ACCA Exhibition Program for 2022

8 February 2022

The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) is pleased to share the Exhibition Program for 2022, which includes:

The third edition of the Macfarlane Commissions, featuring major new works by eight Australian artists, including Nadia Hernández, Lucina Lane, Gian Manik, Betty Muffler, Jahnne Pasco-White, Jason Phu, JD Reforma and Esther Stewart.
Frances Barrett’s much anticipated exhibition Meatus, postponed from 2020 due to COVID related lockdowns and part of the revered Suspended Moment: Katthy Cavaliere Fellowship, will open at ACCA in April.
The September launch of an extensive survey exhibition of works by Paul Yore in ACCA’s annual Influential Australian Artists series, and a large-scale exploration of contemporary data-driven society will be the focus of the 2022-23 Summer Big Picture exhibition.

Max Delany, ACCA Artistic Director said that, after two years of COVID related interruptions, it was with hope and focused enthusiasm that the ACCA team prepares to roll out the 2022 exhibition program. “We look forward to continuing to welcome visitors back into the gallery, and to a series of offsite and special programs that complement the creative program.”

Exhibition details follow below with more detailed Press Releases to follow.

WHO’S AFRAID OF PUBLIC SPACE?
4 December 2021–20 March 2022

Who’s Afraid of Public Space? is a multifaceted project of exhibitions and programs exploring the role of public culture, the contested nature of public space, and the character and composition of public life. The exhibition continues ACCA’s Big Picture series, which explores contemporary art’s relation to wider social, cultural and political contexts.

Developed by ACCA’s curatorial team Max Delany, Miriam Kelly and Annika Kristensen, with the support of a curatorial advisory group, Who’s Afraid of Public Space? is organised according to a collaborative, dispersed, distributed structure, encouraging a polyphonic and polycentric understanding of our increasingly complex public realm. Taking place at ACCA over the summer months of 2021–22, the project also extends across Melbourne with a series of satellite exhibitions in collaboration with cultural partners, as well as installations, events and projects in the public realm. For further information and a full list of artists and contributors, visit https://acca.melbourne/whos-afraid-of-public-space/

FRANCES BARRETT: MEATUS
Presented as part of Suspended Moment: The Katthy Cavaliere Fellowship
2 April–19 June 2022
Commissioning curator: Annika Kristensen

Drawing on her background in performance, curating and collaborative models of making, Frances Barrett has expanded the solo commissioning focus of the Katthy Cavaliere Fellowship to present new sonic compositions and live performances by multiple artists. Alongside a major sound installation by Barrett, developed in collaboration with Hayley Forward and Brian Fuata, Barrett has curated specially commissioned sound compositions by artists Nina Buchanan, Del Lumanta and Sione Teumohenga, as well as a series of incursions by Debris Facility Ltd.

A ‘meatus’ is an opening or passage leading to the interior of the body. Encompassing a range of sensations and functions, the plurality of meatus becomes a way for Barrett to explore the practice of listening that decentres the ear to activate the entire body, attuned to both conscious responses and unconscious intensities. Barrett has conceived of ACCA’s four galleries as an immersive environment of sound and light – a performative staging of the body, which bleeds and leaks, and into which the audience may enter to consider the physical, sensual and critical experience of listening.

THE 2022 MACFARLANE COMMISSIONS
2 July–4 September 2022
Artists: Nadia Hernández, Lucina Lane, Gian Manik, Betty Muffler, Jahnne Pasco-White, Jason Phu, JD Reforma, Esther Stewart
Curators: Max Delany and Annika Kristensen

ACCA is pleased to present the third edition of The Macfarlane Commissions in 2022, continuing a multi-year partnership and biennial series of exhibitions designed to support the production and presentation of ambitious new projects by significant emerging and mid-career artists.

The 2022 edition of The Macfarlane Commissions will focus upon recent developments in contemporary painting, with a focus upon expanded painting practices in which the relations between art and life are intensified. The exhibition brings together new works by eight Australian artists, whose work collectively derives from a studio-based practice informed by the language of painting, with shared interests in the intersection and circulation between painting and other materials, forms and disciplines, including architecture, literature, performance, ecology, music and other relational activities.

PAUL YORE: WORD MADE FLESH
24 September–20 November 2022
Curator: Max Delany

A prominent queer artist whose iconoclastic works engage with the histories of ritual, queer identity, popular culture, nationalism and neo-liberalism, Paul Yore was born in Melbourne in 1987, completed his studies in painting, archaeology and anthropology at Monash University in 2010, and lives and works in Gippsland, Victoria. Yore’s garish yet playful works recast a vast array of found materials, images and texts into sexually and politically loaded tableaux, suggesting hybridity, contradictory meanings, or an overturning of stable categories altogether.

Paul Yore: Word Made Flesh will encompass the full scope of Yore’s work –appliquéd quilts and needlework, banners, painting, collage and assemblage – drawing on the vernacular of visionary and psychedelic art, Greco-Roman forms, medieval tapestries, the decorative excesses of rococo style and trash culture. The exhibition will be constructed as a gesamtkunstwerk, with an ambitious new immersive installation presented alongside selected works from the past fifteen years, accompanied by a major new monographic publication.

BIG DATA
10 December 2022–19 March 2023
Curator: Miriam Kelly

Continuing ACCA’s ongoing Big Picture and ACCA Beyond Walls initiatives Big Data brings together artist-led projects that tackle key issues and challenges of our contemporary data-driven society. In Big Data, new commissions, existing works, performances and workshops address forms of activism against algorithmic violence, machine learning bias, and surveillance capitalism, as well as the role of data and technology in the climate crisis.

Australian Centre for Contemporary Art

111 Sturt Street, Southbank VIC 3006
Melbourne, Australia
Opening hours: Tuesday – Friday 10am–5pm, Weekends 11am–5pm Entry free
#accamelbourne #artstartsatacca

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.

For further media information:
Katrina Hall
Publicity/Communications
0421153046 | kathall@ozemail.com.au