Lecture Topic: Don’t Leave Me This Way: Art in the Age of AIDS 1994, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Speaker: Dr Ted Gott
In 1994 it was hard to open a newspaper in Australia, listen to a radio broadcast or turn on a television set without encountering some discussion of the ‘new’ disease AIDS and its causative factor, the HIV virus. In the same fashion, HIV/AIDS had come under scrutiny in many forms of cultural response from theatre and dance, to fiction, poetry, music and soap opera; such that the Australian public often then found its ‘entertainment’ engaged in serious debate around issues of illness, prejudice, medical research and death.
Don’t Leave Me This Way: Art in Age of AIDS (National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 12 November 1994 – 5 March 1995) presented over 200 works on the subject of HIV/AIDS by more than 100 Australian and international artists. This lecture looks back at the scope of the exhibition, and some of the stories around its inception.
Dr Ted Gott is Senior Curator of International Art, National Gallery of Victoria. He has curated and co-curated twenty-five exhibitions, including Napoleon: Revolution to Empire (2012), Gustave Moreau and the Eternal Feminine (2010), Salvador Dalí: LiquidDesire (2009), Modern Britain 1900–1960 (2007), Kiss of the Beast: From Paris Salon to King Kong (2005) and The Impressionists: Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay (2004). In his former role as Curator of European Art at the National Gallery of Australia, Gott curated Don’t Leave Me This Way: Art in the Age of AIDS (1994), among other key exhibitions of international art. He has published widely on Australian, British and French art.
ABOUT THE SERIES:
ACCA’s Lecture Series, Defining Moments: Australian Exhibition Histories 1968–1999, will take a deeper look at the moments that have shaped Australian art since 1968. In the second year of this two-year series, seven more guest lecturers will analyse the game changers in Australian art, addressing key contemporary art exhibitions staged over the last three decades of the twentieth century and reflecting on the ways these exhibitions shaped art history and contemporary Australian culture more broadly.
Ambitious, contested, polemical, genre-defining and genre-defying, contemporary art exhibitions have shaped and transformed the cultural landscape, along with our understanding of what constitutes art itself. This program traces the legacies of artists and curators, addresses the critical reception of selected significant projects, and reflects on a wide range of exhibitions and formats; from artist run initiatives to institutions, as well as interventions in public space and remote communities.
This two-year series is presented in association with Abercrombie & Kent and Research Partner, Centre of Visual Art (CoVA) at The University of Melbourne and supported by Art Guide Australia, The Saturday Paper, Triple R, The Melbourne Gin Company, Capi and the City of Melbourne.
FREE DIGITAL DELIVERY:
As ACCA is currently closed to support public health measures we will be recording our entire 2020 season and releasing all lectures online as freely available videos and podcasts on ACCA’s website and promoted across our social media channels.
A bespoke cocktail recipe created by The Melbourne Gin Company using Capi will be available alongside each lecture. We encourage you to make the cocktail with us.
