Laresa Kosloff: Public Announcements

Co-presented with Arts Centre Melbourne
4 February – 20 March 2022

Along a busy stretch of footpath on St Kilda Road, pedestrians, idlers and commuters will be interrupted from their thoughts by a series of ambiguous public announcements, broadcast intermittently from existing overhead speakers installed in Arts Centre Melbourne’s covered walkway between Theatres Building and Hamer Hall. Laresa Kosloff‘s Public Announcements 2 2021–22, commissioned by ACCA, appropriates the impersonal institutional tone of public announcements and advertising, yet is complicated by the opinionated, open-ended and frequently comical content of the missives.

Gathered from a wide variety of sources, including etiquette blogs and specialist websites, the scripted content within Public Announcements 2 reflects the absurd exchanges that often occur within the public realm, such as random thoughts, snippets of overheard conversation, and unexpected human interactions. Some announcements are directive in content, addressing the audience personally (‘The results are in! 97% of other pedestrians would not wear your clothes’), while others are more subjective or obscure in meaning, as if communicating to a universal subject (‘Let’s teach the real history’). 


Public Announcements 2 continues Kosloff’s interest in language, humour and the relationship between the body and the everyday environment. A recurrent theme across Kosloff’s practice, encompassing performative videos, short films, audio works and participatory artworks, is the use of representational strategies to reveal tensions between received cultural values, individual agency and free will. Public Announcements 2 builds from an earlier work presented as part of the Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture in 2017, for which Kosloff utilised existing speakers installed across Federation Square to broadcast a series of recorded audio announcements.

An extract of this project will also be presented at ACCA, in the Project Space: The Hoarding over the duration of the exhibition.

Access:

This is an audio work. A transcription of this work is available. This section of the Arts Centre Melbourne is a covered walkway, between Theatres Building and Hamer Hall, it has a paved flat footpath. Tram and train access are in close proximity. Please contact ACCA if you have any further queries about access, the transcription and this event 03 9697 9999 or info@acca.melbourne