
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art 111 Sturt Street, Southbank VIC 3006 Melbourne, Australia acca.melbourne
ACCA acknowledges the Wurundjeri Woiwurrung people as sovereign custodians of the land on which we work and welcome visitors, along with the neighbouring Boonwurrung, Bunurong, and wider Kulin Nation. We acknowledge their longstanding and continuing care for Country and we recognise First Peoples art and cultural practice has been thriving here for millennia. We extend our respect to ancestors and Elders past and present, and to all First Nations people
Future Remains
The 2024 Macfarlane Commissions
Artists explore myriad ways stories from the past can shape and impact present realities in Future Remains: The 2024 Macfarlane Commissions, the fourth edition of a multi-year partnership supporting ambitious new artworks by emerging and mid-career artists.
Future Remains presents major new projects from seven contemporary artists from across Australia who variously reclaim, restage and reframe specific material, cultural or ideological inheritances in an effort not only to better understand the past but also to open up new possibilities for our current and future worlds.
Engaging a broad range of historical reference points, from idiosyncratic personal and familial chronicles, 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 inherited legacies, alongside the promise of their reconfiguration for the future.
Curator Dr Shelley McSpedden said theworks presented in Future Remains stage material and conceptual explorations of historical narratives, ‘grappling with knotty notions of truth, authenticity, imitation and desire. Ranging in tenor from humorous and poetic to bitingly satirical, these works explore how the stories told about the past are fabricated and perpetuated, and how they shape the contours of our personal and collective lives,’ she said.
‘At an historical moment when we are collectively grappling with contested histories and their profound impact on our present reality, the artists brought together in Future Remains not only probe the veracity of personal and social historical accounts, they attempt to rework them into something productive for the future.’
Future Remains features seven new artwork commissions, including:
A sprawling, multi-part weaving by Kim Ah Sam, in which she employs her innovative, improvisational textile techniques to map her life story, with a focus on connection to her grandmother’s Kuku Yalanji Country, and her father’s Kalkadoon Country.
A major moving-image installation by Andy Butler that irreverently responds to the Henry Otley Beyer archive held by the National Library of Australia. Filmed on location in Canberra, the three-channel work sees Asian-Australian actors recreate selected movie scenes referenced in cinema programs in the Beyer archive from the early 1930s, when Hollywood films were being screened in Manila during the height of the American colonial period.
A large-scale installation by Teelah George that brings together a new iteration of her celebrated embroidery and bronze work, alongside experiments with other materials, including cardboard, Blu Tack and discarded truck vinyl, to mediate on the workings of time, and the unstable and constantly evolving nature of material cultures and historical narratives.
A two-channel moving image installation by Wiradjuri artist Joel Sherwood Spring that adopts the language of a tech pitch and the infrastructure of gaming engines and AI technology to satirically probe the heightened desire for and framing of Indigeneity as a panacea for contemporary social ills. The work lambasts historical representations of Indigenous culture, while subversively speculating on new configurations from the future.
A towering sculptural installation by Salote Tawale that appears like supersized beaded jewellery composed of culturally specific materials, including tarps, corrugated iron and patterned textiles. Expanding on her previous work with wearable adornment, the exuberant sculpture is designed as a fantastical talisman, spreading positive energy and protection in a moment of heighted social fracture and crisis. The work is conceived as both a self-portrait of the artist as a queer Fijian woman with settler-colonial heritage living in Australia, and a joyful monument to the collective energy that sustains us during difficult times.
A tactile sculptural installation by Nicholas Smith in which large-scale hand-built ceramic vessels appear like strewn bodies within an elaborate stage-set. Intersecting domestic materials and palettes drawn from his own regional suburban upbringing, with references to 20th century décor and design, and religious iconography, this luscious installation draws out and plays with repressed desires and libidinal drives.
An immersive installation by emerging Melbourne artist, Alexandra Peters, incorporating large-scale prints and sculptural objects that draws on the materiality and methods of both high art and mass industry to interrogate and subvert notions of individuality and authenticity.
Developed in partnership with ACCA, The Macfarlane Commissions is an initiative of the The Macfarlane Fund designed 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. To date, the series has supported the creation of almost thirty major new works, with significant impacts for the careers of the artists involved.
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.
Future Remains: The 2024 Macfarlane Commissions Exhibition dates: 29 June – 1 September 2024 Artists: Kim Ah Sam, Andy Butler, Teelah George, Alexandra Peters, Nicholas Smith, Joel Sherwood Spring and Salote Tawale Curator: Shelley McSpedden
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art 111 Sturt Street, Southbank VIC 3006 Melbourne, Australia Opening hours: Tuesday to Friday 10am–5pm, Weekends 11am–5pm, Free entry acca.melbourne #accamelbourne #artstartsatacca
For further media information: Katrina Hall Publicity/Communications 0421 153 046
ACCA acknowledges the Wurundjeri Woiwurrung people as sovereign custodians of the land on which we work and welcome visitors, along with the neighbouring Boonwurrung, Bunurong, and wider Kulin Nation. We acknowledge their longstanding and continuing care for Country and we recognise First Peoples art and cultural practice has been thriving here for millennia. We extend our respect to ancestors and Elders past and present, and to all First Nations people.
2024 ACCA International exhibition
Laure Provoust: Oui Move In You
The first major Australian survey of work by celebrated French artist Laure Prouvost opens at ACCA on 23 March.
Continuing the annual ACCA International series of solo exhibitions by influential artists on the international stage, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art will present Oui Move In You, a major solo exhibition by Laure Prouvost. Encompassing new commissions and a survey of existing work over the past decade, the exhibition will transform ACCA’s unique architecture into a labyrinthine and other-worldly environment, introducing Australian audiences to the imaginative, absorbing and frequently absurdist hallmarks of Prouvost’s diverse artistic practice.
Acknowledging the radical, experimental, and pathfinding figures who came before her, Oui Move In You conceptually explores the roles and legacies of grandmother and grandfather, the maternal spaces of mother and child, and contemporary social spaces in which humans commune with the natural world. The exhibition is composed as a celebration of liberation and imagination, the sensual and sensuous, being and belonging, care and connection. Taking audiences on a journey from the subterranean realm of the underground and the subconscious, opening into the bodily and earthly realm exploring sensuality, desire and the fecundity of nature, the exhibition culminates with a release into the sky and celestial plains of weight and weightlessness, lightness and gravity.
Laure Prouvost is among the most celebrated artists on the contemporary international art scene, with ACCA’s exhibition the first major presentation of the artist’s work in Australia. Born in 1978 in Lille, France, Prouvost lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. Prouvost graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Central Saint Martins (London, 2002) and a Master of Fine Arts from Goldsmiths College (London, 2010). Prouvost represented France at the 58th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennial in 2019. She was the recipient of the prestigious Turner Prize in 2013 and the MaxMara Art Prize for Women in 2011. Prouvost has recently presented solo exhibitions at Remai Modern (Saskatoon, Canada 2023); Nasjonalmuseet (Oslo, Norway, 2022); Longlati Foundation (Shanghai China, 2022); and Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Copenhagen, Denmark, 2021), which included a major new video work co-commissioned with ACCA; as well as a wide range of public art and performance projects.
A limited-edition artist’s book will be published to coincide with the exhibition, including contributions from fellow artists, friends and collaborators across the globe, paying homage to grandmothers, artistic matriarchs, ancestors, inspirational elders and forebears.
An abridged version of the exhibition will tour to Perth Institute of Contemporary Art in 2025.
Laure Provoust: Oui Move In You Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) 23 March – 10 June 2024 Curators: Max Delany and Annika Kristensen
Touring to Perth Institute of Contemporary Art in 2025
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art 111 Sturt Street, Southbank VIC 3006 Melbourne, Australia
For further media information: Katrina Hall Publicity/Communications 0421153046
ACCA acknowledges the Wurundjeri Woiwurrung people as sovereign custodians of the land on which we work and welcome visitors, along with the neighbouring Boonwurrung, Bunurong, and wider Kulin Nation. We acknowledge their longstanding and continuing care for Country and we recognise First Peoples art and cultural practice has been thriving here for millennia. We extend our respect to ancestors and Elders past and present, and to all First Nations people.
2024 ACCA Artistic Program
ACCA is pleased to announce its 2024 artistic program, encompassing a quarterly, seasonally-based program of exhibitions, alongside offsite, online, touring and special projects, supported by a dynamic series of education and public programs. Our 2024 program includes the following keynote projects.
Artists: Naomi Blacklock, Mia Boe, Louise Bourgeois, Cybele Cox, Theron Debris, Karla Dickens, Lonnie Hutchinson, Naomi Kantjuriny, Minyoung Kim, Maria Kozic, Jemima Lucas, Clare Milledge, Tracey Moffatt, Julia Robinson, Marianna Simnett, Heather B. Swann, Suzan Pitt, Kellie Wells, and Zamara Zamara
From the other side integrates historical and contemporary works, alongside new commissions that draw upon horror’s capacity to transgress and destabilise forms of power and subjugation. The exhibition summons the impulse for rage and revenge, while embracing feelings of vulnerability and unease. From the other sidecasts a lens upon feminist, queer and non-binary subjectivities to consider the transgressive pleasures and liberations of horror, as makers, masters and consumers of the genre.
Oui Move In You is a major exhibition featuring the work of Laure Prouvost (born Lille, 1978). Encompassing new commissions and a survey of work over the past decade, the exhibition will transform ACCA into a labyrinthine and other-worldly environment, immersing audiences in the imaginative, absorbing and frequently absurdist hallmarks of Prouvost’s diverse artistic practice.
Oui Move In You explores the roles and legacies of grandmother and grandfather, the maternal spaces of mother and child, and contemporary social spaces in which humans commune with the natural world. Taking audiences on a journey from the subterranean realm of the underground and the subconscious, opening into the bodily and earthly realm exploring sensuality, desire and the fecundity of nature, the exhibition culminates with a release into the sky and celestial plains of weight and weightlessness, lightness and gravity.
Artists: Kim Ah Sam, Andy Butler, Teelah George, Alexandra Peters, Nicholas Smith, Joel Sherwood Spring and Salote Tawale
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 artists 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.
Tennant Creek Brio 21 September – 17 November 2024
Artist collective including members: Fabian Brown Japaljarri, Lindsay Nelson Jakamarra, Rupert Betheras, Joseph Williams Jangarrayi, Jimmy Frank Juppurla, Clifford Thompson Japaljarri, Simon Wilson Pitjara, Marcus Camphoo Kemarre
Tennant Creek Brio are an artist collective working on Warumungu Country, including contemporary artists from Northern Central Australia to Melbourne. The group first converged in 2016 when the artists initiated an outreach program at the local men’s centre (Anyinginyi Health Aboriginal Corporation). Since then, the Brio have continued their work, conjuring the haunting wounds of post-contact histories, the renewal and remaking of cultural practices, and the collaborative resilience of a frontier community.
As a group of charismatic outsiders working in an industrial estate on the outskirts of town—at once marginal figures and cultural leaders—the Brio fuse First Nations cultural traditions, the industrial materiality of the mining industry, and regional and global art influences to express and re-imagine their cross-cultural identities, and the reality of unresolved tensions between Indigenous and settler colonial cultures.
The Charge That Binds 7 December 2024 – 2 March 2025
The Charge That Binds presents new and recent works that celebrate the exuberance and beauty of a world composed of multifaceted, multispecies relations and pulses. The exhibition examines how, in the midst of planetary ecological crisis, artists are utilising this dynamic energy to remember, reimagine, and to foster new modes of relationality and connection beyond the extractive logic of capital.
The Charge That Binds emphasises our entanglement in a constellation of living networks not only to stress the ethics of kinship but to foreground collectivity and collaboration as vibrant political strategies. Accompanied by a series of experimental workshops, discussions, performances and pedagogical investigations, the exhibition presents an assembly of practices that celebrate and cultivate reciprocity, exchange, and interdependency across difference in both a poetic and pragmatic register.
Announcing Dr Terry Wu as ACCA’s new Chair
ACCA’s Board of Directors announced today that Dr Terry Wu will take on the role of Chair at ACCA. He follows John Denton, who steps down after thirteen years as Chair and two decades as a member of ACCA’s Board.
A member of the ACCA Board since 2019, Terry is a a long-standing arts advocate and supporter, and a leading plastic surgeon specialising in facial reconstruction.
‘I am honoured to take on this new role, and to cement the exceptionally important work John has done in steering ACCA through an enormous period of growth and change’, Terry said.
‘On behalf of the Board of Directors and the ACCA team, I thank John and applaud him for his exceptional contribution to ACCA, and to our wider community. As a Director of the internationally renowned architectural firm Denton Corker Marshall, John has helped shape the architectural and visual identity of Melbourne, but has also played a vitally important role supporting one of Melbourne’s – and Australia’s – most significant arts organisations.
‘We are so thankful for all he has done over the past two decades, as a longstanding and loyal donor, and a kind and generous leader, supporting ACCA with great vision, governance and advocacy’.
John Denton joined the ACCA Board in 2002 when it first moved into its award-winning building designed by Wood Marsh in Southbank. His retirement comes as ACCA celebrates 21 years at the heart of the Melbourne Arts Precinct, and 40 years as a leading producer of contemporary visual art and culture in Australia.
‘I am honoured to follow in John’s exceptional footsteps and to continue to work with the ACCA Board and team as it embraces new horizons and continues to build on the influential role it plays in the Australian visual arts ecology over the next 40 years and beyond. I’m especially excited to expand ACCA’s role as a platform for artists, through our ambitious and groundbreaking exhibitions and commissioning, our transformative education and public programs, and our strong community engagement,’ Terry said.
Dr Terry Wu is also a Board Member of ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image), Science Gallery International (Dublin) and serves as a Member of Creative Australia’s Venice Biennale Ambassadors Council. He was formerly a Board Director of Heide Museum of Modern Art and the National Association of Visual Arts, and a member of the International Council of Tate (UK). As the son of an artist and writer, Terry is passionate about arts, culture and philanthropy and in 2019 was awarded the Emerging Philanthropy Leadership Award by Creative Partnerships Australia.
Screams on Screen
Over two heart stopping nights in February (16th-17th), RMIT’s historic Capitol Theatre will become the spookiest place in Melbourne for Screams on Screen, a curated program at the interface of art/horror featuring live music, art, feature films, rarely seen experimental shorts, artist and director talks that celebrate the monstrous emotions and transgressive, rebellious forces that fuel the horror genre.
Screams on Screen has been co-organised with RMIT in association with ACCA’s current exhibition From the other side,which centres the fear of the monstrous- feminine to consider the pleasure and liberation of horror from feminist, queer and non-binary subjectivities.
The program includes a 10-year anniversary screening of one of the most influential Australian horror films of the 21st century, Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook , 2014, a selection of art/horror auteur David Lynch’s rarely screened earliest experimental shorts, 1967-68, as well as shorts from some of Australia’s finest contemporary artists, a digital restoration of Ann Turner’s Australian folk-horror cult classic Celia, 1989, and the first Iranian Vampire Western, Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, 2014.
The program also includes a presentation of the sculptural works by multi- disciplinary artist Isabel Peppard and a live theremin performance by musician Roman Tucker. Creepy Cocktails served in the foyer.
‘Screams on Screen’ celebrates horror’s potential to empower social ‘otherness’ and project our darkest fantasies and social nightmares onto the big screen.
Screams on Screen: The Dark Desire Friday, 16 February, from 6:00pm
Art, screenings, music, talks. The Dark Desire features stories of impulse, longing, craving and lust.
Isabel Peppard, artworks in the foyer
Roman Tucker, live theremin performance and creepy cocktails in the Salon Talks to be announced
Experimental shorts
Liang Luscombe and Cara Benedetto, Leave, 2023
Leave uses puppetry to explore representations of Caucasian women and drunkenness in film and television. The stumbling woman, made famous in films and
TV shows such as Fatal Attraction, Fleabag, Killing Eve, and Single Drunk Female, appears as a part-human-part-puppet character trying to piece together the night before. ‘Leave’ explores the erotics of the relationship between puppeteer and puppet, showing the way the puppeteer supports and manipulates the puppet to ask questions about agency and intoxication within the body horror genre.
Drew Pettifer, Untitled (Gasp!), 2024
Untitled (Gasp!) intersperses moments from cinematic history where male-identifying characters gasp in fear. The syncopated rhythm of these spliced moments collate micro-challenges to expectations of masculinity and allude to queer histories of the horror genre.
Isabel Peppard, Butterflies, 2012
A young artist struggles to make a living selling her drawings at a train station. When a sinister businessman offers her a paying job the prospect seems inviting but the reality threatens to kill her imagination…Butterflies is a Gothic Fantasy stop-motion animation that speaks to the tension between art and capitalism and the struggle to preserve one’s creative soul.
David Lynch, The Alphabet, 1968
The Alphabet is an experimental short film featuring a sick woman’s nightmare involving living representations of the alphabet. Combining animation and live-action the film presents an absurdist nightmare where learning and fear are intertwined.
David Lynch, Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times), 1966
Lynch’s first exploration into film, Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times) was developed during his time at art school and presents a visceral and tongue-in-cheek metaphor about the process of expression and art marking.
Feature Film
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, 2014
A tale of love, loneliness and family ties, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is set in the fictitious town of Bad City. Dubbed the first Iranian Vampire Western, Amirpour’s take of the blood-sucking archetype is anything but prescriptive.
Language: Persian | 104mins | USA
Screams on Screen: The Dark Domestic Saturday, 17 February, from 6:00pm
Australian horror double bill, The Babadook, 2014, Celia, 1989 and in conversation with director Ann Turner, art, and experimental shorts. The Dark Domestic exposes the horrors of suburbia and the fear of home invasion.
Kyle Edward Ball, Heck, 2020
A little kid wakes up in the middle of night to the sound of his mom’s television blaring.
Hayley Millar Baker, The Umbra, 2023
Illuminating the darkest and quietest part of the night when the veil to the physical and spiritual realms are at its thinnest, The Umbra unites the living with the ethereal through an occurrence of astral travel between an adolescent woman and a young spirit brought to physicality.The Umbra is a slow-cinema filmic work that centres female power and strength in reference to elements of the horror genre that is often focused on women’s psychosis.
The Babadook, 2014
This special screening of The Babadook celebrates the 10th anniversary of one of the most influential and internationally acclaimed Australian horror films of the 21st century. Jennifer Kent’s darkly disturbing feature debut starring Essie Davis set a new template for the haunted house subgenre, while also launching its supernatural bogeyman into the memeosphere: Mr Babadook has become one of the horror genre’s most iconic monstrous beings.
Language: English | 93mins | AU
Celia, 1989
A digital restoration by the National Film and Sound Archive of Ann Turner’s 1989 masterpiece revolving around the life of a creative and emotionally troubled young girl named Celia (Rebecca Smart). Set in 1950 Melbourne suburbia Celia’s upbringing is marked by her parents’ devout religious beliefs, which are intertwined with their own sexual frustrations and irrational fears surrounding the rise of communism. Finding solace in her vivid imagination, she conjures up images of malevolent creatures and peculiar phenomena as a means to conceal her insecurities.
Language: English | 103mins | AU
Screams on Screen is co-programmed by Jessica Balanzategui (RMIT’s School of Media and Communication and SIGN network lead), Elyse Goldfinch, Jessica Clark (ACCA) and proudly presented by RMIT Culture and SIGN at RMIT in partnership with ACCA and supported by City of Melbourne Annual Arts Grants.
Hayley Millar Baker’s The Umbra was commissioned by RISING for Shadow Spirit, curated by Kimberley Moulton.
Ann Turner’s Celia is courtesy of Umbrella Entertainment.
#accamelbourne #artstartsatacca For further media information:
Katrina Hall Publicity/Communications 0421153046
ACCA acknowledges the Wurundjeri Woiwurrung people as sovereign custodians of the land on which we work and welcome visitors, along with the neighbouring Boonwurrung, Bunurong, and wider Kulin Nation. We acknowledge their longstanding and continuing care for Country and we recognise First Peoples art and cultural practice has been thriving here for millennia. We extend our respect to ancestors and Elders past and present, and to all First Nations people.
ACCA Statement in Support of Artists
ACCA is a platform for artists, and we fully support and respect their fundamental right to express their artistic and political views, without fear of retribution, in keeping with principles of freedom of cultural expression.
In keeping with our mission, vision and values, ACCA is equally a centre for the exchange of ideas, and we strive to create a safe and respectful space – for artists, audiences, our team, and the communities with whom we work – to create brave and at times challenging artistic works, and to engage in the conversations of our time.
In seeking to encourage cultural participation and debate, we aim to extend a duty of care and respect for the diverse perspectives which reflect our communities, whilst we resolutely stand against all forms of hate speech, bigotry and discrimination, including antisemitism and Islamophobia.
At this distressing time, we express our deepest sympathies to those affected by the devastating events in Gaza and Israel, which are deeply felt in our own communities. We join in calls for an end to violence and the pursuit of peace.
In this spirit we acknowledge the position of artists James Nguyen and Tamsen Hopkinson in relation to their current installation at ACCA and we respect their right to this action.
For further media information, please contact:
Katrina Hall Publicity/Communications 0421153046
James Nguyen: Open Glossary
The second edition of the Copyright Agency Partnerships Commission, James Nguyen’s multi-lingual installation Open Glossary interrogates the politics of language, cultural exchange, activism and belonging.
Amongst other things, Nguyen will fill ACCA’s main hall with hundreds of white shirts, as a sensory and immersive sculptural work that probes the language of contemporary art and society more widely.
Born in Vietnam and based in Narrm (Melbourne), James Nguyen’s practice examines ways to decolonise and interrogate the politics of family history, translation, displacement and diaspora.
For Open Glossary, Nguyen and his collaborators, Tamsen Hopkinson (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Pāhauwera), Budi Sudarto, Kate ten Buuren (Taungurung) and Chris Xu, present dynamic installations, videos, performances and events across all four ACCA galleries, each carrying multi-lingual conversations on a range of contemporary issues including gender diversity and sexual identity, the linguistic and spiritual connections of Southeast Asia, First Nations Australian and Moana neighbours, as well as Land Rights and Indigenous Constitutional Recognition.
A central feature is the installation of white shirts, gathered from donations across Australia. Presented together these shirts evoke a range of touch points, from the political sculpture of Brazilian artist Lygia Pape, the Angel Ally corridors from Stonewall rallies and the Matthew Shepherd murder trials, the deregulation of the textiles and footwear industry in 1980s Australia, to Nguyen’s family sewing factory. This provisional structure is an intimate space for the public to encounter experiences of belonging and non-belonging from a range of LGBTQI+ migrants recently resettled to Australia, whose personal accounts were recorded in workshops facilitated in collaboration with Budi Sudarto.
In the adjacent gallery space, a guard of white angels secures a safe space for queer communities, filled with messages of hope and A Queer Glossary – a collective multi-lingual translation project of queer terms for, and by, non-English speaking LGBTQI+ community members. This evolving glossary records the shifting and collective presence of multi-lingual queerness.
In a separate project, James Nguyen stages an extended conversation with Māori artist and curator Tamsen Hopkinson. The work is a material and conceptual coming together, a manifestation of the shared term ‘Hui’, which resonates across Indo-Pacific and Moana Polynesian cultures. Conceived as a meeting space of cultural negotiation and exchange, ‘Hui’ continues the contemporary linguistic and artistic connections of two practitioners coming from Māori and Vietnamese traditions.
In the final section of the exhibition, James Nguyen and First Nations artist and curator Kate ten Buuren have crafted an interactive space for young people to consider their relationship with Aboriginal and Torres Strait people in contemporary Australia. Furnished with zines, dioramas and costumes, this hands-on making-space encourages participants to craft their own stories in relation to Sovereignty, the Voice, Treaty and Care for Country.
This project is presented in partnership with the Copyright Agency as part of the 2023 Copyright Agency Partnerships (CAP) Commission, supporting mid-career and established Australian visual artists to produce a major new commission. The first in the series was TextaQueen’s Bollywouldn’t at the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art’s Haymarket gallery.
James Nguyen, Open Glossary In collaboration with Tamsen Hopkinson, Budi Sudarto, Kate ten Buuren and Chris Xu 16 September – 19 November 2023
Curator: Shelley McSpedden
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art 111 Sturt Street, Southbank VIC 3006 Melbourne, Australia Opening hours: Tuesday – Friday 10am–5pm, Weekends 11am–5pm, Free entry acca.melbourne #accamelbourne #artstartsatacca
For further media information: Katrina Hall Publicity/Communications 0421153046
ACCA acknowledges the Wurundjeri Woiwurrung people as sovereign custodians of the land on which we work and welcome visitors, along with the neighbouring Boonwurrung, Bunurong, and wider Kulin Nation. We acknowledge their longstanding and continuing care for Country and we recognise First Peoples art and cultural practice has been thriving here for millennia. We extend our respect to ancestors and Elders past and present, and to all First Nations people.
Between Waves
The Yalingwa Exhibition
21 July – 3 September, 2023
A major new exhibition featuring ten ambitious commissions by emerging and established First Nations artists that embrace the intersection of material and immaterial realms of knowledge and knowing.
Between Waves is the third edition of the Yalingwa exhibition series that supports the development of outstanding contemporary First Peoples art and curatorial practice in Southeast Australia. Curated by Jessica Clark, the exhibition features new works by Maree Clarke, Dean Cross, Brad Darkson, Matthew Harris, James Howard, Hayley Millar Baker, Jazz Money, Cassie Sullivan, this mob, and Mandy Quadrio.
Through a range of multidisciplinary frameworks including video, installation, poetry, projection, sculpture and sound, each of the artists respond to concepts expressed by the word ‘Yalingwa’, a Woi Wurrung word which means light, time, vision, or shining a light on the times.
“The exhibition embraces the visible and invisible energy fieldsand flowsthat these ideas set in motion,” Jessica Clark said. “Each of the artists explore and experiment with the cyclic and sensory rhythms between light and sound, thinking and feeling, time and vision, with relation to the body, materiality, place and space, revealing an interconnected web of shapeshifting ecologies within, beyond and between what can be seen”.
“By engaging processes of remembering, rehabilitation, regeneration and reclamation, the artists’ weave conversations, experiences, and memories to map connections and disconnections with one another, the self, and the world, and highlight the importance of knowledge sharing, holding and deep listening and extends beyond the surface of things”, Jessica said.
Minister for Creative Industries Steve Dimopoulos said the Andrews Labor Government was proud to support the exhibition as part of its work to develop and promote First Peoples leadership and careers in the creative industries. “By supporting major exhibitions, curatorial positions and Fellowships, the Yalingwa initiative is helping to build the profile of First Peoples art and artists across the state. The free Between Waves exhibition will showcase paintings, poetry, sound art, video art, sculpture and much more. It will be another must-see exhibition that will open up our perspectives on what First Peoples art is and can be.”
ACCA Artistic Director/CEO Max Delany said ACCA was pleased to present the third Yalingwa exhibition at ACCA and to continue to build on the success of previous exhibitions. “Between Waves follows Hannah Presley’s exhibition A Lightness of Spirit is the Measure of Happiness presented at ACCA in 2018, and Stacie Piper’s WILAM BIIK, presented at TarraWarra in 2021. Both exhibitions had significant impact on a number of levels, and each played a vital role in supporting and elevating the practices of the commissioned artists, and in the creation of important new bodies of work that continue to circulate in galleries and exhibitions nationally – and internationally. We are very excited to continue to present this important series.”
Projects included in Between Waves:
Maree Clarke is a Yorta Yorta, Wamba Wamba, Mutti Mutti and Boonwurrung woman and established multidisciplinary contemporary artist and a pivotal figure in the reclamation of southeast Australian Aboriginal art practices. For Between Waves, Maree will present a new photographic series and projection work that navigates intersections and interconnections between art, culture and science in relation to place. Informed by recent practice-based research in collaboration with The University of Melbourne Histology Platform, this new body of work will explore the internal and external worlds of Phragmites australis (otherwise known as river reeds) – their patterns, structures, and the elemental activity occurring at a cellular level.
Matthew Harris was born in Wangaratta in 1991 and is of mixed European and Koorie descent. His practice often debases dominant hierarchies through socially critical and conceptual painting and sculpture. Matthew’s commission for Between Waves includes a dramatic suite of seven large-scale ochre paintings that reflect the size and scale of museum archival shelving. Harris formally references notions of minimalism and seriality to draw attention to the relentless and repetitious efforts of museums and collecting institutions to contain First Peoples material culture, and their history of gate-keeping that continues to deny Aboriginal ancestors return to Country.
Jazz Money is a Wiradjuri poet and artist whose creative and cultural practice encompasses installation, performance, film, and text-based works. For Between Waves Jazz will combine the twin strands of their practice, poetry and film, to present an immersive three-channel video work in the form of an evolving poem with infinite possibilities. Drawn from Money’s personal archive of collected and recorded images, this ambitious new commission recalibrates the many ‘lost lines’ or phrases from previous creative writing projects.
Cassie Sullivan is a palawa woman with a responsive, intimate, and experimental contemporary art practice that crosses disciplines of moving image, photography, writing, sound, installation, and printmaking. For Between Waves, shewill create a new series of large-scale monoprints that reflect the relations of textiles and Country. The works are presented on clouded Perspex reminiscent of the mist that amasses and disperses across Country in lutruwita (Tasmania) and will be generate a maze of ancestral imprinting for the viewer to navigate.
Brad Darkson is a Narungga man, and contemporary artist working across various media including carving, sound, sculpture, and painting, and multimedia installations that engage and experiment with a range of technologies. Brad’s new commission will recreate a three-dimensional model of a local fish trap using photogrammetry software and interactive animation. Informed by community consultation with the artists’ local Kaurna community members, Brad’s animated multi-projection installation dispels the ongoing hunter-gatherer myth in regards to First Nations art and cultural practice, specifically in relation to sophisticated traditional aquaculture technologies. In doing so, Brad foregrounds the work that continues within community to rehabilitate these important cultural sites.
Hayley Millar Baker is a Gunditjmara and Djabwurrung woman whose contemporary art practice centres painting, photography, collage and film in the development and abstraction of autobiographical narratives and themes relating to her identity and beyond. For Between Waves Hayley will present a major new screen-based video work that channels the in-between internal moments of restrained rage turned to grief rippling through the body and permeating all levels of self. Through size, scale, and silence, Hayley’s new commission simultaneously embraces notions of intimacy and intensity to convey the monumental focus, determination and power of women, their strength and resilience, with the film teetering between moments of action and recognition and the anticipation of reaction or external rupture.
James Howard is a Jaadwa song-man and composer who will create a long-form, generative sound sculpture that explores the intersecting realms of material and immaterial experience – drawing attention to the way that sound can elicit emotion, despite not having a physical form itself. Derived from a range of field recordings gathered in and around ACCA, James’ asynchronously layered sonic response will draw attention to the often-unnoticed sites or structures of the everyday that are hidden in plain sight. By amplifying the sounds of such spaces, James draws attention to the way that First Nations culture is deeply embedded in our landscape yet overlooked by so many people.
Mandy Quadrio is a Trawlwoolway and Laremairemener Tasmanian Aboriginal artist working with sculpture and installation. Her contemporary art practice encompasses sculpture, installation, photography, and mixed media, working to unfix racist categorisations, historic denials, and imposed invisibiliy. For Between Waves, Mandy is creating a multi-piece sculptural installation that responds to buried Australian colonial histories that have dominated her Tasmanian Aboriginal people since invasion and colonisation. Asserting her adaptability, strength, and long-time relationships to being, Mandy’s new commission will generate an immersive shadow-world that gently emerges, unfolds, and metamorphoses into the gallery.
Dean Cross was born and raised on Ngunnawal/Ngambri Country and a Worimi man through his paternal bloodline. He is a paratactical artist interested in collisions of materials, ideas and histories. His new commission for Between Waves reflects on life stages, shifts, and changes, and the waves of memory and meaning that influence our encounter with each other and the world. By resurfacing and recontextualizing these things, Cross creates a sculptural self-portrait that prompts contemplation on life, learning, love, and loss, and the ways in which we ascribe memory and meaning to objects, materials, and things. In doing so, Dean’s work asks; are we the sum of all our experiences? Or are we somehow something more?
In addition, Naarm-based Indigenous-arts collective this mob will produce an ambitious new digital commission for ACCA’s new Digital Wing. Taking the form of a digital zine that centres notions of interactivity and connection, this mob will highlight the breadth of their individual and collaborative contemporary art practices by featuring a range of new photography, poetic texts, recorded yarns, mini feature films, interviews, recipes, gardening tips, crossword puzzles. This new digital commission has produced by this mob’s core members: Yorta Yorta/Wurundjeri and Wiradjuri artist Moorina Bonini, Taungurung curator, artist and writer Kate ten Burren, Lardil and Yangkaal writer and curator Maya Hodge, Luritja artist, curator and writer Jenna Rain Warwick, and Gulumerridjin, Wardaman and KarraJarri Saltwater artist and graphic designer Jenna Lee, and will be accessible within the exhibition space, and through ACCA’s new Digital Wing.
About Jessica Clark
Jessica Clark is a proud palawa/pallawah woman and an independent curator living and working on Wurundjeri Country in Naarm. Currently Yalingwa Curator at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Jessica has been working in various independent and collaborative curatorial roles since 2017 and is a current PhD candidate at the Victorian College of the Arts, The University of Melbourne. Recently, Jessica worked as part of the curatorial team for the national touring exhibition Experimenta Life Forms: International Triennial of Media Art (2021–2023), and in 2019-2020 worked with Country Arts SA, within a First Nations-led creative team, to develop and curate the exhibition VIETNAM: ONE IN, ALL IN, in response to the cultural and political sensitives inherent in the honoring and acknowledgement of the service and lived experience of South Australian Aboriginal Vietnam Veterans.
Jessica is an alumni of: International Curators Program: Asia Pacific Triennial x TarraWarra Biennial (2021–2023), PIAD First Nations Colloquium, South Africa (2019), Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair Cultural Keepers Program (2017–2021), Wesfarmers Indigenous Arts Leadership Program at the National Gallery of Australia (2018), and the First Nations Curators Program at the Venice Biennale (2017). Previous independent curatorial projects include breathing space (2021) at Margaret Lawrence Gallery, In and of this place (2021) at Benalla Art Gallery [online], All of us (2018) at Blindside Gallery, and TELL: Contemporary Indigenous Photography (2017–2018) for the Ballarat International Foto Biennale.
About Yalingwa
Yalingwa is a Victorian Government Visual Arts Initiative developed in partnership between ACCA, Creative Victoria, and TarraWarra Museum of Art. The program is overseen by the Yalingwa Directions Circle, chaired by Aunty Joy Wandin AO, and includes First Peoples Elders and cultural, curatorial, and community leaders.
Announced in 2017, the initiative comprises new curatorial positions, major exhibitions alternating between ACCA and TarraWarra, and one year Artist Fellowships of $60,000 for senior South East Australian First Nations artists. The first exhibition in the series was A Lightness of Spirit is the Measure of Happiness curated by Hannah Presley at ACCA in 2018 and was followed by by WILAM BIIK 2021 at TarraWarra Museum of Art, curated by Stacie Piper.
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art 111 Sturt Street, Southbank VIC 3006 Melbourne, Australia Opening hours: Tuesday – Friday 10am–5pm, Weekends 11am–5pm, Free entry acca.melbourne
#accamelbourne #artstartsatacca
For further media information: Katrina Hall Publicity/Communications 0421153046
ACCA acknowledges the Wurundjeri Woiwurrung people as sovereign custodians of the land on which we work and welcome visitors, along with the neighbouring Boonwurrung, Bunurong, and wider Kulin Nations. We acknowledge their longstanding and continuing care for Country and we recognise First Peoples art and cultural practice has been thriving here for millennia. We extend our respect to ancestors and Elders past and present, and to all First Nations people.
Mithu Sen: mOTHERTONGUE
22 April – 18 June 2023
Continuing the annual ACCA International series of solo exhibitions by influential artists on the international stage, a new exhibition of work by leading New Delhi-based artist Mithu Sen will open on 22 April.
Mithu Sen (b. 1971) was born in West Bengal, and is one of India’s most renowned contemporary artists, with a prolific body of work recognised through awards, exhibitions, and performances at prestigious forums across the globe.
Mithu Sen explores myths of identity, and their intersection with the structures of our world, whether social, political, economic, or emotional. Sen works fundamentally as a performer, tangling with politics of language, disciplining of bodies, conventions of society, and polite impositions of the art world. Known for her provocative, alluring, and playful examination of these hierarchies, Sen is committed to perpetual unbecoming through performative interventions.
mOTHERTONGUE surveys the past fifteen years of Mithu Sen’s compelling art practice, alongside a series of major new commissions. Curated by ACCA Artistic Director/CEO Max Delany, the exhibition is presented as a mind-map, moving between interior states and visible surfaces, charting Sen’s language-based articulations and interventions. mOTHERTONGUE will explore the ways in which language is channelled into forms as diverse as drawing, media and performance to create complex artworks which resist definitional categories and elude institutional power structures related to race, gender, ethnicity, caste, and location.
Returning time and again to the idea of myth and initiating its unmaking, Mithu Sen’s work explores personal and public dependencies through radical hospitality by generating concurrent dialogues, gatherings, and contracts that test relationships between guests and hosts, participants and performers, and ultimately, an artist and her audiences — thereby complicating the notions of identity circulating around her as a woman artist located in the global south, navigating feminist and post-colonial discourses, framed within the art market.
Max Delany said ACCA was excited to present the work of such a distinguished and intriguing artist. “Mithu Sen’s practice occupies both intellectual and emotional registers – at once sensual, intimate and bodily, whilst equally conceptual, critical and subversive, extending from conceptual art to glitch poetry and performative media interventions, and from daring, libidinous drawings to graphic works which condemn the prevalence of communal violence and marginalisation in Indian and wider global society”.
Mithu Sen lives and works in New Delhi. She grew up in a Bengali family steeped in culture; her mother is a poet, and Mithu originally considered poetry her calling. Writing Bangla poetry from an early age, she published several books, before expanding her repertoire to the visual arts. Sen studied at Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan, where she gained her BFA and MFA in Painting from 1990 to 1997. She subsequently participated in the post-graduate program at the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland in 2001. Mithu credits her move to Delhi at the end of 1997 as a defining moment in her artistic journey, where she was a migrant in the nation’s capital, home to diverse cultures, populations, and a cosmopolitan and anglophone art world.
Mithu is now one of India’s most renowned contemporary artists. She was awarded the Skoda Prize in 2010 and the Prudential Eye Award for Contemporary Asian Art – Drawing in 2015. She has exhibited and performed in major international forums including Sharjah Biennale 15, UAE (2023); sonsbeek 20-24, Arnhem, the Netherlands (2021); APT9-9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2018); Kunstmuseum, Wolfsburg (2018); Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai (2018); Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi (2017); Guggenheim Museum, New York (2016); Unlimited: Art Basel (2016); Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan, USA (2014); Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2014); Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna (2014); Dhaka Art Summit (2014); Tate Modern Project Space, London (2013); Zacheta Museum, Warsaw (2011); and National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (2008), among other forums and institutions.
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art 111 Sturt Street, Southbank VIC 3006 Melbourne, Australia Opening hours: Tuesday – Friday 10am–5pm, Weekends 11am–5pm, Free entry acca.melbourne
#accamelbourne #artstartsatacca
For further media information: Katrina Hall Publicity/Communications 0421153046
ACCA acknowledges the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as sovereign custodians of the land on which we work and welcome visitors, who have cared for Country and culture over millennia, and continue to do so. We extend our respect to ancestors and Elders past and present, and to all First Nations people.
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.
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.
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.
Maree Clarke awarded $60,000 Yalingwa Fellowship
Mutti Mutti, Wamba Wamba, Yorta Yorta and Boonwurrung woman Maree Clarke has been awarded the prestigious Yalingwa Fellowship, a $60,000 award for a Senior First Nations artist currently living and working in Victoria who has made an outstanding contribution to creative practice in the First Peoples arts community and are at a critical moment in their career.
Announced today by Minister for Creative Industries Steve Dimopoulos, the Fellowship is part of the Yalingwa program, a collaboration between Creative Victoria, ACCA and TarraWarra Museum of Art designed to support the development of outstanding contemporary Indigenous art and curatorial practice.
Following an open call for submissions, Maree was awarded the Fellowship by the Yalingwa Directions Circle, a panel that includes members of the Indigenous arts and wider community, as well as representatives from Creative Victoria, ACCA and TarraWarra Museum of Art.
In making their decision, the Directions Circle noted Maree’s exemplary contribution to arts, culture and Indigenous curatorial practice in the South East particularly, as well as her reclamation and innovation of cultural practice, and the role she has played as a teacher, curator and mentor.
“Our unanimous decision to award Maree this Fellowship recognizes not only her stellar career as a groundbreaking artist working nationally and internationally, but also the inspirational role she has played in her 35-year career for emerging artists and curators, and her sustained impact on community through mentoring and collaboration,” the panel noted.
Minister for Creative Industries Steve Dimopoulos said: “The Yalingwa initiative is one of the ways we are working to develop and promote First Peoples leadership in the creative industries, and back the careers of First Peoples artists and arts workers.
“Maree Clarke is one of our most respected and important artists and a well-deserved recipient of this Fellowship. I hope this opportunity enables her to reach even greater heights and introduces her work to a wider audience.”
Maree is the third recipient of the Yalingwa Fellowship. The inaugural prize went to Melbourne-based artist Destiny Deacon from the Kuku, East Cape region and Torres Strait, and the second to Kokatha and Nukunu woman Yhonnie Scarce.
Maree Clarke said: “I am honoured to accept this award, and to have my name included alongside respected former Fellowship recipients Yhonnie Scarce and Destiny Deacon. This is an incredible gift, which will allow me to focus on long term projects and conduct further research in the UK that will inform my new body of work. I would like to thank the Minister Dimopoulos, Creative Victoria, ACCA and TarraWarra for creating this visionary program. I am passionate about arts and culture in the Southeast, and I want to recognise how important the investment of the Yalingwa arts initiative is in nurturing, promoting and making visible arts and culture here in Victoria.”
Based in Naarm/Melbourne, Maree grew up in Northwest Victoria, and is a pivotal figure in the reclamation of southeast Australian First People’s art practices, revitalising the creation of traditional possum skin cloaks, kangaroo teeth and river reed necklaces. In 2021 she was the subject of a major survey exhibition Maree Clarke – Ancestral Memories at the National Gallery of Victoria and other recent exhibitions include Tarnanthi, Art Gallery of South Australia (2021), and the National at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2021).
Established in 2017, Yalingwa is a multi-year program which, in addition to the Fellowships, also includes curatorial positions for First People’s curators to work with host organisations in the development of a major exhibition.
The current Yalingwa Curator, Palawa woman Jessica Clark, will deliver the third Yaligwa exhibition at ACCA in July. Titled Between Waves, the exhibition will also include a new work by Maree Clarke, and new commissions by artists Dean Cross, Brad Darkson, Matthew Harris, James Howard, Hayley Millar Baker, Jazz Money, Cassie Sullivan and Mandy Quadrio that explore and experiment with the visible and invisible energy fields and flows of light, time, and vision.
ACCA launches new Digital Wing
A new commission by New York based artists Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne and the Data Relations digital publication will launch ACCA’s new Digital Wing on 30 January 2023.
ACCA’s current exhibitionData Relations explores our rapidly expanding data economy, surveillance technologies and the ascendance of Artificial Intelligence. Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne’s project, titled Offset, is a new online platform that suggests a variety of social exchanges and political actions individuals can undertake to reduce emissions and earn carbon credits. The project also invites suggestions from visitors for the artists to explore and bring to life over the course of the year.
According to Brain and Lavigne, the existing carbon offset markets act to maintain a status quo rather than address root causes of the climate catastrophe. “For ACCA’s digital commission, we will launch the first stage of Offset: Version 0.1 of an alternative carbon offset market. In this market, historic direct political actions will be quantified and sold as carbon offsets. How might political work that slows or prevents combustion be recognised in carbon markets just like other biophysical efforts to reduce emissions?,” they ask.
Offset is the first work to be included in ACCA’s new Digital Wing, a flexible, iterative constellation of digital initiatives which is part of ACCA’s ongoing strategy to create works beyond the gallery walls. The Digital Wing will include artistic commissions, creative development, knowledge-sharing and publishing.
ACCA Artistic Director/CEO Max Delany said the Digital Wing is a future-focused online destination for new and experimental contemporary art practices. “We are extremely grateful to the Ian Potter Foundation for supporting our new Digital Wing, which expands ACCA’s reach beyond the gallery. ACCA’s artistic program will be expanded through digital commissions and projects that will be launched through the Digital Wing, so in time, it will be populated by new art, as well as writing, publications and research and a site for experimentation, collaboration, new partnerships and communities,” Max said.
The launch of the Digital Wing will also include the release of the Data Relations digital publication, which features texts by leading writers and academics in the field, addressing the art and ideas of artists included in the Data Relations exhibition.
Guest Curator Miriam Kelly’s curatorial essay considers the research and methodology undertaken in the development of Data Relations. Atlanta-based writer Amy Hale takes readers through the shady Californian Ideology of Silicon Valley as explored in Zach Blas’Metric mysticism. London-based PHD researcher Yung Au tackles data’s relationship to the censorship, erasure and suppression of public information in Winnie Soon’sUnerasable characters series 2020-2022. California-based academic Mashinka Firunts Hakopian explores themes of intimacy, control and autonomy in Lauren Lee McCarthy’s new installation and video work Surrogate 2022.
Exhibiting artists Machine Listening (Sean Dockray, James Parker and Joel Stern) present the full transcript of their multi-channel sound installation, After words 2022, featured in the exhibition; and Mimi Ọnụọha has collaborated on an experimental performance script with New York-based Postdoctoral Fellow Tiara Roxanne. Installation images of the exhibition and moving-image excerpts from works are accompanied by ekphrastic alt texts written by Loqui Paatsch.
The Data Relations digital publication is generously supported by the Ian Potter Foundation, edited by Elyse Goldfinch, ACCA’s Curator, Public Programs and Publications, and designed by Lloyd Mst with website development by Jake Bonin. It is available via the ACCA website from 30 January. Expressions of Interest are currently invited for participation in the Data Relations Summer School. Staged over four days from 18 February, this is a free public program of experimental talks, workshops, performances, investigations and site-visits focused on understanding and intervening in the social consequences of a data driven society. Data Relations Summer School is curated by ACCA in collaboration with RMIT Research Fellow Joel Stern. Further information and EOI is available here.
Data Relations: until 19 March 2023, ACCA Galleries and Digital Wing
Currently showing at ACCA, Data Relationsbrings 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.
Artists: Zach Blas, Tega Brain & Sam Lavigne, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Machine Listening (Sean Dockray, James Parker and Joel Stern), Mimi Onuoha, Winnie Soon; plus Data Relations Summer School Guest Curator Miriam Kelly, Coordinating Curator Shelley McSpedden.
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art 111 Sturt Street, Southbank VIC 3006 Melbourne, Australia Opening hours: Tuesday – Friday 10am–5pm, Weekends 11am–5pm Entry free acca.melbourne
#accamelbourne #artstartsatacca
For further media information: Katrina Hall Publicity/Communications 0421153046 kathall@ozemail.com.au
ACCA acknowledges the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as sovereign custodians of the land on which we work and welcome visitors, who have cared foACCA acknowledges the Wurundjeri people as sovereign custodians of the land on which we work and welcome visitors, along with the neighbouring Boonwurrung and Bunurong people, and wider Kulin Nations. We acknowledge their longstanding and continuing care for Country and culture, and we extend our respect to ancestors and Elders past and present, and to all First Nations people.
Data Relations
Featuring artists: Zach Blas, Tega Brain & Sam Lavigne, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Machine Listening (Sean Dockray, James Parker and Joel Stern), Mimi Onuoha, Winnie Soon; plus Data Relations Summer School Guest Curator Miriam Kelly, Coordinating Curator Shelley McSpedden
Opening on 10 December, this major new exhibition and program explores our rapidly expanding data economy, data-obsessed society, and the extremes of artificial intelligence.
Data Relations features major new commissions and site-specific installations from six Australian and international artists and collectives across ACCA’s four galleries.
In addition, a new online project by New York/Sydney based artists Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne will launch ACCA’s new Digital Wing, a new platform and constellation of digital initiatives including artistic commissions, creative development, knowledge-sharing and publishing.
The exhibition will also be accompanied by ACCA’s a dedicated digital publication and a week-long Data Relations Summer School featuring performances, talks and workshops by participating artists who will be joined by a wider cohort of artists, academics, curators and activists, encouraging a wider appreciation of what data means and how it can be explored within contemporary art practice.
Exhibition curator Miriam Kelly says: “Artists included in Data Relations reflect on the effects of the contemporary data economy and techno-mediated relationships in ways that are profound, humorous, poetic and confronting. The impacts of what has been described as the ‘data revolution’ – that began with the internet and accelerated with the opportunities to commercialise data and store vast amounts of ‘big data’ – cannot be understated within our economic, political, environmental, social and cultural contexts. Data now permeates contemporary life”.
“The title, Data Relations, is drawn from analyses of the data economy as having generated new forms of social interaction, while perpetuating existing discrimination, bias, forms of social oppression and class division. I believe that some of the most interesting and vital art of our times is being made with and about data, and particularly the issue of data relations,” she said.
Data Relations includes:
Two works by LA-based artist Lauren Lee McCarthy, LAUREN 2017- and SURROGATE 2022, are brought together into a newly commissioned installation and performance that reflects on the physical intimacy of data, surveillance and AI as it relates to the home, body and kin.
Hong Kong born, artist-researcher Winnie Soon’s Unerasable characters I-III 2020-22 – a series based on a data-set of censored social media posts, which examines the wider and seemingly endless consequences of control that is implemented through politics, technological platforms and social infrastructure.
A new multi-channel sound installation, After Words 2022, that explores the datafication and computation of language and speech across a series of semi-fictional tales and speculative scenes, by Machine Listening (Sean Dockray, James Parker and Joel Stern).
An installation by New York artist Mimi Onuoha centred around her short film These networks in our skin 2021, depicting four women who work to rewire the cables that carry the data that powers the world, and what it might mean to recreate the internet. Onuoha has collaborated with Dinzi Amobi, a local fashion designer and founder of Ulo Australia, a contemporary African lifestyle brand, on a site-specific iteration of the installation for ACCA.
Metric mysticism 2018/22 by Zach Blas, a multi-channel installation and lecture-performance that gazes into the crystal balls of Silicon Valley to chart the transmutation of big data into a magical substance that predicts – and polices – the future.
Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne’s Synthetic messenger 2021 is a multi-channel video tracing the zoom performance of a botnet as it attempts to artificially inflate the value of climate change news and reporting by clicking on ads. The project examines the relationship between climate change and the internet’s data-hungry business model, that subsequently produces its capacity for splintering public opinion and an algorithmic myopia.
In addition, a major new commission by Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne, Offset, will launch ACCA’s Digital Wing in January 2023. Offset will see the artists establish an alternative carbon offset market platform focusing on social exchanges and political actions with the aim of contributing to a program of radical change. The project will playfully propose a variety of actions that individuals can undertake to reduce emissions and earn carbon credits, as well as produce an archive of offsets purchased from leading offset organisations.
Data Relations: 10 December 2022 to 19 March 2023, ACCA Galleries and Digital Wing.
Artists: Zach Blas, Tega Brain & Sam Lavigne, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Machine Listening (Sean Dockray, James Parker and Joel Stern), Mimi Onuoha, Winnie Soon; plus Data Relations Summer School Guest Curator Miriam Kelly, Coordinating Curator Shelley McSpedden
About Data Relations Summer School:
Staged over one week in February 2023, Data Relations Summer School is a co-presented program of experimental talks, workshops, performances, investigations and site-visits focused on understanding and intervening in the social consequences of a data driven society. As an exhibition of contemporary art that critically engages with political concerns about data, as well as presenting works that visualise real-world data-sets, Data Relations Summer School builds literacy in a rich recent history of data in art and cultural practice.
About ACCA’s Digital Wing:
A flexible, iterative constellation of digital initiatives, ACCA’s new Digital Wing will include artistic commissions, creative development, knowledge-sharing and publishing, and is aligned with ACCA’s ongoing strategy of creating works beyond the gallery walls. Supported by the Ian Potter Foundation, ACCA’s Digital Wing fosters innovation in art form beyond the gallery, supporting new communities of practice, and a future-focused network of contemporary art practices through sites of experimentation and development, partnership and collaboration. Further details to come.
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art 111 Sturt Street, Southbank VIC 3006 Melbourne, Australia Opening hours: Tuesday – Friday 10am–5pm, Weekends 11am–5pm Entry free acca.melbourne
#accamelbourne #artstartsatacca
For further media information: Katrina Hall Publicity/Communications 0421153046 kathall@ozemail.com.au
ACCA acknowledges the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as sovereign custodians of the land on which we work and welcome visitors, who have cared for Country and culture over millennia, and continue to do so. We extend our respect to ancestors and Elders past and present, and to all First Nations people.
Paul Yore: WORD MADE FLESH
Paul Yore: WORD MADE FLESH is an extensive survey exhibition encompassing the full scope of the artist’s work, and includes a major new room-scaled installation developed especially for the exhibition.
Continuing ACCA’s Australian solo series which highlights the work of significant and influential contemporary Australian artists, WORD MADE FLESH is constructed maximally as a gesamtkunstwerk, presenting work from the past fifteen years, including appliquéd quilts and needlework, banners and pendants, collage and assemblage, and large-scale mixed media installations.
Paul Yore is one of Australia’s most thought-provoking and consequential multidisciplinary artists. Born in Naarm/Melbourne in 1987, he lives and works on Gunaikurnai Country in Gippsland, Victoria, and completed his studies in painting, archaeology and anthropology at Monash University in 2010. Yore’s work engages with the histories of religious art and ritual, queer identity, pop-culture and neo-liberal capitalism, recasting a vast array of found images, materials and texts into sexually and politically loaded tableaux and assemblages which celebrate hybrid and fluid identities, unstable and contradictory meanings, and the glowing horizon of queer worldmaking.
Paul Yore: WORD MADE FLESH is structured around five purpose-designed spaces presenting specific bodies of work and discursive contexts: Signs; Embodiment; Manifesto; The Horizon; and Word Made Flesh. This itinerary articulates two key trajectories in the artist’s work: the first charting the development of Yore’s textile practice, beginning with small, embroidered works through to large-scale appliquéd quilts, which variously draw on the traditions of classical Greek art, decorative Flemish and French tapestries, trashy pop-culture, gay porn, cartoons, psychedelia, narrative and history painting, as well as the decorative semantic excesses of rococo style.
The second trajectory is represented in a new kaleidoscopic, architecturally-scaled installation, anarchically composed of improvised makeshift structures, mixed media sculpture and found objects, collage and assemblage, painting, video, sound and light. This immersive installation imagines a queer alternative reality, erected from the wasteland of the Anthropocene, performatively implicating itself into the debased spectacle of hyper-capitalist society.
Yore has exhibited widely since the early 2000s, with notable individual exhibitions including SEEING IS BELIEVING BUT FEELING IS THE TRUTH, Rising, Golden Square, Melbourne, 2022; Let Them Eat Cake, Neon Parc, Melbourne, 2021; Pleasures Against Nature, RMIT Project Space and Spare Room, Melbourne, 2020; Let the World Burn, Textile Art Museum Australia, Ararat, 2019; It’s All Wrong but It’s Alright, Dark Mofo, Black Temple Gallery, Hobart, 2019; Paul Yore, NADA, Miami Beach, Florida, 2016; Boys Gone Wild, Studio 12, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, 2012; The Big Rainbow Funhouse of Cosmic Brutality Part 2, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 2009.
Recent group exhibitions include Queer: Stories from the NGV Collection, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2022; SOFT_WARE: Textiles after Technology, Kunsthaus Erfurt, Germany, 2020; Exhibition Colectiva, Galeria Casa Colon, Yucatan, Mexico, 2020; Misfit: Collage and Queer Practice, National Art School, Sydney, 2020; 16th International Triennal of Tapestry: Breaching Borders, Centralne Muzeum Włókiennictwa, Łódź, Poland, 2019; London Summer Intensive, Camden Arts Centre, London, UK, 2019; RIJSWIJK TEXTILE BIENNIAL, Rijswijk Museum, Rijswijk, Netherlands, 2019; National Anthem, Buxton Contemporary, Melbourne, 2019; and Craftivism. Dissident Objects and Subversive Forms, Shepparton Art Museum, 2019.
Yore has been a recipient of numerous awards and residencies including an Australia Council Arts Project Grant, 2022; Marten Bequest Travelling Scholarship, 2015–16; Artspace Studio Residency, Sydney, 2014; Geumcheon Residency, Seoul, 2013; Gertrude Contemporary Studio Residency, 2012–11; and the Alliance Française Prize, 2009.
To accompany the exhibition, a major monographic publication is forthcoming, published in partnership with Art Ink, which includes an extensive interview with the artist and essays and texts by leading Australian and international artists, scholars and commentators.
Paul Yore: WORD MADE FLESH
Curator: Max Delany, in collaboration with Paul Yore and Devon Ackermann
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art 111 Sturt Street, Southbank VIC 3006 Melbourne, Australia Opening hours: Tuesday – Friday 10am–5pm, Weekends 11am–5pm Entry free acca.melbourne #accamelbourne #artstartsatacca
For further media information:
Katrina Hall
Publicity/Communications
0421153046 kathall@ozemail.com.au
ACCA acknowledges the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as sovereign custodians of the land on which we work and welcome visitors, who have cared for Country and culture over millennia, and continue to do so. We extend our respect to ancestors and Elders past and present, and to all First Nations people.
Announcing James Nguyen is the second recipient of the $80,000 Copyright Agency Partnerships Commission, in collaboration with ACCA
James Nguyen. Photograph: Damian Gibney
The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) and the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund are pleased to announce Melbourne artist James Nguyen is the second recipient of the CAP (Copyright Agency Partnerships) Commission.
The commission is part of a three-year series run by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund with leading Australian arts institutions 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Sydney), Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (Melbourne) and the Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane) to support mid-career and established visual artists with an $80,000 artistic commission and solo exhibition opportunity. 50 artists applied for this year’s commission, which was assessed by a panel of representatives from the partner institutions and the Copyright Agency.
Born in Vietnam and based in Narrm/Melbourne, James Nguyen’s interdisciplinary practice moves between live and online performance, video, drawing and installation. He is interested in personal history and migrant absurdities, often working with his family and friends to examine the politics of art, self-representation, displacement and diaspora.
For this project, which will encompass a major exhibition across all four ACCA galleries opening in September 2023, Nguyen plans to create Open Glossary, a multi-lingual installation that opens up the language and terminologies that permeate contemporary art and society more widely. Nguyen will collaborate with academics, community members and social enterprises to create a series of multilingual glossaries and language toolkits to bring non-English and plain-English speaking communities into artworld conversations.
‘The artworld has the privilege of literacy and access to text’, Nguyen says. ‘It is where artists and our communities push for social change, contesting important ideas and concepts. But what of the many communities that do not necessarily speak, or feel they can engage with the complex terminologies of contemporary art?’
Max Delany, ACCA Artistic Director & CEO said: ‘James Nguyen left a career as a pharmacist to study art full time, and is today one of Australia’s most compelling artists – injecting a sense of humour and play into his work whilst interrogating issues around histories of colonisation, migration and cultural identity. We are especially pleased to be working with James towards the realisation of this ambitious project and exhibition, which will continue ACCA’s annual Contemporary Australian Solo exhibition series.’
‘We are extremely grateful to the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund for this collaboration, and for their visionary support of contemporary Australian artists to make substantial new, ground-breaking works’, Max said.
Copyright Agency CEO Josephine Johnston says ‘This is such a timely and important commission for James, and we are delighted that our partnership with ACCA through CAP provides the financial support for James to work uninhibited, as well as receiving the unique expertise from ACCA to deliver an outstanding exhibition.’
‘What a total privilege to work with ACCA, Copyright Agency and their audiences,’ James says. ‘Leading up to this project, I did a PhD on language brokering and translation at the UNSW Art & Design under the guidance of Professor Jennifer Biddle and Dr Veronica Tello. My practice has been shaped by the many conversations and endless patience of all my teachers, parents, aunties, uncles, lovers, friends and strangers.’
James Nguyen has been the recipient of several prizes and awards, including the Clitheroe Foundation Scholarship, the Nillumbik Art Prize for Contemporary Art, and the Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship. His work has been included in group exhibitions across Australia, including The National in 2019. Recent solo exhibitions include Re:Tuning, (with Victoria Pham and collaborators, forthcoming at the Sydney Opera House), 2022, Re.Sounding, (with Victoria Pham and collaborators), Samstag Museum, Adelaide, 2021, Homesickness, (with Nguyen Thi Kim Nhung) a commission by the Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 2018; and BuffaloDeer, (with Nguyen Ngoc Cu) Westspace, Melbourne 2016.
In 2021 Texta Queen was announced as the first recipient of the Copyright Agency Partnerships commission and their work will be exhibited by 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in late 2022. The third Copyright Agency Partnership will be offered in 2023 with the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane.
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art 111 Sturt Street, Southbank VIC 3006 Melbourne, Australia Opening hours: Tuesday – Friday 10am–5pm, Weekends 11am–5pm Entry free acca.melbourne
#accamelbourne #artstartsatacca
For further media information: Katrina Hall Publicity/Communications 0421153046 kathall@ozemail.com.au
ACCA acknowledges the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as sovereign custodians of the land on which we work and welcome visitors, who have cared for Country and culture over millennia, and continue to do so. We extend our respect to ancestors and Elders past and present, and to all First Nations people.
ACCA announces Jessica Clark as third Yalingwa Curator and welcomes Jessica to the ACCA team
Jessica Clark. Photograph: Keelan O’Hehir
This week the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) welcomed Jessica Clark to the role of Yalingwa Curator. An independent curator and PhD candidate at the Victorian College of the Arts, Jessica will be responsible for conceiving and realising the 2023 Yalingwa exhibition at ACCA, which is the third in a series of First Nations exhibitions arranged as part of the Yalingwa visual arts initiative.
ACCA Artistic Director/CEO Max Delany said Jessica’s achievements as an emerging curator and academic, and her interests in art history, education and exploring inter-cultural relationships between people, place and materials will bring a rich perspective to the role.
“Conversation is central to Jessica’s curatorial practice, who has worked extensively engaging First People’s artistic, cultural practices and community practices. Jessica is an active participant in local and international cultural and curatorial exchange programs, with a curatorial methodology focused on consultation, care and respect”.
“We are excited to have Jessica join the curatorial team at ACCA and to build on the highly acclaimed Yalingwa exhibition series, which includes A Lightness of Spirit is the Measure of Happiness, curated by Hannah Presley at ACCA in 2018, and Stacie Piper’s 2021 TarraWarra exhibition, Wilam Biik,” Max said.
Jessica is a proud Tasmanian Aboriginal woman. She was born in nipaluna, lutruwita (Hobart, Tasmania) and currently lives and works on Wurundjeri Country in Naarm (Melbourne). Her independent practice is focused on fostering critical curatorial engagement with the presentation of Aboriginal art, with an interest in challenging preconceived ideas/ideals about what Aboriginal art is and can be.
Jessica Clark has said of her appointment: “It’s a great privilege to take up the role of Yalingwa Curator at ACCA. I feel honoured to have this opportunity to work in dialogue with the ground-breaking exhibitions that have been previously curated by Hannah Presley and Stacie Piper in this role. I am excited at the opportunity to develop this third iteration of the Yalingwa visual arts initiative and to join the fabulous ACCA team and be guided by their expertise. This will be my first ongoing curatorial appointment in an institution-based context, and I am excited at the new opportunities and platform the exhibition will offer contemporary Aboriginal artists. I look forward to meeting with the Yalingwa Directions Circle, to start the conversations, and connect with artists; their current ideas, interests and contemporary art practices.”
As an independent curator Jessica Clark has developed an impressive series of exhibitions and projects including TELL: Contemporary Indigenous Photography (2017–218) for the Ballarat International Foto Biennale, the first exhibition in the biennale’s history dedicated to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art. As curator for the exhibition VIETNAM: ONE IN, ALL IN (2019–2020), Jessica worked with an entirely First Nations led creative team to develop an interview-based exhibition model in response to the cultural and political sensitives inherent in the honouring and acknowledgement of the service and lived experience of South Australian Aboriginal Vietnam Veterans.
Recent exhibition projects include breathing space (2021) and one (&) another (2020) at Margaret Lawrence Gallery, In and of this place (2021) at Benalla Art Gallery [online], and as part of the team for the national touring exhibition Experimenta Life Forms: International Triennial of Media Art (2021–2023). Jessica is a current participant in the International Curators Program: Asia Pacific Triennial x TarraWarra Biennial (2021–2023), and alumni of: PIAD First Nations Colloquium, South Africa (2019), Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair Cultural Keepers Program (2017–2021), Wesfarmers Indigenous Arts Leadership Program at the National Gallery of Australia (2018), Signature Works: Innovation Lab (2018), and the First Nations Curators Program at the Venice Biennale (2017).
About the Yalingwa Initiative
Yalingwa is a visual arts initiative of the Victorian Government, developed in partnership with ACCA and Tarrawarra Museum of Art, that aims to support the development of outstanding contemporary First Peoples’ art and curatorial practice, with a primary focus on southeast Australian Aboriginal artists within a national context.
The Yalingwa project has been designed to provide a platform for First Peoples artists and curators to develop their work at a senior professional level within a leading and high-profile public gallery and museum context, as well as offering a series of First Peoples Artist Fellowships.
The Yalingwa series encompasses three discrete but related program elements as follows:
Curatorial positions for First Peoples curators
A major exhibition focussing on commissions by contemporary First Peoples artists
Artist Fellowships of $60,000 for senior South East Australian First Nations artists who have made an important contribution to the development of Indigenous cultural expression.
The Yalingwa Initiative was inaugurated at ACCA in 2017–2019, with the second cycle following at TarraWarra from 2020–2021. This third edition of the series will be held at ACCA over 2022–2024, with the Yalingwa Curator to be appointed in late 2021, who will be lead the research and development of the exhibition scheduled at ACCA in 2023, among other roles. The program is overseen by the Yalingwa Directions Circle, chaired by Aunty Joy Murphy Wandin AO, that includes First Nations Elders and cultural, curatorial and community leaders.
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art 111 Sturt Street, Southbank VIC 3006 Melbourne, Australia Opening hours: Tuesday – Friday 10am–5pm, Weekends 11am–5pm Entry free acca.melbourne
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