This new publication reflects on the thematics of Five Acts of Love, featuring new essays and creative responses from contributors Dr Jessica Clark, Dr Eugenia Flynn, Sara M Saleh, Elyas Alavi, Dr Safdar Ahmed and Five Acts of Love curator Dr Nur Shkembi.
Explore our digital publication Tina Stefanou: You Can’t See Speed, presented by ACCA.
Designed as a multi-sensory, interactive experience led by video, sound and text, the work broadens our understanding of the traditional publication, and becomes an extension of the exhibition itself.
Featuring Tina Stefanou and curator Elyse Goldfinch in conversation, alongside text from contributors Juundaal Strang-Yettica, Alexandra Pirici, Fayen d’Evie, Michael Taussig, Azza Zein, Tessa Laird and Tara Heffernan.
The digital publication website was created by Lloyd Mst and Jake Bonin.
Published on the occasion of Tennant Creek Brio’s first major survey, ACCA is pleased to develop a dedicated publication celebrating the work of the artist collective living and working on Warumungu Country.
Contributors to the publication include: Jimmy Frank Jupurrula, Joseph Williams Jangarrayi, Tristen Harwood, Erica Izett, Levi McLean, Max Delany, Jessica Clark, Elyse Goldfinch and Shelley McSpedden
Fusing First Nations cultural traditions, the industrial materiality of the mining industry, and regional and global art influences, Tennant Creek Brio: Juparnta Ngattu Minjinypa Iconocrisis 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.
Format: Paperback
Publisher: ACCA
Curators & Editors: Max Delany, Jessica Clark, Elyse Goldfinch and Shelley McSpedden
Published: 2024
Pages: 135
ISBN: 978-0-6458328-6-0
This publication accompanies ACCA’s exhibition Future Remains: The 2024 Macfarlane Commissions, the fourth edition of a multi-year partnership with The Macfarlane Fund that supports ambitious new artworks by emerging and mid-career artists.
The publication features new texts by Freja Carmichael, Angela Hesson, Tiarney Miekus, June Miskell, Jazz Money, Audrey Pfister and Aubrey Wang, and Azza Zein on the work of commissioned artists, along with full colour documentation of the exhibition, and a curatorial introduction by curator and editor Dr Shelley McSpedden.
Future Remains brings together works by Kim Ah Sam, Andy Butler, Teelah George, Alexandra Peters, Joel Sherwood Spring, Nicholas Smith and Salote Tawale. Collectively, these artists engage with a broad range of historical reference points, from family stories and lore, the annals of pop-culture and industry, art and architectural genealogies, to state archives and collections. These works, by turn, honour and critique, celebrate and thwart the legacies they address, inviting us to contemplate the gifts and burdens of that which we inherit.
Format: Paperback
Publisher: ACCA
Curator and Editor: Dr Shelley McSpedden
Published: 2024
Pages: 108
ISBN: 978-0-6458328-5-3
H Oma Je is a limited edition artist’s book published to coincide with the exhibition Laure Prouvost: Oui Move In You, presented at ACCA from 23 March – 10 June 2024.
Continuing Laure Prouvost’s interest in how ideas, forms and subjectivities are inherited and passed from one generation to the next, H Oma Je features contributions by the artist alongside over one hundred friends and fellow artists, colleagues and collaborators. Each contribution pays homage to grandmothers, artistic matriarchs, inspirational elders, ancestors and forebears.
At the heart of the book is a campfire, animating a seance of sparkling words, images, memories and poetic reflections which float through space and time. Readers are invited to gather around the campfire, and to cast their own memories and reflections into the chorus of dancing flames and smouldering embers.
Format: Paperback
Publisher: ACCA
Curators: Max Delany and Annika Kristensen
Editors: Max Delany, Annika Kristensen and Mona Pouillon
Published: 2024
Pages: 247
ISBN: 978-0-6458328-4-6
From the other side features curatorial texts by Elyse Goldfinch and Jessica Clark, alongside writings from Barbara Creed, author of The Monstrous Feminine; Canadian film writer Kier-La Janisse, author of the cult classic, House of Psychotic Women, 2012; Lisa Fuller, a Murri woman and author of the novel Ghost Bird, 2021; and a horror-themed screenplay by UK-based author and filmmaker Alison Peirse, editor of the Women Make Horror anthology, 2021.
Produced in association with the upcoming ACCA exhibition of the same name, this publication casts 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.
The exhibition crosses the artificial parameters of horror in the everyday, as something that exists as part of society but also from outside of it. Culminating in a potent synthesis of dread, camp, humour and catharsis, From the other side challenges the traditional narratives and assumed boundaries of the body, gender, the self and the ‘other’.
Format: Paperback
Publisher: ACCA
Curators: Elyse Goldfinch & Jessica Clark
Editor: Elyse Goldfinch
Published: 2023
Pages: 111
ISBN: 978-0-6458328-3-9
This multilingual book, published in association with the exhibition James Nguyen: Open Glossary, features artist sketches and process-based images, newly commissioned writing by Fayen d’Evie and Luke King, Nhung Dinh, Stéphanie Kabanyana Kanyandekwe, Do Tuong Linh, Dr Kirsten Lyttle, James Nguyen and Budi Sudarto, Brooke Wandin, and Chris Xu; alongside an artist interview with James Nguyen and curator Shelley McSpedden.
Each book is unique, with the cover of every copy handprinted in one of James Nguyen’s works.
James Nguyen: Open Glossary is presented as part of the Copyright Agency Partnerships series of new commissions supporting mid-career and established visual artists to develop and present a major new body of work. The exhibition expands the solo commissioning focus, featuring Tamsen Hopkinson (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Pāhauwera), Budi Sudarto, Kate ten Buuren (Taungurung) and Chris Xu working alongside Nguyen on a series of new polyphonic installations presented throughout ACCA’s galleries, as well as an evolving multilingual queer glossary for ACCA’s Digital Wing.
Open Glossary explores the capacity of language to both bind and divide us. Alert to the liveness of lexicons, the exhibition emphasises the ways that words and syntax constantly evolve and transform, marking our connections to others across the specifics of time and place. Conversation is key to Nguyen’s approach, positioning his personal experience and perspective in dialogue with others – family, friends, Vietnamese diasporic and LGBTIQA+ communities, the artworld and its institutions.
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Australian Centre for Contemporary Art
Editor: Elyse Goldfinch
Published: 2023
Pages: 112
ISBN: 978-0-6458328-2-2
Curated by Jessica Clark, Between Waves presents ten major new commissions traversing internal and external worlds, embracing the sensory and cyclical rhythms of light and sound, thinking and feeling, listening and seeing, interwoven with ideas of material memory.
Between Waves continues the Yalingwa exhibition series, presented in partnership with Creative Victoria, which is devoted to highlighting the significance of First Nations contemporary art practice of the Southeast within a national context.
Artists: Hayley Millar Baker, Maree Clarke, Dean Cross, Brad Darkson, Matthew Harris, James Howard, Jazz Money, Mandy Quadrio, Cassie Sullivan, and this mob
The publication features detailed documentation of all exhibited works, a curatorial essay by Jessica Clark and newly commissioned writing by Natalie Harkin and Tina Baum.Format: Paperback
Publisher: Australian Centre for Contemporary Art
Editor: Jessica Clark
Copyeditor and Editorial Production: Elyse Goldfinch
Published: 2023
Pages: 122
ISBN: 978-0-6458328-1-5
Published on the occasion of Mithu Sen’s major solo exhibition, Mithu Sen: mOTHERTONGUE, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) is excited to present a monograph that celebrates the work and career of one of India’s most renowned contemporary artists.
Surveying the past two decades of Mithu Sen’s compelling art practice, including a series of new commissions, the installation of mOTHERTONGUE is presented as an illuminated mind-map; a constellation of image and word associations which move between visible surfaces and interior states.
Featuring full-colour documentation of all the works in the exhibition, the catalogue includes a curatorial essay by Max Delany alongside newly commissioned essays by Nancy Adajania, Nikos Papastergiadis and Laura Raicovich.
Publication has been produced with the generous support of Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi; Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai; Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna; and Dr Terry Wu and Dr Melinda Tee.
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Australian Centre for Contemporary Art
Published: 2023
Editors: Max Delany and Shelley McSpedden
Pages: 112
Explore the digital publication Black Wattle V2 by this mob, commissioned as part of ACCA’s exhibition Between Waves 2023.
Explore our digital publication Writing in the Expanded Field V.1, presented by ACCA and RMIT non/fictionLab.
Writing in the Expanded Field is an experimental writing program and digital publishing project engaging outstanding writers of diverse age, gender, ability, cultural and disciplinary background. Writing in the Expanded Field encourages discussion, collaboration and professional development through collective work and interdisciplinary exchange.
Explore Data Relations digital publication featuring interviews, videos, and ekphrastic texts by leading writers and academics in the field, addressing the art and ideas of artists included in ACCA’s Data Relations exhibition, and wider cultural contexts.
Published on the occasion of Paul Yore’s extensive survey exhibition, Paul Yore: WORD MADE FLESH, Art Ink in association with the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) are excited to present an expansive, limited edition monograph that celebrates one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists.
The exhibition, which continues ACCA’s contemporary Australian solo series, is constructed maximally as a gesamtkunstwerk, presenting work over the past fifteen years, alongside a major new room-scaled sculptural installation developed especially for the exhibition.
Multilayered in it’s design, the cover features a die-cut hole alongside full colour, detailed photo documentation of the works as well as drawings and newly commissioned writing across the 416 pages. The publication features texts and essays by leading Australian and international artists, scholars and commentators including Tony Albert, hanna baer, Mikala Dwyer, Daniel Fountain, Helen Hughes, Bruce LaBruce, and an extended interview with Paul Yore by Max Delany.
Limited edition of 1000
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Art Ink in association with Australian Centre for Contemporary Art
Published: 2022
Design and Art Direction: Hayman Design
Designer: Lavinia Puccetti
Pages: 416
Dimensions: 27.5 x 24.6 x 4 cm
ISBN:978-0-6450166-7-3
ACCA is excited to present Like a Wheel That Turns: The 2022 Macfarlane Commissions, the third edition of a multi-year partnership that supports the commissioning of ambitious new projects by contemporary emerging to mid-career artists.
Like a Wheel That Turns reflects upon painting practices which extend beyond the frame and from the realm of the studio into the world at large, through the work of Nadia Hernández, Lucina Lane, Gian Manik, Betty Muffler, Jahnne Pasco-White, Jason Phu, JD Reforma and Esther Stewart.
Presenting a series of eight new commissions, with artists who approach the medium of painting as a vehicle through which to consider cultural and family histories, our relationship to Country and the environment, institutional and domestic architectures, the role of art and the gallery as repository of memories, and as a means of communing with those who have come before.
Featuring full-colour documentation of all the works in the exhibition, the catalogue includes a preface by Melissa Macfarlane, founder of The Macfarlane Fund, a curatorial essay by Max Delany and Annika Kristensen alongside newly commissioned essays by Verónica Tello,Lisa Radford, Tristen Harwood, Stephanie Rhea Erevm Mahmood Fazal, June Miskell and Amelia Winata, as well as an in conversation between Betty Muffler and Brook Garru Andrew.
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Australian Centre for Contemporary Art
Published: 2022
Editors: Max Delany and Annika Kristensen
Pages: 109
ISBN:9780648435396
Tom Nicholson’s Chimney in store (Towards a monument to Batman’s Treaty) 2021 marks the culmination of the artist’s long-term public art project Towards a monument to Batman’s Treaty, the project that begins with the conflicted meanings associated with Melbourne’s first European chimney, built by William Buckley for John Batman, and with the counter-narratives that assemble around that form.
The project has continued to evolve through a framework of projects and collaborators, including exhibitions and education programs at ACCA, TarraWarra Museum of Art, the Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture, as well as discussions with City of Melbourne and Creative Victoria.
Critical to its development has been dialogues with Senior Wurundjeri Elder Aunty Joy Murphy Wandin (over a ten-year period), Professor Tony Birch, and artist Jonathan Jones, as well as more recent dialogues with N’arweet Carolyn Briggs (Chair, Boonwurrung Foundation) and Aunty Melinda Kennedy (Wathaurung Aboriginal Corporation).
Accompanying the brick and grass mound is an artist’s book that includes all of the texts for plaques that would inscribe the disinterred material for a future monument to Batman’s Treaty. Designed by Ziga Testen studio, the plaque fonts are evidence of a complete census of the plaque typographies of inner Melbourne (and in this sense constitute a meditation on the entirety of the city’s monumental complex).
To read more about the project please click here
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, ACCA
Published: 2022
Editors: Stephanie Jaerling and Sarah Gory
Designer: Ziga Testen
Pages: 384
ISBN:9780646854786
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.
The catalogue features a curatorial introduction by Max Delany, Annika Kristensen, and Miriam Kelly, alongside feature texts by guest writers, and transcripts from Think Tanks, lectures, symposia and artist talks from the lead up to and throughout the exhibition period. Also included are full colour images of the exhibitions and programs at ACCA, in the public realm and by our cultural partners.
Who’s Afraid of Public Space? is organised according to a 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.
This catalogue is proudly supported by the Besen Family Foundation.
Yhonnie Scarce: Missile Park is the first survey exhibition of leading contemporary artist Yhonnie Scarce, and brings a major new commission into dialogue with work that spans the past fifteen years of the artist’s career.
Scarce’s works in this survey reference the on-going effects of colonisation on Aboriginal people, responding to research into the impact of nuclear testing and the removal and relocation of Aboriginal people from their homelands and the forcible removal of Aboriginal children from their families. Born in Woomera, South Australia in 1973, Scarce belongs to the Kokatha and Nukunu peoples, and family history is central to Scarce’s works in this show. This survey also includes major works that engage with the disciplinary forms of colonial institutions and representation – religion, ethnography, medical science, museology, taxonomy – as well as monumental and memorial forms of public art and remembrance.
Featuring full-colour documentation of all the works in the exhibition, the catalogue includes a foreword by ACCA’s Artistic Director and CEO Max Delany and the IMA Artistic Director and CEO, Liz Nowell; a pictorial essay by Yhonnie Scarce; a curatorial essay by Lisa Waup, Max Delany and Liz Nowell; alongside newly commissioned essays by Daniel Browning, Hannah Presley and Lisa Waup; a new poem by Natalie Harkin; and a special reprint of a text by Louis Anderson Mokak.
This exhibition and publication have been produced in collaboration with the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, and supported by the Gordon Darling Foundation.
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Institute of Modern Art
Published: 2021
Pages: 147
ISBN:9780648435365
Overlapping Magisteria: The 2020 Macfarlane Commissions presents five immersive installations that pay attention to multiple ways of knowing, sensing, feeling and interacting with the world. Overlapping Magisteria is the second edition of a multi-year partnership that supports ambitious projects by contemporary artists, and transforms ACCA’s galleries with major new works by Robert Andrew, Mimosa Echard, Sidney McMahon, Sam Petersen and Isadora Vaughan.
Curated by Max Delany and Miriam Kelly, the works in Overlapping Magisteria draw on various social, cultural, technical and material forms, unsettling the lingering divide between nature and culture towards more complex realms of knowledge and experience.
This catalogue features a curatorial introduction by Max Delany and Miriam Kelly and five feature texts by guest writers Robin M Eames, Ellen Greig, Abbra Kotlarczyk, Tim Riley Walsh and Marion Vasseur Raluy addressing the work of each exhibiting artist and accompanied by full colour installation images of the exhibition at ACCA.
Explore our digital publication Writing in the Expanded Field V.3: Overlapping Writing, presented by ACCA and RMIT non/fictionLab.
Writing in the Expanded Field is an experimental writing program and digital publishing project engaging outstanding writers of diverse age, gender, ability, cultural and disciplinary background. Writing in the Expanded Field encourages discussion, collaboration and professional development through collective work and interdisciplinary exchange.
Feedback Loops presents six immersive installations that explore the material and digital worlds of our past, present and speculative futures. Populated by characters and conceptualisations that are at once real and fictive, and inherently performative, the works of participating artists are informed by aesthetics of the internet and the ethics of new materialist philosophies, presenting a kaleidoscopic positioning of familiar and unfamiliar references. Mythology, spirituality and philosophy are mashed together with personal and collective narratives, popular culture, computer gaming and art history.
Featuring new work, alongside significant existing projects, the exhibition features artists Madison Bycroft, Tianzhuo Chen, Lu Yang, Sahej Rahal, and is curated by ACCA’s Curator Miriam Kelly.
This catalogue features a curatorial introduction by Miriam Kelly and six feature texts by guest writers Jack Halberstam, Kim Machan, Reza Negarestani, Legacy Russell, Justin Shoulder and Xin Wang, addressing the work of each exhibiting artist and accompanied by full colour installation images of the exhibition at ACCA.
Haroon Mirza: The Construction of an Act is the first solo exhibition in Australia by acclaimed London-based artist Haroon Mirza, bringing new commissions into dialogue with re-presentations of recent work to provide a choreographed experience of the artist’s diverse interests and applications across the last decade.
Featuring full-colour documentation of all the works in the exhibition including documentation of the live performance by local and international collaborators Jessica Aszodi, Chess Boughey, Julie Cunningham, Alexander Garsden, Sarah-Jane Lewis, Tom Mclean, James Rushford, Freya Schack-Arnott and Carolin Schnurrer.
The catalogue includes a foreword by ACCA’s Artistic Director and CEO Max Delany, a curatorial essay by Annika Kristensen alongside a newly commissioned text in collaboration with Liquid Architecture with writers in residence Chi Tran and Arben Dzika as well as new texts by Elizabeth Neilson, Director of Zabludowicz Collection, London and Haroon Mirza in conversation with James Rushford.