NEW16

5 March – 8 May 2016
NEW16

ACCA’s influential commissions exhibition returns in 2016, with ten promising Australian artists invited to make eight big new works in this popular annual series.  

The NEW series is one of Australia’s only commissions exhibitions, offering artists the rare opportunity to make and show a new work with the support of a guest curator and the ACCA installation team.

Now in its fourteenth year, around 100 artists have made ambitious new works for NEW since it was first established in 2003, in what is widely considered a defining moment in invited artists careers.  

This year, ten artists from across Australia will deliver new projects in time for the March opening, becoming the 2016 fresh crop of ‘artists-to-watch’.  

NEW 16 curator Annika Kristensen says the artists in NEW16, outlined below, have a shared interest in “negotiating various tensions and thresholds: including relations between themselves and others, the artwork and the audience, private and public space, and productive futility".

THE NEW16 ARTISTS ARE:

Catherine or Kate
Brisbane based double act comprising Catherine Sagin and Kate Woodcroft, who create artworks around the theme of winning and losing, playing out the division of labour in an artistic practice that employs video, performance, photography and sculpture.

Jacobus Capone  
A Perth-based emerging artist working within durational performance, installation, painting and video, delivering works that have an emotional and humanistic sensitivity, centering around the desire to integrate all action into the wholeness of one lived experience.

Julian Day
Composter, artist, writer and broadcaster, Day is Sydney based, and makes site-specific sound works exploring the acoustic and architectural properties of spaces such as railway sheds, marketplaces, laneways, parks and galleries.

Gabriella Hirst
Sydney born, Berlin based, Hirst is a cross-disiplinary artist whose works responds to the fragility of memory and personal narrative.  

Tanya Lee
Perth based, Tanya draws on everyday tasks to create humorous and often futile narratives that subvert rules, protocols and the politics of suburbia.  

Mason Kimber
Sydney based, Mason uses painting, fresco and wall-based installation to address the relationship between architectural memory and painterly abstraction.  

Liam O’Brien
Brisbane based, Liam’s particular interest is in the construction of individuality and the ambiguities of personal freedom, and uses personal experience, intuition and theoretical texts to produce video and performance works that explore the human condition under advanced capitalism.

Anna Varendorff with Haima Marriott
Melbourne based, Anna works in research covers jewellery, sculpture and interactive installation to make works that offer interaction and undirected outcomes through play and experiment.

Annika Kristensen is a curator at ACCA and was previously the Exhibition and Project Coordinator for the 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014) and the inaugural Nick Waterlow OAM Curatorial Fellow for the 18th Biennale of Sydney (2012).  Annika has also held positions at Frieze Art Fair, Artangel, and Film and Video Umbrella, London.  

NEW16 runs from March 5 to 8 May, 2016.

Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 111 Sturt Street, Southbank.
Gallery hours:  Tuesday-Friday 10am–5pm.  Weekends 12am-5pm.  Mondays by appointment.  Tel: 03 9697 9999.  Admission: Free.  www.accaonline.org.au

ACCA is supported by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments.

The exhibition is proudly supported by Alpha60.

MEDIA INFORMATION:  Katrina Hall on 0421 153 046 or email kathall@ozemail.com.au