ACCA Podcast: Recent Episodes
ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art)
Join exhibition curators Sophie Prince and Myles Russell-Cook for a tour of 'Are you lonely tonight? I’m so lonesome I could cry.', and hear directly from artists Polly Borland, Kayla Mattes, Callum McGrath, Nick Mullaly, Melissa Nguyen and Patrick Pound as they speak to directly to their work in the show.
Join artists Patrick Pound and Kayla Mattes, in conversation with ACCA Artistic Director and CEO Myles Russell-Cook, as they discuss their new commissions for the show. Collecting and working with digital and physical materials, respectively, the artists share their unique approaches to making new work out of archives.
ACCA and Monash Art, Design and Architecture (MADA) celebrate the launch of collaborative publication, The Second Studio: Drawing on Contemporary Art in the Gallery. Featuring a panel discussion between ACCA Artist Educator Lauren Simmonds; Amélie Scalercio – Lecturer, Coordinator of Drawing, MADA, Monash University; Andrew Atchison – Artist and educator at Monash, RMIT and Swinburne Universities and Dr Rosslynd Piggott – Artist and tutor, MADA, Monash.
Join artist Julius von Bismarck and ACCA's Senior Curator and Head of Exhibitions Shelley McSpedden as they take a tour of 'This is not the storm', on show at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art.
*Please note this podcast contains coarse languageACCA presents Labels: Fashion and Identity, a panel discussion exploring the role of fashion in expressing identity.Featuring ACCA Curator Sophie Prince, Shauna Toohey (P.A.M), Jackie Wu (Wackie Ju) and Ricarda Bigolin (RMIT), the panel considers unisex and gender nonconforming fashion branding, including designing for diverse bodies and identities.
‘We need to talk’, is a bold new series of free public conversations that bring together artists, thinkers, and cultural leaders to explore the art world from every angle.For our latest event, acclaimed American artist, filmmaker and writer, Tourmaline joins ACCA curator Sophie Prince for a conversation on her exhibition Tourmaline: Transcendent.‘We need to talk’ is a space for spirited exchange, fresh ideas, and unexpected connections.
Listen to our talk with artist r e a, Myes Russell-Cook and Judith Ryan AM on their latest exhibition 'r e a : c l a i m e d'. r e a : c l a i m e d is a focused survey of Gamilaraay, Wailwan and Biripi digital media artist, r e a, highlighting some of their most significant works from a career spanning more than three decades. r e a first exhibited at ACCA as part of the landmark group exhibition Blakness: Blak City Culture! in 1994, curated by Hetti Perkins and Clare Williamson. Now, more than thirty years later, r e a returns to ACCA with a solo exhibition that includes digital media art, sculpture, installation, and video.This podcast was recorded as part of an Artist Talk at ACCA on Saturday 13 December 2025.Image: Artist talk and book launch event, 'r e a : c l a i m e d' 2025/2026, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne 2026. Photograph: Astrid Mulder
*CONTENT WARNING: Please note that this podcast includes discussions of genocide. Support is always available: Lifeline 13 11 14, Beyond Blue 1300 22 4636‘We need talk’, is a bold new series of free public conversations that bring together artists, thinkers, and cultural leaders to explore the art world from every angle.For our first event, acclaimed artist Tschabalala Self joined ACCA’s Artistic Director & CEO Myles Russell-Cook for a conversation on art, identity, and the future. A new ACCA initiative, ‘We need to talk’ is a space for spirited exchange, fresh ideas, and unexpected connections.
*CONTENT WARNING: Please note that this podcast includes discussions of suicide and genocide. Support is always available: Lifeline 13 11 14, Beyond Blue 1300 22 4636Listen to our latest talk with artists Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, Megan Cope, Khaled Sabsabi and Ali Tahayori, from our current exhibition 'Five Acts of Love'. Take a deep dive into the discussions on their works, their practice and the ideas presented as part of the exhibition. This podcast was recorded as part of an Artist Talk at ACCA on Saturday 28 June 2025.Image: Opening night, 'Five Acts of Love' 2025, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne 2025. Photograph: Carmen Zammit
Moderated by exhibition curator Elyse Goldfinch, join us as we hear from designer Lloyd Mist, and contributing writers Azza Zein, Fayen d’Evie, Tara Heffernan and Tessa Laird.The talk includes a tour of the interactive digital publication site, and readings from the writers, followed by conversations around Stefanou’s work and ideas that have been explored through the different texts.
Listen to our talk with artist Tina Stefanou, curator Elyse Goldfinch (and special guests) on her new exhibition 'You Can't See Speed'. This podcast was recorded as part of an Artist Talk at ACCA on Saturday 05 April 2025.'Tina Stefanou: You Can’t See Speed' attends to the interconnected and multisensory experience of film beyond vision. The exhibition continues Stefanou’s interest in the voice as medium, from spoken sonic soundscapes to vocal techniques such as humming.It also expands on her methodology of deep, long-term, co-creative collaboration and socially engaged practice involving interspecies-communal-performance making. Her diasporic, working-class ethic and approach to making challenges institutions of power and capitalistic logics, embedding the commons – from the planetary to the everyday – within her life and work. Image: Tina Stefanou and Matthew Cassar, artist talk, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne 2025. Photograph: Sarah Walker
Listen to Yhonnie Scarce and Lisa Radford in conversation with Vikki McInnes, discussing their artistic practice and publication 'The image is not nothing (Concrete Archives)'..'Concrete Archives' is the culmination of Radford and Scarce’s fieldwork to local and international sites of nuclear colonisation, genocide and memorialisation. Published by Person Books, 2024The podcast was recorded at the book launch of 'The image is not nothing (Concrete Archives)' at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art on Thursday 17 October.
Listen to our panel discussion focusing on the lineages of queer histories on the present. Featuring the research and practices of three speakers, Angela Hesson, Patrice Sharkey and Elyssia Wilson-Heti, who variously engage with queer subcultures, aesthetics and histories, the panel will consider how these legacies have shaped or reshaped the diverse range of LGBTQI+ representation today.This podcast was recorded at ACCA on Wednesday 21 August 2024. Read more about the program here: https://acca.melbourne/program/panel-discussion-living-queer-histories/Image: Nicholas Smith, 'chris' 2024, installation view, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. Courtesy the artist and Haydens Gallery, Melbourne. Photograph: Andrew Curtis
Listen to our talk with artists Andy Butler and Nicholas Smith on their new works presented as part of 'Future Remains: The 2024 Macfarlane Commissions'.This podcast was recorded as part of an Artist Talk at ACCA on Saturday 13 July 2024.
Listen to our talk with artists Kim Ah Sam, Teelah George, Joel Sherwood Spring and Salote Tawale on their new works presented as part of 'Future Remains: The 2024 Macfarlane Commissions'.This podcast was recorded as part of an Artist Talk at ACCA on Saturday 29 June 2024. Please note the quality of this podcast is interrupted towards the end of this recording. We apologise for any inconvenience.Read more: https://acca.melbourne/program/artist-talks-kim-ah-sam-joel-sherwood-spring-and-salote-tawale/
Listen to our talk with artists Kim Ah Sam, Teelah George, Joel Sherwood Spring and Salote Tawale for talks in the gallery, on their new works presented as part of 'Future Remains: The 2024 Macfarlane Commissions'.This podcast was recorded as part of an Artist Talk at ACCA on Saturday 29 June 2024.Read more: https://acca.melbourne/program/artist-talks-kim-ah-sam-joel-sherwood-spring-and-salote-tawale/
Listen to ACCA's in conversation with Laure Prouvost and Annikka Kristensen, following a screening of 'They Parlaient Idéale' 2019.This program was recorded on Monday 18 March at ACMI as part of ACCA's exhibition 'Laure Prouvost: Oui Move In You'.Read more about the program here: https://acca.melbourne/program/screening-and-keynote-with-laure-prouvost-in-conversation-with-annika-kristensen/
Listen to ACCA's in conversation with Barbara Creed, author and Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Melbourne alongside Lisa French, Professor and Dean in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University.This program was recorded on Wednesday 28 February as part of the official book launch of Barbara Creed's new book 'Return of the Monstrous-Feminine: Feminist New Wave Cinema'.Read more about the program here: https://acca.melbourne/program/book-launch-barbara-creed-return-of-the-monstrous-feminine-feminist-new-wave-cinema-2022/
Listen to ACCA's lecture 'Building a post-revolutionary world through the 8th Yokohama Triennale' with Carol Yinghua Lu, art historian, curator, and current Director, Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum. Alongside Liu Ding, Carol Yinghua Lu is also co-Artistic Director of the 8th Yokohama Triennale 2024.Read more about the program here: https://acca.melbourne/program/building-a-post-revolutionary-world-through-the-8th-yokohama-triennale/This recording was made at ACCA on Monday 26 February 2024.
Listen to the artist talk with Maria Kozic speaking about her iconic series 'Calendar Girls' 1999 presented in ACCA’s current exhibition 'From the other side' (9 December 2023 – 3 March 2024).Maria Kozic works across painting, sculpture, photography and film. Her practice has often drawn on the depictions and tropes of women, monsters and creatures in horror and exploitation films. Through the lens of gender and feminist politics, she is known for engaging with cult cinema, music, popular culture, advertising and DIY punk aesthetics.Maria Kozic has been included in major solo and group exhibitions at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Ian Potter Gallery, University of Melbourne, Melbourne; Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne; Posteritati Gallery, New York; Soho Arts Festival, New York.Maria Kozic is represented by Neon Parc, Melbourne.This recording was made at ACCA on Saturday 17 February 2024.
Listen to exhibition artists Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne for a talk about their new digital commission 'Offset' on the ACCA Digital Wing.
What is the sound of racialisation? How might we listen to misrecognition? What does machine error tell us about the precision of racism? And how can the tools of a racist system be used to transcribe new forms of resistance?This experimental presentation is a collaboration between feminist technoscience researcher Thao Phan and Machine Listening, an ongoing investigation and experiment in collective learning, instigated by artist Sean Dockray, legal scholar James Parker, and researcher, curator and artist Joel Stern. Part lecture and part performance, this event brings together critical work on race and algorithmic culture with new techniques for dissecting and analysing automatic speech recognition, applied to personal and public archives drawn from Thao’s life and research. It features a discussion and demonstration of the Word Processor tool, developed in 2021 by the Machine Listening team and Reduct, a US-based tech company co-founded by the artist Robert Ochschorn.
Listen to performance lectures 'Loops, Echoes, Phonophanies, and other Détournments' by Suvani Suri and 'Listening to Misrecognition' by Thao Phan, as well as an Artist Talk with Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne on their new digital commission 'Offset'.
Listen to the performance lecture 'Expositio, Iudicium, Lacrimae, or, Does an AI God Have an Ass?' by exhibiting artist Zach Blas exploring the idea of religious-un/conscious thriving in today’s tech industry. Charting his encounters with various artificial intelligence gods, Blas tells of a computational world of divine judgment and devout submission, where artificial intelligence exists alongside mystical glyphs, occult sigils, captured bodies, and corporate transcendence. Through a consideration of religious sermons, offerings of worship, and spiritual iconography, an AI religiosity is traced, in which flesh becomes biometric and emotional crying transmutes into a symbolic language of holy quantification.
Roe v. Wade is overturned while gene editing is opening entirely new reproductive futures. What does kin mean as reproductive technologies shift our relationships? How much control should we have over a birthing person’s body, and over a life before it begins?.‘The Surrogate project began with a desire to serve as a surrogate. During the pregnancy, the parents would have an app I made that provides 24/7 access to all my biodata, and an interface to control me. So in essence, they could have complete control over my body in which their baby is growing.The past few years of the pandemic have reshaped our bodily boundaries. We’ve swabbed and spit in tubes and traded ownership of our bodily substances in an attempt to feel safe. But these fluids hold the data of our DNA, our personal information, and our identity.I’m fascinated by the ways we’re taught to interact with data, and how this shapes the way we interact with each other. Central to my work is a critique of the simultaneous technological and social systems we’re building around ourselves. What are the rules? What happens when we introduce glitches?’
Through a series of media and artworks, Mimi Ọnụọha’s performance lecture explores absence, knowledge, and how what is missing is still there.
Listen to writer and curator Laura Raicovich discuss the artworks and methodologies that inform Mithu Sen’s exhibition 'mOTHERTONGUE' in relation to Raicovich’s own practice which calls for institutional change to improve cultural spaces.This conversation was recorded at ACCA on Tuesday 16 May, 6–7pm and is presented with the support of Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi (KNMA).Read more about the free event here: acca.melbourne/program/laura-raicovich-undoing-and-redoing/Image: Opening event, 'Mithu Sen: mOTHERTONGUE' 2023, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. Photograph: Casey Horsfield
Listen to artist Mithu Sen in conversation with Max Delany, ACCA’s Artistic Director & CEO, alongside special guests Irina Aristarkhova, Professor at the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design and Digital Studies Institute of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Deepanjana Klein, Director of Acquisitions and Development, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA). They discuss Sen’s major solo exhibition 'mOTHERTONGUE', which surveys the past two decades of her compelling art practice, including a series of major new installations.This conversation was recorded at ACCA on Monday 24 April, 6–7pm and is presented with the support of Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi (KNMA).Read more about the free event here: acca.melbourne/program/mithu-sen-in-conversationImage: Mithu Sen, Museum of unbelongings 2016. Courtesy the artist
This recording is part of a video commissioned for 'Writing in the Expanded Field IV: Touching Feeling Writing' developed in conjunction with ACCA’s exhibition ‘Paul Yore: WORD MADE FLESH’ (23 September – 20 November 2022). The digital publishing project exploring new compositional modes and publics for art writing will be released in early 2023.Credits: Rebecca Bracewell, sound editor Sofie McClure, videographer Lucinda Strahan, editor and program leader Loni Jeffs, editorial coordinator Michaela Bear, participant Ange Crawford, participant Mig Dann, participant Rachel Keir-Smith, participant Carmen-Sibha Keiso, participant Shari Kocher, participant Josephine Mead, participant Nasim Patel, participant Sofia Stavrou, participant Denise Thwaites, participantPresented in partnership with RMIT University non/fictionLab.Read more and watch the video here: https://acca.melbourne/program/writing-in-the-expanded-field-iv-touching-feeling-writing/
Listen to the in conversation with artist Paul Yore and Nick Henderson, volunteer committee member at the Australian Queer Archives, and Curator at the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. They will be discussing Yore’s extensive survey exhibition 'Paul Yore: WORD MADE FLESH', unpacking the past fifteen years of his practice, with a focus on the major new immersive installation commissioned by ACCA.This lecture was recorded at ACCA on Saturday 1 October, 5–6pm. Read more about the free event here: https://acca.melbourne/program/paul-yore-in-conversation-with-nick-hendersonImage: Paul Yore, 'WORD MADE FLESH' 2022, installation view, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. Photograph: Andrew Curtis.
Listen to the lecture by editor Mykaela Saunders speaking on the critically acclaimed anthology 'THIS ALL COME BACK NOW'.
'THIS ALL COME BACK NOW' is the world’s first anthology of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander speculative fiction – written, curated, edited and designed by blackfellas, for blackfellas and about blackfellas. In these stories, ‘this all come back’: all those things that have been taken from us, that we collectively mourn the loss of, or attempt to recover and revive, as well as those that we thought we’d gotten rid of, that are always returning to haunt and hound us.
This critically acclaimed anthology was a collective undertaking, and editor Mykaela Saunders discusses how she worked with others at each different stage of the project. From the first conception of the anthology through to publication and beyond, Mykaela has ensured that the project has been built from good relationality – the very stuff that all healthy communities are made of.
Mykaela Saunders is an award-winning Koori and Lebanese writer, teacher and community researcher, and the editor of the critically acclaimed 'THIS ALL COME BACK NOW', the world’s first anthology of blackfella speculative fiction (UQP).
This lecture was recorded at ACCA on Thursday 4 August 2022, 6–8pm. Read more about the free event here: https://acca.melbourne/program/writing-concepts-lecture-with-mykaela-saunders/
Image: Cover, 'THIS ALL COME BACK NOW'. Courtesy Mykaela Saunders and University of Queensland Press
Listen to our Artist Talk with Gian Manik, Jason Phu and Jahnne Pasco-White.
This Artist Talk was recorded in association with the exhibition ' Like a Wheel That Turns: The 2022 Macfarlane Commissions', now showing at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne until 4 September 2022.
This Artist Talk was recorded in association with the exhibition ' Like a Wheel That Turns: The 2022 Macfarlane Commissions', now showing at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne until 4 September 2022.
In this Artist Talk we hear from exhibiting artists Lucina Lane, Betty Muffler and JD Reforma.
This conversation was recorded in association with the exhibition 'Frances Barrett: Meatus', now showing at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne until 19 June 2022.
In this conversation we hear from artist and curator Frances Barrett and from Daniel Mudie Cunningham, who is head of Programming at Carriageworks.
'Frances Barrett: Meatus' forms part of Suspended Moment: The Katthy Cavaliere Fellowship, an initiative designed to support a solo exhibition by Australian-based female artists who work in performance and installation. Over the past two years this has included exhibitions at the Museum of Old and New Art, and Carriageworks, and at ACCA, as well as a nationally touring iteration.
In this conversation, Frances and Daniel discuss 'Meatus', as well as the influence on both their practises of the late Australian performance artist Katthy Cavaliere, whose life and work is honoured in the exhibition series.
This panel discussion explores ideas of safety, movement, surveillance, physical distancing, visibility and invisibility within Melbourne’s public spaces.
Think Tank Moderator Nur Shkembi, artist, curator and PhD candidate, University of Melbourne, and Curatorial Advisory Group member for Who’s Afraid of Public Space?, is joined by esteemed local cultural contributors including Idil Ali, writer, performer, youth practitioner and community organiser; Antony Hamilton, Artistic Director, Chunky Move; Nicole Kalms, Associate Professor in Department of Design and founding director of Monash University XYX Lab; and Steven Rhall, artist, curator and PhD candidate at Monash University.
This Think Tank is fourth in the series presented by ACCA and produced as part of 'Who’s Afraid of Public Space?'
Listen to Melbourne Art Library for the final in their series of discussions about the values of the public library. Reflecting on the library of written materials on public art, public culture and public space in the Reading Space: The Common Room, Melbourne Art Library discuss the purpose and complexities of developing a community library collection and archives.
Forum Series: Distribution
What power dynamics are at play in the distribution of information? How democratic is ‘collective’ knowledge? And how are individuals and collectives disrupting the flow of information?
The Distribution forum series prods, unravels, makes-visible, and excites non-mainstream ways of information sharing. Engaging publishers, editors, and alternative institutions, the series explores active projects in Naarm/Melbourne that question the traditional flow of information.
Presented by Melbourne Art Library, a not-for-profit lending library exploring art librarianship as a philosophy and mode of practice; a practice guided by collaboration, criticism, and exchange.
Creative practice researchers: Prof Carol Brown, Dr Troy Innocent, and A/Prof Linda Knight, chaired by Rachel Iampolski addresses how artistic practices offer insurgent modes for developing reconnection with urban spaces after a prolonged lockdown, and sustained anxiety around public spaces.
The panel shares their practical and creative approaches for being in the world and the key role that insurgent artistic modes will play in redeveloping our confidence in public space. The experimental visual art practices, digital and gestural drawing, sound art and sonic practices, walking, creative movement, performance and installations explore emotion and affect, aesthetics, the sensorial as well as conflict, tension and congestion, and activism and play in the post-pandemic urban space. Collectively the panel advocates for the generative potential of insurgent modes for urban reconnection.
Urbanists and planners need to engage in broader and messier practices if they are to design inclusive and accessible public spaces. The production of space is as much a social and political process, as a physical one, and identities of places are often latent, contested and invisible. A new genre of artists and creative practitioners are engaging in public space, using site-based practices that catalyse new uses, build new constituencies, and amplify marginalised voices.
Moderated by Mel Dodd, this roundtable event brings together five leading creative practitioners from Monash Art, Design and Architecture (MADA) – Gene Bawden, N’arweet Carolyn Briggs, Emily Floyd, Timothy Moore and Sarah Lynn Rees – all working in the public realm, to reveal a more representative city and explore the ways we can make spaces truly public.
Listen to ACCA’s Artist Educator and Curator of the Education Space Andrew Atchison with artists Ross Coulter, Eugenia Lim and James Nguyen for a discussion about art and working in public space. This program is associated with the Education Space: Creating Art in Public, a hybrid studio, classroom and gallery designed to promote active participation with, and careful consideration of, public art practices and the diverse and inventive approaches artists adopt when creating artwork for public space.
Listen to Melbourne Art Library for the first in their series of discussions about experimental modes of sharing information.
Reflecting on the library of written materials on public art, public culture and public space in the Reading Space: The Common Room, Melbourne Art Library unpack the role of the contemporary art librarian.
Forum Series: Distribution What power dynamics are at play in the distribution of information? How democratic is ‘collective’ knowledge? And how are individuals and collectives disrupting the flow of information?
The Distribution forum series prods, unravels, makes-visible, and excites non-mainstream ways of information sharing. Engaging publishers, editors, and alternative institutions, the series explores active projects in Naarm/Melbourne that question the traditional flow of information.
Presented by Melbourne Art Library, a not-for-profit lending library exploring art librarianship as a philosophy and mode of practice; a practice guided by collaboration, criticism, and exchange.
Join artists Jon Campbell, Guled Abdulwasi, and Laresa Kosloff at ACCA as they discuss their commissioned works as part of Who’s Afraid of Public Space? offsite projects.
Join Melbourne Art Library for the second in their series of discussions about experimental modes of sharing information as part of Who's Afraid of Public Space?.
The forum panel includes: Nell Fraser (Melbourne Art Library), Caroline Phillips (Womens Art Register), and Nick Henderson (Australian Queer Archives).
Join artists Sean Lynch and Mikala Dwyer, and writer Alicia Sometimes for a panel discussion about public art, presented in association with the recent launch of two major City of Melbourne temporary public art commissions in University Square, Carlton.
Join artists Simona Castricum, Michael Candy, Hoang Tran Nguyen, and Callum Morton at ACCA as they discuss their commissioned works as part of Who’s Afraid of Public Space? offsite projects.
Listen to a panel discussion on Melbourne-based collective APHIDS’ new moving-image work 'DESTINY' with artist Eugenia Lim, and worker-performers Cher Tan and Wasay, moderated by Amelia Wallin.
'DESTINY' 2021 is a moving-image work made in collaboration with on-demand or ‘gig economy’ workers – rideshare drivers, food delivery riders and cleaners – exploring personal and global experiences of the platform economy.
Listen to N’arweet Carolyn Briggs AM, Sarah Lynn Rees, Andrew Atchison, Stephanie Pahnis, Lauren Crockett, Nicola Cortese, Timothy Moore, and John Tanner as they share their approaches to transforming ACCA’s four galleries to become civic spaces: Gathering Space: Nargee Djeembana, Education Space: Creating Art in Public, Reading Space: The Common Room, and Project Space: The Hoarding.
Speakers: Biljana Ciric and iLiana Fokianaki
In this lecture, curator and researcher Biljana Ciric discusses her educational platform What Could/Should Curating Do? and long-term project 'As you go... the roads under your feet, towards a new future' as experimental models for cross-cultural collaborations. Writer and curator iLiana Fokianaki shares her curatorial journey in establishing the non-profit gallery ‘The State of Concept’ in Athens and her interdisciplinary program 'The Bureau of Care'. Ciric and Fokianaki also reflect on the future of art institutions and the responsibility of curators and arts workers in these changing times.
Read more here: https://acca.melbourne/program/experimental-institutionalism/
Listen now to a panel discussion on A Poem and a Mistake, written by Cheri Magid, with Alexis Grenell, Cheri Magid, Stephanie McCarter, Sarah Baskin and Tamila Woodard.
Read more here: https://acca.melbourne/program/a-poem-and-a-mistake-by-cheri-magid/
Ecological: Practices and challenges of sustainability Speakers: José Roca and Keg de Souza
In this lecture, we are joined by José Roca, Artistic Director of the 23rd Biennale of Sydney, and artist Keg de Souza, with a focus on the practices and challenges of sustainability. Roca’s presentation questions whether biennales are sustainable, sharing the processes, curatorial considerations and some of the challenges faced in developing the 23rd Biennale of Sydney. de Souza’s presentation is centred on ‘Ecologies of Place,’ exploring the importance of community, place, and collaboration in relation to their recent work 'Not a drop to drink' 2021, followed by a discussion on building and imagining a more sustainable future for the arts.
This program is part of ACCA’s 2021 Lecture Series, Experimental Institutionalism: Contemporary Art and Curatorial Ecologies, which delves into the artistic, curatorial, organisational and institutional models in which artists, curators and producers reflect and shape the role of contemporary art practice.
José Roca is a Colombian curator living and working in Sydney. He is currently the Artistic Director of FLORA ars+natura, an independent space for contemporary art in Bogotá. Roca was recently appointed as Artistic Director of the 23rd Biennale of Sydney in 2022. For a decade, he managed the arts program at Banco de la República in Bogotá. Roca was previously Estrellita B. Brodsky Adjunct Curator of Latin American Art for the Tate, London, and for a decade oversaw the arts program at the Museo del Banco de la República in Bogotá, establishing the institution as one of the most respected in Latin America.
Keg de Souza lives and works in Sydney on unceded Gadigal land and uses mediums such as; temporary architecture, food, mapping and dialogical projects to explore the poetics and politics of space. This investigation of social and spatial environments is influenced by formal training in architecture and experiences of radical spaces through squatting and organising. Keg often creates site and situation specific projects with people, with an emphasis on knowledge exchange. These often manifest as temporary architectures that become framing devices to host pedagogical platforms, centring voices that are often marginalised, for learning about place.
Electronic: Modelling the digital present and tools for the future
Speakers: Seb Chan and Sahej Rahal
Seb Chan is the Chief Experience Officer (CXO) at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image where he is responsible for a holistic, multi-channel, visitor-centred design strategy for the institution. Until August 2015, he was Director of Digital & Emerging Media, at Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York. There he led the museum’s digital renewal and its transformation into an interactive, playful new museum reopened after a 3-year rebuilding and reimagining. His team’s work won awards from the American Association of Museums and Museums and the Web, One Club, D&AD, Fast Company Innovation by Design, Core77 Design Awards, and has been featured in Slate, The Verge, Fast Company and elsewhere.
A sculptor, coder, painter and performer, Sahej Rahal is a graduate of the Rachana Sansad Academy of Fine Art, Mumbai. He has been a recipient of a number of residencies including Bar1, Bangalore, 2011; FUTUR foundation, Zurich, 2011; INLAKS Shivdasani Foundation sponsored residency at KHOJ international artists’ association, New Delhi, 2013. Rahal has presentd work in major solo and group projects, including recently at Akademie Schloss Solitude & ZKM Center for Art and Media, Stuttgart, Germany in 2018, at the Vancouver Biennale and Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in 2019, in the 2020 Gwangju Biennale, and as part of Transmediale.
Listen now to Cheri Magid and Stephanie McCarter on ‘A Poem and a Mistake’, presented between 27 August – 12 September at acca.melbourne as part of the exhibition 'A Biography of Daphne.'
Read more here: https://acca.melbourne/program/a-poem-and-a-mistake-by-cheri-magid/
Listen now to Mihnea Mircan in conversation with artists Erik Bünger, Inge Meijer, and Katie West to discuss their works featured in the exhibition 'A Biography of Daphne'.
A Biography of Daphne’ is a curatorial project that revisits the Classical myth of Daphne as the starting point for an investigation of trauma and metamorphosis, symbiosis and entanglement in contemporary art. Daphne, the nymph who turned into a tree to evade the assault of the god Apollo, is a figure in, and of, crisis, but also a symbol of resistance and transformation.
Read more here: acca.melbourne/exhibition/a-biography-of-daphne/
Employment: Art, labour and changing modes of working
This program is part of ACCA’s 2021 Lecture Series, Experimental Institutionalism: Contemporary Art and Curatorial Ecologies and features two short lectures by Alana Kushnir and Julieta Aranda followed by a conversation with ACCA Curator Miriam Kelly.
Alana Kushnir explores collaboration, labour and scaling-up the artist’s studio in the context of the contemporary art ecology, and Julieta Aranda examines our relationship – as beings, as humans, as artists, as cultural workers – to the toxic environments that we have created.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS: Alana Kushnir an art lawyer, curator, art advisor and Director and Founder of Guestwork Agency based in Melbourne, Australia. She is the Principal Investigator of the Serpentine Galleries R&D Platform Legal Lab and a sessional lecturer at The University of Melbourne, teaching subjects on curating, contemporary art and art law.
Julieta Aranda is an artist and co-director of the online platform e-flux. Her artistic practice spans installation, video, and print media, with a special interest in the creation and manipulation of artistic exchange and the subversion of traditional notions of commerce through art making.
Read more, including full speaker biographies here: https://acca.melbourne/program/experimental-institutionalism-employment/
Read more about the series here: https://acca.melbourne/series/experimental-institutionalism-2021
Listen to curator Mihnea Mircan in conversation with artists Ho Tzu Nyen, Jill Magid, and P. Staff and Candice Lin to discuss their works featured in the exhibition 'A Biography of Daphne'.
Listen to artists Lauren Burrow and Nicholas Mangan as they discuss their works featured in the exhibition 'A Biography of Daphne'.
‘A Biography of Daphne’ is a curatorial project that revisits the Classical myth of Daphne as the starting point for an investigation of trauma and metamorphosis, symbiosis and entanglement in contemporary art. Daphne, the nymph who turned into a tree to evade the assault of the god Apollo, is a figure in, and of, crisis, but also a symbol of resistance and transformation.
Read more here: https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/a-biography-of-daphne/
What similarities and alliances can be drawn across borders, and how do we work and learn differently in response to the specificities of locality, place, culture and community? Can we work better together? What futures are possible or likely for the contemporary art ecology?
Listen now to Expanded: Collectivity and Solidarity in Changing Times now, with ruangrupa and The Unbound Collective, as part of our lecture series Experimental Institutionalism: Contemporary Art and Curatorial Ecologies.
ruangrupa is a Jakarta-based collective established in 2000. It is a non-profit organization that strives to support the idea of art within urban and cultural context by involving artists and other disciplines such as social sciences, politics, technology, media, etc, to give critical observation and views towards Indonesian urban contemporary issues. ruangrupa also produce collaborative works in the form of art projects such as exhibition, festival, art lab, workshop, research, as well as book, magazine and online-journal publication.
The Unbound Collective brings together years of research in a performance that moves through spaces that have historically seen Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians excluded and reduced to tell untold chapters of Australia’s true history. The Collective consists of Ali Gumillya Baker (curator), Simone Ulalka Tur, Faye Rosas Blanch and Natalie Harkin.
Listen now to the third conversation in the Think Tank series as part of the forthcoming exhibition Who’s Afraid of Public Space?
Presented in partnership with Art Projects Australia (APA), this session will be moderated by ACCA’s Public Programs Coordinator Bianca Winataputri and include contributors Dewi Cooke, Eleanor Jackson, Sim Luttin, Michael Camakaris and Ed Service.
ACCA is pleased to co-host further Think Tanks over the coming year to consider a wide array of considerations pertinent to the exhibition and the work of our partner organisations and co-hosts. The Think Tank discussions will continue to feed into the critical concerns of the overarching Who’s Afraid of Public Space? project, contributing to a polyphonic and polycentric understanding of our increasingly complex public realm.
Listen now to a conversation between between Yhonnie Scarce, Kokatha and Nukunu artist from South Australia, Mykaela Saunders, writer, teacher, and community researcher and Dimity Hawkins, Australian activist, researcher and academic.
This podcast concludes the series produced in association with 'Yhonnie Scarce: Missile Park', including Glass with Yhonnie Scarce, Kristel Britcher and Lisa Slade, Architecture with Louis Mokak, Mikhail Rodrick and Kim Bridgland, Family with Hannah Presley and Lisa Waup and Concrete Archives with Yhonnie Scarce and Lisa Radford.
Listen now to a conversation between Yhonnie Scarce, Kokatha and Nukunu artist from South Australia and Lisa Radford, artist and writer about their collaborative project 'Concrete Archives.'
Stay tuned for further podcasts to be released, produced in association with 'Yhonnie Scarce: Missile Park.'
Listen now to a conversation between Hannah Presley, currently curator of Indigenous art at the National Gallery of Victoria and inaugural curator for the Yalingwa program at ACCA, and Lisa Waup, artist and co-curator of 'Yhonnie Scarce: Missile Park.'
Stay tuned for further podcasts to be released, produced in association with 'Yhonnie Scarce: Missile Park', on view at ACCA until 14 June.
Listen now to a conversation between Louis Anderson Mokak, a Djugun man from West Kimberley and interdisciplinary designer, Mikhail Rodrick, architect at Wood Marsh and Yhonnie Scarce's long-term collaborator, and Kim Bridgland, a director at Melbourne based architecture studio Edition Office.
Stay tuned for further podcasts to be released, produced in association with 'Yhonnie Scarce: Missile Park', on view at ACCA until 14 June.
ACCA and the non/fictionLab at RMIT are pleased to present a live snapshot of outcomes and processes from the 2021 program of Writing in the Expanded Field Volume 3: Overlapping Writing, developed in conjunction with ACCA’s summer show Overlapping Magisteria.
Program participants: Des Barry, Anna Kate Blair, Alisa Blakeney, Sophia Cai, Kate Jama, Peta Murray, Diego Ramirez, Autumn Royal, Audrey Schmidt and Tina Stefanou.
Encompassing living organisms, kinetic installations and immersive assemblages, Overlapping Magisteria pays attention to multiple ways of knowing, sensing, feeling and interacting with the world. The works by participating artists 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.
Participants from Writing in the Expanded Field, Volume 3: Overlapping Writing have taken these exhibition themes as a provocation for further exploring what is possible when we shift position so that instead of writing about art we write with and from art.
Building on the discoveries of Writing in the Expanded Field Volume 1 and Volume 2, and the ongoing inquiries of RMIT non/fictionLab, writer/participants are exploring embodiment, feeling, and intuition in the writer’s encounter with art, situating material, poetic and playful ways of knowing alongside critical and curatorial perspectives. Writers have also participated in an overlapping, or ‘cross-over writing’, methodology that explores decentred authorship and cacophonous voice alongside the development of individual pieces.
Listen now to a discussion about the medium of glass between Yhonnie Scarce, Kokatha and Nukunu artist from South Australia, Kristel Britcher, artist, designer and head of the Jam Factory glass studio, and Lisa Slade, Assistant Director at the Art Gallery of South Australia.
Stay tuned for further podcasts to be released, produced in association with 'Yhonnie Scarce: Missile Park', on view at ACCA until 14 June.
Counter-monuments: Indigenous settler relations in Australian contemporary art and memorial practices
Session Three: Friday 19 March 2021
Chair: Dr Marnie Badham, Senior Research Fellow, CAST, RMIT School of Art
SPEAKERS: Unbound Collective: Sovereign Acts of (Anti)Memorial Love Djon Mundine: Remembering and Forgetting –Forgiveness and Not Forgetting
More information: https://acca.melbourne/counter-monuments-indigenous-settler-relations-in-australian-contemporary-art-and-memorial-practices
Genevieve Grieves and Dr Amy Spiers have developed this program in partnership with the Indigenous Settler Relations Collaboration (ISRC), University of Melbourne, Contemporary Art and Social Transformation (CAST), RMIT, and with assistance from the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
ACCA is pleased to host this symposium as part of the 2020-22 research, publication and exhibition project 'Who’s Afraid of Public Space?'
Counter-monuments: Indigenous settler relations in Australian contemporary art and memorial practices
Session Two: Thursday 18 March 2021
Chair: Genevieve Grieves, Indigenous Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Melbourne
SPEAKERS: Dr Fiona Foley: Honouring our Aboriginal Warriors
Carol Que and Joel Sherwood Spring: Mutually assured construction
Lilly Brown, Dianne Jones and Dr Odette Kelada: Mass Exposure: Memory Laundering, Racial Literacy and the Art of Truth Telling
MORE INFO: https://acca.melbourne/counter-monuments-indigenous-settler-relations-in-australian-contemporary-art-and-memorial-practices
Genevieve Grieves and Dr Amy Spiers have developed this program in partnership with the Indigenous Settler Relations Collaboration (ISRC), University of Melbourne, Contemporary Art and Social Transformation (CAST), RMIT, and with assistance from the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
ACCA is pleased to host this symposium as part of the 2020-22 research, publication and exhibition project 'Who’s Afraid of Public Space?'
Counter-monuments: Indigenous settler relations in Australian contemporary art and memorial practices
Session One: Wednesday 17 March 2021
Chair: Associate Professor Sana Nakata, co-founder of the Indigenous Settler Relations Collaboration, University of Melbourne:
SPEAKERS: Genevieve Grieves and Dr Amy Spiers: Counter-monuments: An introduction
Dr Julie Gough: MISSING or DEAD: reinstating the hidden figures of history
Paola Balla and Dr Clare Land, with Kate Golding: Indigenous perspectives on Captain Cook: this full agency, this decolonised spirit
MORE INFO: https://acca.melbourne/counter-monuments-indigenous-settler-relations-in-australian-contemporary-art-and-memorial-practices
Genevieve Grieves and Dr Amy Spiers have developed this program in partnership with the Indigenous Settler Relations Collaboration (ISRC), University of Melbourne, Contemporary Art and Social Transformation (CAST), RMIT, and with assistance from the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
ACCA is pleased to host this symposium as part of the 2020-22 research, publication and exhibition project 'Who’s Afraid of Public Space?'
Education: Alternatives and the Academy with Emily Floyd and Gridthiya Gaweewong
This program is part of ACCA’s 2021 Lecture Series, Experimental Institutionalism: Contemporary Art and Curatorial Ecologies and features two short lectures by Emily Floyd and Gridthiya Gaweewong, followed by a conversation with ACCA’s Artistic Director and CEO Max Delany.
'Loose Objects and Situated Knowledge', a lecture by Emily Floyd:
Emily Floyd’s practice activates spatial and material strategies of child-centred learning, exploring possibilities and limitations for navigating the casualised realm of Contemporary Art’s critical classroom. Emily will discuss the concept of Loose Objects, an institutional experimentalism used in Montessori classrooms, referring to objects that can be moved around and manipulated by children as they play and explore. Like utopian artworks, Loose Objects play the role of itinerant, post-human educators; freely circulating across institutional frameworks. Yet, what happens when these haptic distractions can no longer deflect from the flaking paint on the kindergarten walls?
'What’s missing with the Art School in Thailand (and beyond)?' a lecture by Gridthiya Gaweewong:
Gridthiya Gaweewong founded arts organisation Project 304 in 1996, and is currently Artistic Director of the Jim Thompson Art Center, Bangkok. Her curatorial projects have addressed issues of social transformation confronting artists from Thailand and beyond since the Cold War. Gaweewong has organized exhibitions and events including Underconstruction, Tokyo (2000 – 2002), Politics of Fun at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2005), the Bangkok Experimental Film Festival (1997–2007) (co-founded with Apichatpong Weerasethakul), Saigon Open City in Saigon, Vietnam (2006-07) (with Rirkrit Tiravanija) and Unreal Asia, Oberhausen International Short Film Festival (2010). Gaweewong is on the curatorial team for the 2018, 12th Gwangju Biennale, Imagined Borders. She is also the head curator of ICI’s traveling exhibition Apichatpong Weerasethakul: The Serenity in Madness.
Read more about the speakers, their lectures and the series here: https://acca.melbourne/program/experimental-institutionalism-education/
Listen to a conversation between exhibiting artist Yhonnie Scarce and exhibition curator Max Delany about Scarce’s major new commission, 'Missile Park'.
'Missile Park' extends Scarce’s research into the impacts of nuclear testing on the land and the people of South Australia, and the architectural legacies of past and ongoing international military presence in the region.
Image: Yhonnie Scarce, 'Missile Park' 2021, installation view, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. Commissioned by ACCA and IMA. Courtesy the artist and THIS IS NO FANTASY, Melbourne. Photograph: Andrew Curtis
Listen now to Yhonnie Scarce in conversation with Daniel Browning, producer and presenter of Awaye! on ABC Radio National, as they unpack a range of ideas in Scarce’s practice and consider the works on display in the artist’s major solo survey, 'Yhonnie Scarce: Missile Park'.
Yhonnie Scarce is an artist known for sculptural installations which span architecturally-scaled public art projects to intimately-scaled assemblages replete with personal and cultural histories. Scarce is a master glass-blower, which she puts to the service of spectacular and spectral installations full of aesthetic, cultural and political significance. Her work also engages the photographic archive and found objects to explore the impact and legacies of colonial and family histories and memory. Yhonnie Scarce was born in Woomera, South Australia, and belongs to the Kokatha and Nukunu peoples.
Daniel Browning is an Aboriginal journalist, radio broadcaster, documentary maker, sound artist and writer. Currently, he produces and presents Awaye!, the Indigenous art and culture program on ABC RN, a specialist radio network of Australia’s national broadcaster. Awaye! surveys contemporary Indigenous cultural practice across the arts spectrum. A visual arts graduate, Daniel is also a widely-published freelance arts writer. He is a former guest editor of Artlink Indigenous, and the curator of Blak Box, a specially-designed sound pavilion commissioned by Urban Theatre Projects. He studied English and Art History at the University of Queensland before graduating with a degree in visual arts from the Queensland University of Technology. Daniel is a descendant of the Bundjalung and Kullilli peoples of far northern New South Wales and south-western Queensland.
Image: Yhonnie Scarce in conversation with Daniel Browning at ACCA. Photograph: Arini Byng
ACCA’s 2021 Lecture Series ‘Experimental Institutionalism: Contemporary Art & Curatorial Ecologies’ delves into the artistic, curatorial, organisational and institutional models in which artists, curators and producers reflect and shape the role of contemporary art practice.
Our first lecture ‘Exchange: Reciprocity and institutional collaboration’ features Nikos Papastergiadis and Laura Raicovich presenting a short lecture each, followed by a discussion with ACCA’s Artistic Director and CEO Max Delany.
Read more here: https://acca.melbourne/program/experimental-institutionalism-exchange/
‘On the Museums of the Commons’ Lecture by Nikos Papastergiadis
Museums of the Commons is a recent 2020 publication by Papastergiadis that examines L’Internationale, an ongoing confederation between six museums and contemporary art institutions in Europe. Chronicling the challenges faced by the museums, Papastergiadis goes on to situate their responses within the wider political and cultural context that is shaping the future of all contemporary art museums. Five key domains of research are explored within the book: the genealogy of the museum; the need for alternative models of trans- institutional governance; examples of innovation in the spaces of aesthetic production; experimentation in the forms of partnership and engagement with constituents; and finally, examination of the impact of a collaborative and collective regime of artistic practices. Museums of the Commons provides a multi- perspectival account of a trans-institutional and transnational collaboration.
‘On Interconnection, Culture, and Care’ Lecture by Laura Raicovich
The activism of 2020 was a bright call for liberation. Indeed, this is the first moment in my lifetime when I feel there is truly an opportunity to make the radical change our society so desperately needs. Can it lead to an excising of the beliefs and behaviours that are poison to a culture that is killing itself by perpetrating such egregious harm? Can society recover from the delirium of individualism to recognize the fundamental interconnectivity of humanity? Can cultural spaces be undone and redone to accommodate and support this transformation, and even provide models for its manifestation in society at large? Through an examination of recent transnational events and their impact on perceptions of what is possible, I will consider how we might use cultural spaces as sites of societal transformation and civic life. Discussions of the myth of institutional neutrality as a gatekeeping device that supports the status quo, alongside unpacking protest and unionization efforts as acts of radical care, point to specific ideas and suggestions towards moving forward collectively and more equitably.
Listen to artists Mimosa Echard, Sidney McMahon and Robert Andrew and and as they discuss their newly commissioned works for Overlapping Magisteria: the 2020 Macfarlane Commissions.
Encompassing living organisms, kinetic installations and immersive assemblages, Overlapping Magisteria pays attention to multiple ways of knowing, sensing, feeling and interacting with the world. The works by participating artists 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.
The artists in Overlapping Magisteria layer intuitive and sensory material responses with ideas drawn from across disciplinary as well as metaphysical domains to consider the possibilities of a world in flux, transformation and entropy.
Image: Installation view, Sidney McMahon; Robert Andrew in Overlapping Magisteria, the 2020 Macfarlane Commissions, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. Commissioned by ACCA and the Macfarlane Fund. Photograph: Andrew Curtis
Speakers: Rebecca Huntley, Isadora Vaughan, Amanda Cachia and Tim Riley Walsh.
Listen to a panel of artists, writers, academics, journalists and environmentalists each addressing our collective responsibility to sustain our planet.
This forum reflects on working better together across various disciplines and backgrounds in addressing the climate emergency. Panellists will consider the social, cultural and economic opportunities that can be cultivated to create long-term sustainability and resilience, from addressing a culture of care, to the roles played by arts and culture in sustainable and collective ways of working.
Image: Isadora Vaughan, 'Ogives' 2020, installation view, 'Overlapping Magisteria: the 2020 Macfarlane Commissions', Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. Commissioned by ACCA and the Macfarlane Fund. Courtesy the artist and STATION, Melbourne. Photograph: Andrew Curtis
Listen to artists Isadora Vaughan and Sam Petersen as they discuss their newly commissioned works for Overlapping Magisteria: The 2020 Macfarlane Commissions.
Encompassing living organisms, kinetic installations and immersive assemblages, Overlapping Magisteria pays attention to multiple ways of knowing, sensing, feeling and interacting with the world. The works by participating artists 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.
The artists in Overlapping Magisteria layer intuitive and sensory material responses with ideas drawn from across disciplinary as well as metaphysical domains to consider the possibilities of a world in flux, transformation and entropy.
Image: Isadora Vaughan, 'Ogives' 2020, installation view, 'Overlapping Magisteria: the 2020 Macfarlane Commissions', Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne. Commissioned by ACCA and the Macfarlane Fund. Courtesy the artist and STATION, Melbourne. Photograph: Andrew Curtis
Brook Andrew, Artistic Director of NIRIN, 22nd Biennale of Sydney in discussion with exhibiting NIRIN NAARM artists, including Victoria Hunt, Justin Shoulder and James Tylor.
Hosted online for a limited one-week period from 10–15 November, NIRIN NAARM is a unique collaboration between ACCA and the Biennale of Sydney, presenting key works from NIRIN, the 22nd Biennale of Sydney online on ACCA's website.
Read more about NIRIN NAARM here: https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/nirin-naarm/
Recorded on Zoom on Saturday 14 November 2020
This episode featuring Tony Birch is part of Six Walks an audio walking tour series commissioned by ACCA – Australian Centre for Contemporary Art.
Find bio, access notes, images and further information here: https://acca.melbourne/six-walks-episode-one-tony-birch/
ABOUT THIS EPISODE: Tony Birch’s walk, along a section of the Birrarung (Yarra) river from the Children’s Farm at Collingwood to the Fairfield ‘pipe-bridge’ and surrounding country, is located on the land of the Wurundjeri People of the greater Kulin Nation. Each time we walk we consider the privilege of being on Wurundjeri land and pay respect not only to their Elders – past, present and emerging – but all of their people. The Birrarung River is an ancient waterway. It precedes the birth of what we know today as Port Phillip Bay by tens of thousands of years. Prior to the formation of Port Phillip Bay and Bass Strait, during the end of the Ice Age, the Birrarung flowed across a land mass known as the Bassian Plains, that joined what we know today as Victoria and Tasmania. The ancient Birrarung eventually flowed into the Southern Ocean. While the contemporary Birrarung River has changed significantly over thousands of years, we know that the original bed of the Ice Age river remains, and can be located around 100 metres below Port Phillip Bay at the heads of the bay. The significance of this geological, cultural and spiritual reality should not be lost on us as we walk by the river today. We are sharing a story of both the past and the present, enmeshed in the country beneath our feet.
Tony Birch is an award winning author. He is a frequent contributor to ABC local and national radio, a regular guest at writers’ festivals, and a climate justice campaigner. Read the full bio via the link above.
Curators: Annika Kristensen and Miriam Kelly Audio technician: Simon Cotter
ABOUT THE SERIES: Six Walks has been conceived to be ideally listened to in situ, with headphones on a personal mobile device. Maps, directions and access notes are available with each walk to assist with orientation.
ACCA reminds participants to be aware of their surroundings and to adhere to road safety guidelines at all times. Please note that when undertaking a walk, participants must assume personal responsibility for any liability, injury, loss, or damage in any way connected with their experience of Six Walks.
Six Walks can also be listened to from anywhere and at any time and Text versions of each walk are available for download.
ACCA acknowledges the support of Creative Victoria in the development of the Six Walks series.
This episode featuring Sophie Cunningham is part of Six Walks an audio walking tour series commissioned by ACCA – Australian Centre for Contemporary Art.
Find bio, access notes, images and further information here: https://acca.melbourne/six-walks-episode-two-sophie-cunningham/
ABOUT THIS EPISODE: In this episode of Six Walks, author Sophie Cunningham invites you on a walk through Royal Park. Established in 1854, Royal Park’s very existence was both a gesture towards the colonial administrator's belief in the role of public spaces to improve the health of the new town’s citizens, and a strategic way of building a green fortress around the city: that is parks were established as a way of displacing the traditional owners, the Wurundjeri people, from significant lands.
Sophie’s narration of her walk is interspersed with readings from her collection of essays, City of Trees, supported by the sonic landscapes of composer Martin Friedel. Read full bios via the link above.
Curator: Annika Kristensen Audio technician: Simon Cotter
ABOUT THE SERIES: Six Walks has been conceived to be ideally listened to in situ, with headphones on a personal mobile device. Maps, directions and access notes are available with each walk to assist with orientation. ACCA reminds participants to be aware of their surroundings and to adhere to road safety guidelines at all times. Please note that when undertaking a walk, participants must assume personal responsibility for any liability, injury, loss, or damage in any way connected with their experience of Six Walks.
Six Walks can also be listened to from anywhere and at any time and Text versions of each walk are available for download.
ACCA acknowledges the support of Creative Victoria in the development of the Six Walks series.
This episode featuring Eleanor Jackson is part of Six Walks an audio walking tour series commissioned by ACCA – Australian Centre for Contemporary Art.
Find bio, access notes, images and further information here: https://acca.melbourne/six-walks-episode-three-eleanor-jackson/
ABOUT THIS EPISODE: New parents are frequently told about the importance of art in a child’s development. From fostering creativity to visual, motor and social skills, art is considered a vehicle for enriching children’s communication abilities, nourishing new thoughts, and aiding expressive exploration. But how do we locate motherhood out of the domestic space and into the public realm, particularly the worlds of contemporary and public art? In her piece for Six Walks, Eleanor Jackson considers the ways in which mothers and caretakers occupy public space, blurring and reinforcing conventional understandings of mothering – using galleries, parks, libraries and the streets in a manner not always anticipated by planners and designers – all the while performing the role of “being mothers” with all the associated complex, gendered connotations that this brings.
Eleanor Jackson is a Filipino Australian poet, performer, and arts producer. She is the producer of the Melbourne Poetry Map, Vice-Chair of the Stella Prize and a Board Member of Queensland Poetry Festival. Eleanor is currently Chair, and was formerly Editor in Chief, of Peril Magazine, an online magazine celebrating Asian Australian arts and culture. Read extended bio via the link above.
Curator: Annika Kristensen Audio technician: Simon Cotter
ABOUT THE SERIES: Six Walks has been conceived to be ideally listened to in situ, with headphones on a personal mobile device. Maps, directions and access notes are available with each walk to assist with orientation. ACCA reminds participants to be aware of their surroundings and to adhere to road safety guidelines at all times. Please note that when undertaking a walk, participants must assume personal responsibility for any liability, injury, loss, or damage in any way connected with their experience of Six Walks.
Six Walks can also be listened to from anywhere and at any time and Text versions of each walk are available for download.
ACCA acknowledges the support of Creative Victoria in the development of the Six Walks series.
This episode featuring Idil Ali is part of Six Walks an audio walking tour series commissioned by ACCA – Australian Centre for Contemporary Art.
Find bio, access notes, images and further information here: https://acca.melbourne/six-walks-episode-four-idil-ali/
ABOUT THIS EPISODE: In this episode of Six Walks, storyteller Idil Ali guides you through an extended period of over ten years of gentrification at the Carlton Housing Estate. Based on her personal perspective, having grown up and witnessed the effect of this gentrification on both herself and her community, Idil attempts to dig up memories buried underneath an updated infrastructure.
Idil Ali is a proud Somali woman raised by the east African community in the Carlton flats. A settler on unceded Wurundjeri land, Idil embeds her belief in freedom, sovereignty and resistance into her work as a writer, performer, youth practitioner and community organiser.
Curator: Annika Kristensen Audio technician: Simon Cotter
ABOUT THE SERIES: Six Walks has been conceived to be ideally listened to in situ, with headphones on a personal mobile device. Maps, directions and access notes are available with each walk to assist with orientation.
ACCA reminds participants to be aware of their surroundings and to adhere to road safety guidelines at all times. Please note that when undertaking a walk, participants must assume personal responsibility for any liability, injury, loss, or damage in any way connected with their experience of Six Walks.
Six Walks can also be listened to from anywhere and at any time and Text versions of each walk are available for download.
ACCA acknowledges the support of Creative Victoria in the development of the Six Walks series.
This episode featuring Timmah Ball is part of Six Walks an audio walking tour series commissioned by ACCA – Australian Centre for Contemporary Art.
Find bio, access notes, images and further information here: https://acca.melbourne/six-walks-episode-five-timmah-ball/
ABOUT THIS EPISODE: Hidden between parkland and suburbia along the Maribyrnong River, a 128-hectare site formerly occupied by the Australian Defence Force lies vacant as government planners and private developers speculate its future use. Timmah Ball takes us on a walk around the periphery – considering the colonial history of the site, its use by the military in producing explosives and ammunition, its eery abandonment in the present-day, and predicted future gentrification. Considering the resonance between the military history of the site and the unprecedented limitations imposed upon Melbourne during COVID-related lockdowns, Timmah asks, as the city begins to open again, what futures can we imagine as we walk past the site’s forbidding walls?
Timmah Ball is a nonfiction writer, researcher and creative practitioner of Ballardong Noongar heritage. Read the extended bio via the link above.
Curator: Annika Kristensen Audio technician: Simon Cotter
ABOUT THE SERIES: Six Walks has been conceived to be ideally listened to in situ, with headphones on a personal mobile device. Maps, directions and access notes are available with each walk to assist with orientation. ACCA reminds participants to be aware of their surroundings and to adhere to road safety guidelines at all times. Please note that when undertaking a walk, participants must assume personal responsibility for any liability, injury, loss, or damage in any way connected with their experience of Six Walks.
Six Walks can also be listened to from anywhere and at any time and Text versions of each walk are available for download.
ACCA acknowledges the support of Creative Victoria in the development of the Six Walks series.
This episode featuring Christos Tsiolkas is part of Six Walks an audio walking tour series commissioned by ACCA – Australian Centre for Contemporary Art.
Find bio, access notes, images and further information here: https://acca.melbourne/six-walks-episode-six-christos-tsiolkas/
ABOUT THIS EPISODE: Christos Tsiolkas first got to know the city by falling in love with film. In his walk through the laneways, streets and arcades of Melbourne’s CBD, Christos recounts memories of early childhood trips to the cinema with his parents, teenage escapes from the suburbs to cinemas in the city, and his own discovery of secret quarters and spaces. The cinema is a space of dreaming. It is also an art infused with eroticism. Many of Christos’s secret spaces may now have vanished, but in his recollections, as he walks and meanders through the city, we can imagine the flicker of projectors and the experience of bathing in the luminescent silver light of dreams.
Christos Tsiolkas is a novelist, playwright, scriptwriter and essayist and film critic for The Saturday Paper. Read the extended bio via the link above.
Advisory note: contains strong language, sexual references and adult themes.
Curator: Annika Kristensen Audio technician: Simon Cotter
ABOUT THE SERIES: Six Walks has been conceived to be ideally listened to in situ, with headphones on a personal mobile device. Maps, directions and access notes are available with each walk to assist with orientation. ACCA reminds participants to be aware of their surroundings and to adhere to road safety guidelines at all times. Please note that when undertaking a walk, participants must assume personal responsibility for any liability, injury, loss, or damage in any way connected with their experience of Six Walks.
Six Walks can also be listened to from anywhere and at any time and Text versions of each walk are available for download.
ACCA acknowledges the support of Creative Victoria in the development of the Six Walks series.
Listen to ACCA’s Public Programs Coordinator Bianca Winataputri in conversation with ACCA Open artists Léuli Eshrāghi, Sean Peoples and Zanny Begg to discuss their new digital commissions that respond to the unusual times and cultural conditions in which they are produced.
Zanny Begg’s filmic narrative presents psycho-philosophical reflections on histories of isolation, contagion and quarantine., whilst Sean Peoples and Léuli Eshrāghi draw on cosmology and the digital archive as an open source for speculative fiction and historical re-interpretation, and as a meeting place and a keeping place for ancestral and other forms of knowledge. From artificial intelligence to sound, animation, video and archives, this conversation will delve into the various possibilities of working in the digital realm.
ACCA Open is a new series of contemporary art projects commissioned for the digital realm, initially conceived as a way for ACCA to continue to work with and support contemporary artists during COVID-19-related gallery closures and disruptions. The six newly commissioned projects are by Archie Barry, Zanny Begg, Léuli Eshrāghi, Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey, Amrita Hepi and Sam Lieblich, and Sean Peoples.
DEFINING MOMENTS LECTURE SERIES: Founding of Gallery 4A and the inaugural exhibition in 1997 with Dr Mikala Tai
ABOUT THIS LECTURE: In this lecture, Dr Mikala Tai discusses the founding of Gallery 4A in Sydney and its inaugural exhibition in 1997 featuring three Asian-Australian artists: Emil Goh, Lindy Lee and Hou Leong, curated by Melissa Chiu, 4A’s first curator and director. Tai considers the exhibition and the context in which the organisation launched and how 4A continues to expand and thrive.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Dr Mikala Tai is the Director of 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, and a curator, researcher and academic specialising in contemporary Asian art and Australian design. Tai has collaborated with local, national and international organisations to strengthen ties between Australia and Asia. As an academic Tai has lectured at both RMIT and the University of Melbourne, and devised and delivered the inaugural Contemporary Asian Art syllabus at RMIT (2012 – ) and the first China Fieldwork Course (2015 – ) with Rebecca Coates and Kate McNeill at the University of Melbourne. Tai was the founder and director of Supergraph – Australia’s Contemporary Graphic Art Fair, which has been held twice at the Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne and exhibited at Somerset House, London (2015). Tai currently sits on the board of BUS Projects, Melbourne.
THANK YOU TO OUR PARTNERS: Presenting Partner Abercrombie & Kent; Research Partner Centre for Visual Art (CoVA); Event Partners Melbourne Gin Company, Capi and City of Melbourne; Media Partners Art Guide Australia, The Saturday Paper, 3RRR FM Produced by Gatherer Media.
Further information: acca.melbourne/series/defining-moments/
A lively digital discussion, Think Tank #2 will engage with ideas of collaboration, collectivity, community engaged practice and the commons, as part of the Think Tank series as part of ACCA’s forthcoming exhibition Who’s Afraid of Public Space?
Presented in partnership with Footscray Community Arts Centre (FCAC), and moderated by FCAC Artistic Director and co-CEO Daniel Santangeli, the panel will include contributors Eugenia Flynn, Kent Morris, Roberta Joy Rich and Kate Sulan. Read more about the speakers via the link below.
ABOUT 'WHO'S AFRAID OF PUBLIC SPACE?' Developed with an assembly of advisors and collaborators, Who’s Afraid of Public Space? is a research, publication and exhibition project which ACCA is developing over 2020–22. ACCA has partnered with Abbotsford Convent, Arts Project Australia, Blak Dot, Bus Projects and FCAC to present a dispersed program of exhibitions and projects that consider critical ideas as to what constitutes public culture and to ask who might it be for? More information: https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/whos-afraid-of-public-space/
In this lecture, Dr Stephen Gilchrist considers two major exhibitions as key examples of Indigenous curation that encode Indigenous philosophies of critical care and value — 'Aratjara: Art of the First Australians' 1993 at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf; and 'fluent: Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Yvonne Koolmatrie, Judy Watson' at the Australian Pavilion, Venice Biennale in 1997.
Part of ACCA's lecture series 'Defining Moments: Australian Exhibition Histories 1968–1999'.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Dr Stephen Gilchrist belongs to the Yamatji people of the Inggarda language group of northwest Western Australia, and is Lecturer of Indigenous Art at the University of Sydney. He is a writer and curator who has worked with the Indigenous Australian collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (2003–05); the British Museum, London (2008); the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2005–10); and the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College (2011–13). He was also the Australian Studies Visiting Curator at the Harvard Art Museums, Harvard University (2012–16). Gilchrist has curated numerous exhibitions in Australia and the United States and has written extensively on Indigenous Art from Australia.
THANK YOU TO OUR PARTNERS: ACCA's lecture series 'Defining Moments: Australian Exhibition Histories 1968–1999' 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. This lecture video was produced by Gatherer Media: www.gatherer.media
Further information: https://acca.melbourne/series/defining-moments/
DEFINING MOMENTS LECTURE SERIES CONTINUES: Listen to Dr Ted Gott discussing the landmark 1994 exhibition ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way: Art in the Age of AIDS’ at the National Gallery of Australia, which presented over 200 works on the subject of HIV/AIDS by more than 100 Australian and international artists.
Part of ACCA's lecture series 'Defining Moments: Australian Exhibition Histories 1968–1999'.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER: 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.
THANK YOU TO OUR PARTNERS: ACCA's lecture series 'Defining Moments: Australian Exhibition Histories 1968–1999' 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.
Production by Gatherer Media: www.gatherer.media
Further information: https://acca.melbourne/program/defining-moments-dont-leave-me-this-way https://acca.melbourne/series/defining-moments
Listen to ACCA’s Senior Curator Annika Kristensen in conversation with ACCA Open artists Archie Barry, Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey, and Amrita Hepi and Sam Lieblich to discuss their new digital commissions that respond to the unusual times and cultural conditions in which they are produced.
In our final ACCA Book Club, Ellen van Neerven discusses 'Throat', their newly published poetry collection, which explores love, language and land, and shines a light on Australia’s unreconciled past and precarious present with humour and heart.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Ellen van Neerven is an award-winning writer of Mununjali Yugambeh (South East Queensland) and Dutch heritage. They write fiction, poetry, plays and non-fiction. Ellen’s first book, Heat and Light, was the recipient of the David Unaipon Award, the Dobbie Literary Award and the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Indigenous Writers Prize. Ellen’s second book, a collection of poetry, Comfort Food, was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Kenneth Slessor Prize and highly commended for the 2016 Wesley Michel Wright Prize. Throat is Ellen’s highly anticipated second poetry collection.
Further information: https://acca.melbourne/program/acca-book-club-ellen-van-neerven/
DEFINING MOMENTS LECTURE SERIES: The first Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at the Queensland Art Gallery 1993 with Doug Hall AM
ABOUT THIS LECTURE: In this lecture, Doug Hall AM reflects on the unique circumstances and legacy of the first Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane 1993, and how it was conceived as inseparable from the art museum’s conduct, collections development and its influence upon other institutional and programming activity.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Doug Hall AM was director, Queensland Art GalleryǀGOMA, Brisbane from 1987 to 2007. The first Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art was held in 1993. He conceived the idea for the Gallery of Modern Art and oversaw its development and opening in December 2006. He was Commissioner for the Australian exhibitions at the Venice Biennales in 2009 and 2011. He returned to Melbourne in 2010 and later appointed Associate Professor and Honorary Fellow, Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne. He was an inaugural member of the Asia Art Council, Guggenheim Museum, New York, and has served as a board member of the Australian Japan Foundation and the Australia Thailand Institute. His book Present Tense was published by Black Inc in 2019.
THANK YOU TO OUR PARTNERS: Presenting Partner Abercrombie & Kent; Research Partner Centre for Visual Art (CoVA); Event Partners Melbourne Gin Company, Capi and City of Melbourne; Media Partners Art Guide Australia, The Saturday Paper, 3RRR FM Produced by Gatherer Media.
Further information: acca.melbourne/series/defining-moments/
In this edition of ACCA Book Club, Wotjobaluk writer, consultant, artist and curator Kat Clarke discussed the role of sensation and memory in the development of a new written work. Clarke read her story ‘The Road Trip’, written in association with the 2018 ACCA exhibition 'A Lightness of Spirit is the Measure of Happiness' and finished the session with the reading of a new poem.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Kat Clarke is a proud Wotjobaluk writer, consultant, artist and curator from the Wimmera. She is an active advocate within her own community and Land Council and holds strong relationships with multiple Melbourne and Victorian communities. Graduating from RMIT in Creative Writing and majored in Screenwriting, Clarke gradually developed her craft alongside learning the ways of her cultural lore and storytelling from community and Elders dear to her. She continues to acknowledge her teachings by incorporating her own interpretations that speak through different forms of her creative practices. Clarke’s skills and knowledge in community engagement, networking, writing, the arts, and education has led her to collaborate with RMIT, Rag and Bone Man Press, Footscray Community Arts, The Koorie Heritage Trust, Screen Australia and The Lifted Brow – Blak Brow edition. She consults with mainstream, creative industries and community organisations ensuring the right cultural processes are upheld, and recently was contracted by ACMI as Assistant First Nations Curator working on the ACMI Re/new project and Cleverman: The Exhibition, where her contributions have been key throughout the development process.
Further information: https://acca.melbourne/program/acca-book-club-kat-clarke/
Recorded on Wednesday 12 August 2020
In this session of ACCA's Book Club, author and activist Tony Birch and Max Delany discuss two of Birch's essays about site-specific writing, one written in reflection of a residency in Banff, Canada to research climate change and Indigenous knowledge, and the second considering the ecological pertinence of the walking/reflective/philosophical essay model.
For more information, and links to read the essays available here: https://acca.melbourne/program/acca-book-club-tony-birch/
Defining Moments: 'The Aboriginal Memorial' at the 1988 Biennale of Sydney with Djon Mundine, OAM.
ABOUT THE LECTURE: Djon Mundine OAM reflects on his personal account of the initial development of the idea of 'The Aboriginal Memorial' from a series of projects which involved all sections of the local art community, to the genesis of an idea for a memorial, through to the process of its realisation into the form it took at the '7th Biennale of Sydney' in 1988, and its subsequent permanent installation in the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Djon Mundine OAM is a member of the Bandjalung people of northern New South Wales, and is an independent curator, activist and writer. His career has helped revolutionise the criticism and display of contemporary Aboriginal art, including through prominent curatorial positions held in many national and international institutions, including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and Queensland Art Gallery. Between 1979 and 1995. He worked as art advisor at Milingimbi in the Crocodile Islands and at Bula-bula Arts in Ramingining in Arnhem Land where he originated and oversaw the Aboriginal Memorialproject. In 1993 he received the Medal of the Order of Australia for service to the promotion and development of Aboriginal arts, crafts and culture. In 2005-2006 he was Research Professor at The National Museum of Ethnology (Minpaku) in Osaka, Japan.
THANK YOU TO OUR PARTNERS: Presenting Partner Abercrombie & Kent; Research Partner Centre for Visual Art (CoVA); Event Partners Melbourne Gin Company, Capi and City of Melbourne; Media Partners Art Guide Australia, The Saturday Paper, 3RRR FM Produced by Gatherer Media.
Further information: https://acca.melbourne/series/defining-moments/
This conversation between Peter Cripps and Channon Goodwin considers the contemporary relevance of ideas of 'recession art', and follows on from the the lecture by Cripps and response from Goodwin, addressing the 1985 exhibition 'Recession art and other strategies' 1985 at the IMA, curated by Cripps, and the 2019 publication 'Permanent Recession', edited by Goodwin. This conversation is part of ACCA's Lecture Series Defining Moments: Australian Exhibition Histories 1968–1999.
Listen to the lecture by Peter Cripps, and response by Goodwin here: https://soundcloud.com/acca_melbourne/defining-moments-peter-cripps-on-recession-art-and-other-strategies
Read more about the lecture series here: https://acca.melbourne/series/defining-moments
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS: Peter Cripps is an artist and a former Director of the Institute of Modern Art (IMA), Brisbane (1984–86). As an artist has exhibited widely in Australia and internationally since the 1970s, with recent major individual survey exhibitions including Peter Cripps: Endless Space at the IMA, Brisbane in 2012, and Peter Cripps: Towards an Elegant Solution, ACCA, Melbourne in 2010. Between 1973 and 1988, Cripps worked as a curator and various other roles within a number of major Australian museums, galleries and alternative art spaces, as well as in a freelance capacity.
Channon Goodwin is an artist and arts-worker based in Melbourne. Goodwin is the Director of Bus Projects, founding Convener of the All Conference network, and makes films and podcasts for Fellow Worker.
A lecture by artist Peter Cripps on the exhibition 'Recession art and other strategies' 1985 at the IMA Brisbane, followed by a response from Channon Goodwin. Part of ACCA's Lecture Series 'Defining Moments: Australian Exhibition Histories 1968–1999'.
Listen to the follow up conversation between Peter Cripps and Channon Goodwin (Director of Bus Projects, founding Convener of the All Conference network) on the ACCA Podcast here: https://soundcloud.com/acca_melbourne/defining-moments-peter-cripps-channon-goodwin-permanent-recession-art-labour-circumstance
Further information: acca.melbourne/series/defining-moments- popism/
ABOUT THE LECTURE: In response to the social, political and cultural contexts of the 1970s and 80s, Peter Cripps curated the exhibition Recession Art, at the Institute of Modern Art (IMA), Brisbane in 1987. According to Cripps, ‘Recession art refers to art which is made under the pressure of little money and an insignificant market. It tends to be small, easy to produce, store and dispose of. It included the development of new strategies for the sale of works; the possibility of replacing parts as they sell with replicas. It is an art based on the limited means of production, speed of production and small size of constituent units, which, since they can form larger works, do not restrict the artist in the scale of his work. It is an art based on intellect rather than on formal qualities.’ In his lecture, Cripps reviews this exhibition, interrogating its legacy, as well as exploring perceived synergies between historical and contemporary independent art practice. Additionally, he assesses the role and impact of this type of artist thinking and practice on the contemporary context.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS: Peter Cripps is an artist and a former Director of the Institute of Modern Art (IMA), Brisbane (1984–86). As an artist has exhibited widely in Australia and internationally since the 1970s, with recent major individual survey exhibitions including 'Peter Cripps: Endless Space' at the IMA, Brisbane in 2012, and 'Peter Cripps: Towards an Elegant Solution' ACCA, Melbourne in 2010. Between 1973 and 1988, Cripps worked as a curator and various other roles within a number of major Australian museums, galleries and alternative art spaces, as well as in a freelance capacity.
Channon Goodwin is an artist and arts-worker based in Melbourne. Goodwin is the Director of Bus Projects, founding Convener of the All Conference network, and makes films and podcasts for Fellow Worker.
Thank you to our partners: Presenting Partner Abercrombie & Kent; Research Partner Centre for Visual Art (CoVA); Event Partners Melbourne Gin Company, Capi and City of Melbourne; Media Partners Art Guide Australia, The Saturday Paper, 3RRR FM Produced by Gatherer Media.
In this session of ACCA Book Club, Quentin Sprague and John Kean discusses Sprague’s 2020 book, 'The Stranger Artist' (published by Hardie Grant).
ACCA Book Club is our new monthly lunch-time catch up about reading, writing and more. Each month, we invite a special guest and previous contributor to ACCA publications, to lead an open and active discussion with participants about a written or spoken-word work of their choice online via Zoom to a small group.
Further information including speaker bios available here: https://acca.melbourne/program/acca-book-club-quentin-sprague-and-john-kean/
Recorded on 24 June 2020
In this first recorded ACCA Book Club, Elvis Richardson and Melinda Rackham discuss their forthcoming publication 'CoUNTess: Spoiling Illusions since 2008', specifically '‘Chapter 3: My Brilliant Art School Career’ with participants on Zoom.
ACCA Book Club is our new monthly lunch-time catch up about reading, writing and more. Each month, we invite a special guest and previous contributor to ACCA publications, to lead an open and active discussion with participants about a written or spoken-word work of their choice online via Zoom to a small group.
Further information including speaker bios available here: https://acca.melbourne/program/acca-book-club-elvis-richardson-melinda-rackham/ More information about CoUNTess Report available here: https://countess.report/
Recorded on 10 June 2020
Popism, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1982 Lecture by Judy Annear
The exhibition POPISM was held at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1982. At 24 years old, recent honours graduate and founder and editor of Art & Text magazine, Paul Taylor was invited to curate an exhibition of contemporary Australian art. The NGV was usually described as ‘the bunker’ with apparently little connection to the local art scene or experimental practice. POPISM came like a bolt from the blue, hard on the heels of the first five issues of Art &Text.
This lecture will discuss the exhibition and the artists (Howard Arkley, David Chesworth, Ian Cox, Juan Davila, Richard Dunn, Paul Fletcher, Maria Kozic, Robert Rooney, Jane Stevenson, The Society for Other Photography, Imants Tillers, Peter Tyndall, Jenny Watson, and Tsk Tsk Tsk), provide some background and context to the ideas and practices, and the evolution of Taylor’s thinking and working. I will trace this through Taylor’s published writings, the various reactions to his activities, and the recollections and interpretations of his peers – then and now.
Further information: acca.melbourne/series/defining-moments- popism/
Copyright ACCA and Judy Annear Produced by Gatherer Media
Thank you to our partners: Presenting Partner Abercrombie & Kent; Research Partner Centre for Visual Art (CoVA); Event Partners Melbourne Gin Company, Capi and City of Melbourne; Media Partners Art Guide Australia, The Saturday Paper, 3RRR FM
Image: POPISM 1982, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
This Think Tank is the first in a series of public forums that will take place over the next twelve months that will both feed into and highlight the ideas and concerns of ACCA’s forthcoming 2021 research, publication and exhibition project, 'Who’s Afraid of Public Space?'
This forum featured key thinkers in public culture, art and design to consider the impacts of the rapid turn to the digital, messaging around fear, accessibility, as well as other recent global discussions and debates around the contested nature of public space, and the shifting character of public culture.
Speakers: Dr Marnie Badham; Eugenia Flynn; Dr Grace McQuilten; Professor Nikos Papastergiadis; Nur Shkembi and moderated by ACCA Artistic Director and CEO Max Delany.
Recorded on 29 April 2020. Graphic recording and hero image by Sarah Firth.
For more information visit: acca.melbourne/program/think-tank-whos-afraid-of-public-space/
What does it means to live, work and create in the pre-history of the future? This lively discussion about the role of new and emergent technologies in the visual arts and contemporary culture considers the developments in motion capture, mining virtual libraries of code, artificial intelligence, gaming and computer generated imagery and more. The Forum panel features Feedback Loops exhibiting artist Lu Yang (via a digital presence, with translation from Mandarin into English by Zheng Zhou); alongside with Professor Uwe Aickelin Head of School of Computing and Information Systems at University of Melbourne; Dr Claire Roberts, Associate Professor Art History at University of Melbourne; and electronic musician Becky ‘Sui Zhen’ Freeman. The panel is moderated by Rae Johnston, an esteemed and multi-award-winning STEM journalist, who is also Science and Technology Editor for NITV, and host of That Startup Show.
Recorded at ACCA on 3 March 2020
More info: acca.melbourne/exhibition/feedback-loops/
This forum was co-presented with The University of Melbourne and AsiaTOPA 2020’s Sinofuturist program, with the support of Arts Centre Melbourne and the Sidney Myer Fund.
Thank you also to our partners: Asia Engagement Partner: PR Asia; Exhibition Partners: AsiaTOPA, Dulux, Monash University, Quest Southbank, Playking Foundation, Colour Factory; Media Partner: Triple R
Image: Lu Yang, 'The Great Adventure of Material World' 2019 (still), single player, role-playing computer game. Courtesy the artist
In advance of the live performance of 'Carrion: Episodes' at ACCA, as part of the exhibition, 'Feedback Loops' (7 December 2019 – 22 March 2020), artist Justin Shoulder spoke with Kate Ben-Tovim, Associate Director of Asia TOPA 2020.
This rich and generous conversation unpacks a range of ideas in Shoulder’s performance practice, from birds to Body Weather, the underpinning influence of ecology, and considers Shoulder's experiences of working across the platforms of the night club, theatre and art gallery.
Recorded at ACCA on Wednesday 19 February 2020
More info: https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/feedback-loops/ or http://phasmahammer.com
Thank you to our partners: Asia Engagement Partner: PR Asia; Exhibition Partners: AsiaTOPA, Dulux, Monash University, Quest Southbank, Playking Foundation, Colour Factory; Media Partner: Triple R
Image: Justin Shoulder, 'Carrion: Episodes' 2020 (performance still). Courtesy the artist and Invite Arts. Photography: Jacqui Shelton
In this conversation, recorded in association with ACCA’s exhibition 'Feedback Loops' (7 December 2019 – 22 March 2020), exhibiting artist Madison Bycroft speaks with the exhibition Curator, Miriam Kelly about the installation of new drawings, sculptural video installation and performance works in this exhibition.
More info: acca.melbourne/exhibition/feedback-loops/ or https://maddog.hotglue.me
Thank you to our partners: Asia Engagement Partner: PR Asia; Exhibition Partners: AsiaTOPA, Dulux, Monash University, Quest Southbank, Playking Foundation, Colour Factory; Media Partner: Triple R
Image: Madison Bycroft, 'Antihero' 2019 (performance still). Courtesy the artist. Photography: Jacqui Shelton
This podcast is part of of ACCA Education's 2019 ACCADEMY Program. During the last ACCADEMY workshop for 2019, participating students reflected on ACCA's exhibition 'Haroon Mirza: The Construction of an Act' and co-developed an audible response to Mirza’s acoustic, visual and spatial poetry.
ABOUT THE PROGRAM: ACCADEMY is an Education Program providing unique and dedicated opportunities for young people to develop new skills and engage with arts industry professionals, contribute to special projects and gain understanding of the arts industry. In a series of six workshops throughout 2019, ACCADEMY members worked with arts professionals on a variety of creative projects, including art making, writing, project planning and podcast production.
FURTHER INFO: http://acca.melbourne/education/ https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/haroon-mirza
In this floor talk, recorded in ACCA's galleries, exhibiting artist Sahej Rahal speaks about his installation of artificial intelligence and sculptural works for ACCA’s exhibition, 'Feedback Loops' (7 December 2019 – 22 March 2020).
Rahal’s installations, installations and digital works are part of a constructed mythology that he creates drawing upon sources ranging from local legends to science fiction. By bringing these into dialogue with each other, Rahal creates scenarios where indeterminate beings emerge into the everyday as if from the cracks in our civilisation.
More info: https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/feedback-loops/ http://www.sahejrahal.com/
Recorded at ACCA on Saturday 7 December 2019
Thank you to our partners: Asia Engagement Partner: PR Asia; Exhibition Partners: AsiaTOPA, Dulux, Monash University, Quest Southbank, Playking Foundation, Colour Factory; Media Partner: Triple R
Image: Sahej Rahal, 'Antraal' 2019 (still), sentient AI program. Courtesy the artist and Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai
In this lecture feminist art theorist and writer Professor Anne Marsh discusses the influential 1976 exhibition Australian & New Zealand Post-Object Art: A Survey — the first major exhibition curated by the Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, and its legacy for experimental art in Australia today.
This is the final lecture for 2019 in ACCA's to-year series 'Defining Moments: Australian Exhibition Histories 1968–1999'. The 2020 series will be announced shortly on our website here: https://acca.melbourne/series/defining-moments/
More information here: https://acca.melbourne/program/defining-moments-post-object-art-in-australia-and-new-zealand/ http://annemarsh.com.au/ Recorded at ACCA on Monday 4 November 2019
Thank you to our partners: Abercrombie & Kent Presenting Partner; Centre for Visual Art (CoVA) Research Partner; Event Partners Melbourne Gin Company, Capi and City of Melbourne; Media Partners Art Guide Australia, The Saturday Paper, 3RRR FM
Image: Australian & New Zealand Post-Object Art: A Survey, Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide, South Australia, exhibition catalogue, Ian de Gruchy artist page (detail) 1976
The Psychology of Sounds Forum
Listen to our forum about the psychology of music and sound, moderated by psychiatrist, author and media commentator, Steve Ellen. Building on the considerations of sound and the voice in healing and transcendence in ACCA’s exhibition Haroon Mirza: The Construction of an Act, this discussion brought together sound artist and co-director of FutureTense, Fjorn Butler; and music therapist at the Peter McCallum Cancer Centre, Stephan Skov; with exhibition curator Annika Kristensen.
Further info available here: http://acca.melbourne/program/the-psychology-of-sounds-forum/ Recorded at ACCA on Monday 28 October 2019
Thank you to our exhibition partners: Exhibition Partners Melbourne International Arts Festival, Henry Moore Foundation, John Wardle Architects, Centre for Visual Art (CoVA), Dulux; Performance Partners Liquid Architecture, JMC Academy; Media Partner 3RRR FM
Lecture by Janine Burke, Respondent: Helen Hughes
In this lecture, art historian and curator Janine Burke reviews pivotal radical feminist interventions of the mid-1970s, interrogating their legacy and exploring catalysts for collective feminist action, as well as their influence on Australian art history.
Curator, writer and academic Helen Hughes responds and addresses the influence of this era on contemporary art and feminist thinking of today.
More information available: https://acca.melbourne/program/defining-moments-a-room-of-their-own-creating-a-space-for-the-feminist-collective/ https://research.unimelb.edu.au/cova/people/centre-fellows/janine-burke https://research.monash.edu/en/persons/helen-hughes Recorded at ACCA on Monday 7 October
Thank you to our partners: Abercrombie & Kent Presenting Partner; Centre for Visual Art (CoVA) Research Partner; Event Partners Melbourne Gin Company, Capi and City of Melbourne; Media Partners Art Guide Australia, The Saturday Paper, 3RRR FM
Chance Composition: Haroon Mirza and James Rushford in conversation
Artist Haroon Mirza is joined by collaborator and composer James Rushford in a conversation that provides insight into each of their practices, from their shared interest in the aesthetic and spatial possibilities of sound and sampling to their experimental approaches to collaboration. This conversation is presented in conjunction with the exhibition Haroon Mirza: The Construction of an Act, and the program of studio residencies that take place in the exhibition over September and early October.
Further info available here: acca.melbourne/program/chance-composition/ Recorded at ACCA on Monday 16 September 2019
Thank you to our exhibition partners: Exhibition Partners Melbourne International Arts Festival, Henry Moore Foundation, John Wardle Architects, Centre for Visual Art (CoVA), Dulux; Performance Partners Liquid Architecture, JMC Academy; Media Partner 3RRR FM
Doubting Writing/Writing Doubt: Public Readings Developed in partnership with RMIT University non/fiction lab
The Doubting Writing/Writing Doubt workshops were held over August and September 2019 to look closely at the themes of ACCA's exhibition, On Vulnerability and Doubt, and to ask: "How can engaging with doubt and vulnerability help us let go of conventional writing positions, and go further into writing about art in the expanded field?"
Listen here to the public readings by the 10 participants of their works, the final forms of which will be reproduced in a standalone publication.
Further information: acca.melbourne/program/doubting-writing-public-readings/ Recorded at ACCA on Wednesday 21 August 2019 Thank you to our partners: RMIT University non-fiction lab, Art + Australia,Art Guide Australia, The Lifted Brow
Almost Anything Goes: Sculpturescape 1975 at Mildura Lecture by Julie Ewington
In the 1970s Mildura became an unlikely epicentre of contemporary experimental art in Australia. Julie Ewington reflects in this lecture on the visionary leadership of Tom McCullough in staging the Mildura Sculpture Triennial, which morphed the town's Arts Centre from an exhibition of recent sculpture into a freewheeling consideration of contemporary forms that the state art museums could barely contemplate, let alone accommodate. Earth art, conceptual art, performance, feminist artists, ephemeral installations, artists living on site: Mildura commissioned and supported some of the first manifestations in a public art gallery in this country of ‘the expanded field’ of post-object art.
Further information: acca.melbourne/series/defining-moments/ Recorded at ACCA on Monday 2 September 2019
Thank you to our partners: Abercrombie & Kent Presenting Partner; Centre for Visual Art (CoVA) Research Partner; Event Partners Melbourne Gin Company, Capi and City of Melbourne; Media Partners Art Guide Australia, The Saturday Paper, 3RRR FM
Soft Touch: Brent Harris and Justin Clemens in conversation
Artist Brent Harris and academic, writer Justin Clemens discuss the role of vulnerability, doubt, desire and touch in Harris' painting and printmaking practice, specifically with reference to the works presented in ACCA's exhibition, On Vulnerability and Doubt.
Further info available here: https://acca.melbourne/program/brent-harris-justin-clemens/ Recorded at ACCA on Saturday 24 August 2019
Thank you to our exhibition partners: Exhibition Partners Jackson Clements Burrows Architects, Centre for Visual Art (CoVA), Dulux; Media Partners The Saturday Paper, 3RRR FM
ACCA is pleased to host Chi Tran: Attention is a form of prayer as part of the 2019 WRITING & CONCEPTS program.
A writer, artist and editor, Chi Tran presents this lecture in the form of a lyrical, prayer-like essay. Split into short chapters, Chi Tran's talk showcases 'how crucially feminist it is to combine poetry, autobiography, and critical theory,' as the speaker notes. This lecture is a meditation on embodied writing that seeks to simultaneously undo and affirm.
WRITING & CONCEPTS is produced by Future Tense and moderated by Jan van Schaik and Fjorn Butler. WRITING & CONCEPTS is supported by each of the host venues, MvS Architects, RMIT’s School of Art and School of Architecture & Urban Design, Melbourne University and ART + AUSTRALIA.
Further information: https://acca.melbourne/program/writing-concepts-chi-tran/ Recorded at ACCA on Thursday 29 August 2019
Bandits Live Comfortably in the Ruins by Sean Lynch Presented by the City of Melbourne
Irish artist Sean Lynch visited Melbourne in August 2019 as part of a research project into creative practice in Australia, with Arts Melbourne. In this lecture Lynch speaks about his practice and recent work in terms of the public realm.
Sean Lynch is interested in loose ends within stories: the lost footnotes and how to mediate their presence. The sculptures, installations, videos and publications generated in this process sway between the anecdotal and informative. Recent projects have included an exhibition of archaeological forgeries; a ‘storytelling’ installation at the Venice Biennale using sculpture and video; working with a fast food outlet now on the site of the forgotten first museum of London; cataloguing examples of vandalism and conservatism in modern art; locating remnants of the DeLorean car factory in the Atlantic Ocean; investigating alleged supernatural trees, in danger of destruction from new motorways; and finding illicit stone carvings by Irish workmen in Oxford.
Further information: https://acca.melbourne/program/sean-lynch-artist-talk-bandits-live-comfortably-in-the-ruins/ Recorded at ACCA on Monday 12 August 2019
Clifton Hill Community Music Centre Lecture by David Chesworth. Respondent: Kelly Fliender
The Clifton Hill Community Music Centre (CHCMC) was a lively place from 1976 to 1984, where artists from two distinct generations created, performed and debated. In this lecture, David Chesworth (coordinator between 1978-82) examines the CHCMC as one of the first places in Australia where the boundaries of performance, music-making, filmmaking and installation-making were dissolved.
Further information: acca.melbourne/series/defining-moments/ Recorded at ACCA on Monday 5 August 2019 Thank you to our partners: Abercrombie & Kent Presenting Partner; Centre for Visual Art (CoVA) Research Partner; Event Partners Melbourne Gin Company, Capi and City of Melbourne; Media Partners Art Guide Australia, The Saturday Paper, 3RRR FM
This panel discussion was presented alongside ACCA's exhibition 'On Vulnerability and Doubt' (until 1 Sept 2019) and focussed on self-doubt, imposter syndrome and the complexities for artists in putting themselves and their work on display. PANELLISTS: Exhibiting artist Charlie Sofo is joined by artists Kevin Chin and Jessie Scott and moderators from the Pro Prac Podcast Nicole Breedon and Kiera Brew Kurec.
This program was recorded at ACCA on 17 July 2019 and was presented in collaboration with Pro Prac. This podcast is a special episode of the Pro Prac podcast – the talk behind the artist talk. Find out more here: https://soundcloud.com/propracpodcast Read more about the exhibition here: https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/on-vulnerability-and-doubt/
Inhibodress: Multimedia interference: Lecture by Peter Kennedy; Respondent: Sue Cramer
Artist Peter Kennedy continues our lecture series on the game-changing moments in Australian exhibition histories, speaking on interference and Inhibodress, one of Australia’s first artist-run initiatives co-founded by Kennedy with Mike Parr, Tim Johnson and others.
Sue Cramer, curator of Inhibodress 1971-1972, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 1989, responds considering the legacy of this work in conceptual art practice, and the politics of working with the history of performance art and re-staging historical exhibitions.
Further info available here: https://acca.melbourne/series/defining-moments/ http://www.peterkennedy.com.au/ Recorded at ACCA on Monday 8 July 2019 Thank you to our partners: Abercrombie & Kent Presenting Partner; Centre for Visual Art (CoVA) Research Partner; Event Partners Melbourne Gin Company, Capi and City of Melbourne; Media Partners Art Guide Australia, The Saturday Paper, 3RRR FM
Hear from exhibiting artists in On Vulnerability and Doubt: Join us in the galleries to hear exhibiting artists Cherine Fahd (Sydney), Archie Moore(Brisbane) and Ambera Wellmann(Berlin), speak about their ideas informing the work in the exhibition and their practice more broadly. Submit your fear to Cherine Fahd's anonymous survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/ZLLPH8Q Read more about the exhibition here: https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/on-vulnerability-and-doubt/ Additional links: https://www.amberawellmann.com/ https://cherinefahd.com/home https://thecommercialgallery.com/artist/archie-moore/works Recorded at ACCA on Saturday 29 June 2019
This second 'Public Meeting' at ACCA features artist Tom Nicholson together with guest speakers Ryan Johnston, current Director of Buxton Contemporary and former Head of Art at the Australian War Memorial; and Dr Micaela Sahhar an Australian-Palestinian poet and researcher; and Dr Jordana Silverstein, an ARC Postdoctoral Research Associate at The University of Melbourne, researching the history of Australian child refugee policy from 1970 to the present.
This program takes as its starting point, two key works in ACCA’s exhibition 'Tom Nicholson: Public Meeting' — 'Comparative monument (Shellal)' 2014–17, which draws on the complex history of the Shellal mosaic uncovered by Australian soldiers in Palestine during the First World War, and subsequently installed at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra; and 'Comparative monument (Ma’man Allah)' 2014, which articulates historical links between Jerusalem and Australia.
Further information: https://acca.melbourne/program/public-meeting-comparative-monument/ https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/tom-nicholson/ Recorded at ACCA on Saturday 1 June 2019
In this public forum convened by ACCA Artist Educator Andrew Atchison, artists Emily Floyd, Kathy Temin and Trent Walter reflect on the monument and public sculpture.
Taking the current ACCA exhibition, Tom Nicholson: Public Meeting, as a starting point this panel reflects on how the form of the traditional monument might be re-imagined to better engage the contemporary context and our collective futures.
This event was part of ACCA Education's Masterclass series.
Further resources: https://acca.melbourne/program/public-forum-reflections-on-public-sculpture-and-the-monument/ https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/tom-nicholson/ Recorded at ACCA on Wednesday 22 May 2019
Object and Idea: Lecture by Ian Milliss
National Gallery of Victoria Curator Brian Finemore saw the 1973 exhibition Object and Idea as a smaller conceptualist sequel to the 1968 exhibition The Field. But one invited artist, Ian Milliss, declined to participate having already moved on to working with trade unions and resident action groups rather than exhibitions, galleries and art audiences. At Finemore’s request Milliss wrote a catalogue essay titled New Artist explaining his thinking, the beginning of a politicised cultural activism that was really only accepted by the art world many decades later with the rise of relational aesthetics and social practice.
Further information: acca.melbourne/series/defining-moments/ http://www.ianmilliss.com/ Recorded at ACCA on Monday 3 June 2019
Thank you to our partners: Abercrombie & Kent Presenting Partner; Centre for Visual Art (CoVA) Research Partner; Event Partners Melbourne Gin Company, Capi and City of Melbourne; Media Partners Art Guide Australia, The Saturday Paper, 3RRR FM
In this podcast you'll hear artist Tom Nicholson, ACCA Curator Hannah Presley and academic John Kean engage in an informal and open discussion in the galleries, taking Nicholson's work 'Gorge Photograph, 13 September 1939' 2017-19 as a point of departure for discussion.
'Gorge Photograph, 13 September 1939' 2017-19 reimagines a specific place and time, highlighting the complex relationship between Victorian watercolourist Rex Battarbee and Western Arrernte artist Albert Namatjira. This Public Meeting is programmed alongside ACCA's exhibition 'Tom Nichoslon: Public Meeting' 5 April — 16 June 2019
Further information: https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/tom-nicholson/ https://acca.melbourne/program/public-meeting-gorge-photographs-namatjira-batterbee/
Recorded at ACCA on Saturday 18 May 2019
Digging for Honey Ants: The Papunya mural project Lecture by John Kean. Respondent: Hannah Presley
The creation of murals at the Papunya School in 1971 is cited as the singular catalyst that set off the Western Desert Painting movement. The truth of this claim is in fact more complex, confounding and consequential. In this lecture, John Kean examines the subject of the murals and the broader social context in which they were created, and reveals how this mythic gesture (on walls that few outside the community saw), signified a telling shift in colonial relations.
Further information: acca.melbourne/series/defining-moments/ https://papunyatula.com.au/ Recorded at ACCA on Monday 29 April 2019 Thank you to our partners: Abercrombie & Kent Presenting Partner; Centre for Visual Art (CoVA) Research Partner; Event Partners Melbourne Gin Company, Capi and City of Melbourne; Media Partners Art Guide Australia, The Saturday Paper, 3RRR FM
Lecture by John Kaldor AO; Respondent: Rebecca Coates
Described as ‘somewhere between a monument and an event’, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 'Wrapped Coast – One Million Square Feet', at Little Bay, Sydney, in 1968–69, was an extraordinary project that had an indelible impact on public art and inspired an enduring legacy for Australian culture. 'Wrapped Coast' was the first major environmental project by the internationally acclaimed French husband-and-wife artist duo. 'Wrapped Coast' was the inaugural Kaldor Public Art Project and, over a 50-year period, 33 ground-breaking projects followed. Links: https://acca.melbourne/series/defining-moments/ http://kaldorartprojects.org.au/ https://christojeanneclaude.net/ Recorded at ACCA on Monday 15 April 2019 Thank you to our partners: Abercrombie & Kent Presenting Partner; Centre for Visual Art (CoVA) Research Partner; Event Partners Melbourne Gin Company, Capi and City of Melbourne; Media Partners Art Guide Australia, The Saturday Paper, 3RRR FM
This panel discussion, hosted during ACCA's exhibition 'The Theatre is Lying: The inaugural Macfarlane Commissions' asked what is so intimidating about reality in a post-truth world?
The panel, featuring Justin Clemens, Maddison Connaughton and André Dao, considered how our understandings of trust, truth, fiction and reality have changed in the age of fake-news, Trumpism and social media, from their positions as established thinkers, writers, storytellers and journalists.
Recorded on Monday 4 March at ACCA. More information: https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/the-theatre-is-lying/
Sydney-based collaborators Anna Breckon and Nat Randall explore the intersection of live performance, video and film in a gallery context as they deep dive into the construction and development of their major new work 'Rear view' 2018 commissioned by ACCA and The Macfarlane Fund for ACCA's exhibition 'The Theatre is Lying' (15 December 2018–24 March 2019).
Recorded at ACCA on Saturday 23 March 2019
More information: https://acca.melbourne/program/keynote-lecture-anna-breckon-and-nat-randall/ https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/the-theatre-is-lying/
How does being a teacher affect your art practice? How can an artist successfully engage with an institution’s collection? How do we create our own opportunities and categories? What does it mean to trust your gut?
For this final episode of the second series, Tai Snaith and Meredith Turnbull discuss a broad range of topics around what it means to have a multifaceted, self-driven and supported practice. They share their love and importance of championing OTHER artists — what it means to not be a curator but to keep curatorial skills as part of your practice. Once again the notions of collapsing the boundaries between traditional notions of craft, ornament and art are highlighted and celebrated. Meredith praises the approachability of jewellery and the way it acts as a continuation of dialogue around ideas of genre, discipline and material values.
Together they question what ‘achieving’ and ‘professionalism’ really mean. Finally, the importance of looking back, taking stock of our practices; recognising what we have overcome and achieved and really asking which direction we want to take next.
Additional resources: Meredith’s website: http://meredithturnbull.com/ 'Closer' at the Ian Potter Museum of Art: http://www.art-museum.unimelb.edu.au/exhibitions/future-exhibitions/exhib-date/2018-03-27/exhib/meredith-turnbull-closer John Nixon’s pottery collection at Deakin University Art Gallery: https://thedesignfiles.net/news/john-nixon-studio-pottery-collection-melbourne/ Very Good Advice from Alice in Wonderland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Srn0xkXTSgs Shakespeare Grove studios: http://www.portphillip.vic.gov.au/art_spaces.htm QAGOMA’s Children’s Arts Centre: https://www.qagoma.qld.gov.au/whats-on/kids
What roles can social politics and social media play in driving an art practice? What role do beauty and aesthetic boundaries play in art today? How can these things interrelate?
Tai Snaith and Rowan Oliver delve down the rabbit hole of creating fictions around ideas and images of self and others, creating characters and narratives to open up ideas of social inclusiveness and empathy. Rowan outlines how we should keep making these fictions despite the despair around us. How does marketing affect our image of ourselves? What roles or characters do we play in social media? And what role do we play in the art world? Is it all a play? Rowan refreshingly discusses how she can foresee parts of her practice ‘shedding’ and talks frankly about choosing the path with the most flexibility of being open with herself. We also discuss Casting as a medium, playing the ‘art system game’ and her plans of moving into ‘Aquarian frequencies and taking down the government’.
Additional resources: Rowan’s website: http://rowanoliver.net/ Rowan’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everybodysdaughter/ Crumbling World Runway (Moma PS1 performance): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnQtOuyUnaU Gifts for Manus and Nauru: https://giftsformanusandnauru.org.au/ David Rosetsky: https://davidrosetzky.com/ Women Who Run with the Wolves: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/241823.Women_Who_Run_With_the_Wolves Stanislavski's system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislavski%27s_system Spencer Tunick: https://www.instagram.com/spencertunick/
How important is it to connect with a place that is part of your history? What are your responsibilities to make work for ‘your people’ as well as an art audience?
Tai Snaith and Megan Cope discuss what it means to move back to work ‘on country’ as a contemporary Indigenous artist. They unpack the complexities of relating to a place and its people, and how that might inform your work in a number of different ways. Megan talks about her involvement with proppaNOW and various travels from the bush to the city, overseas and now back to her father’s country on Quandamooka land. She sheds light on her passion for Middens and how they function in Indigenous culture, and their history as one of the earliest forms of architecture in the landscape.
Additional resources: Middens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midden RE FORMATION at The National, Art Gallery of NSW: https://thisisnofantasy.com/exhibition/the-national-new-australian-art/ ‘Haunt’ at IMA Brisbane: https://ima.org.au/2019-program-announced/ Sovereignty at ACCA: https://thisisnofantasy.com/exhibition/acca-sovereignty-2/ https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/sovereignty/ Blaktism: https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/awaye/the-blaktism/5391966 Elizabeth Durack: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Durack proppaNOW: https://proppanow.wordpress.com/about-us/
What does it mean to make artwork with a social consciousness? How do we represent our politics through what we wear?
Tai Snaith and Kate Just discuss the way that clothes, like skin, can carry a multitude of meanings, stories and histories to make up who we are. Kate talks about using other artists’ clothes as the palette or starting point for constructing her current portraits. Our conversation outlines Kate’s very real motives for making change within the art institution to make it a more diverse and balanced community and the capacity that each of us have to work together to achieve change.
Additional resources: Feminist Fan: http://www.katejust.com/feminist-fan/ Kate’s PhD project, The Texture of Her Skin: http://www.katejust.com/phd-texture-of-her-skin/ Catherine Opie: https://www.guggenheim.org/blogs/checklist/catherine-opie-denise-duhamel-and-the-stories-of-a-self-portrait Kate’s dream: https://www.instagram.com/p/BojWGCGlj0b/ Paris is Burning (1990): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Is_Burning_(film) The Furies: http://www.katejust.com/the-furies/ https://www.britannica.com/topic/Furies City of Port Phillip Rupert Bunny Fellowship: http://www.portphillip.vic.gov.au/rbf_fellowship.htm Tracy Connelly, The Age 2018: https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/five-years-on-still-no-answers-in-the-murder-of-st-kilda-sex-worker-tracy-connelly-20180710-p4zqnc.html
View the whole podcast series here: https://acca.melbourne/explore/podcasts/a-world-of-ones-own/
This event formed the public outcome of ACCA’s new writing program, Writing in the Expanded Field, alongside ACCA's exhibition Eva Rothschild: Kosmos (2018). In this public forum, writers, artists and performers who took part in the writing program, share results of the writing workshops and reflect on the future of art writing, criticism and publishing.
Presented in partnership with RMIT University non/fictionLab and supported by Art+Australia, Art Guide Australia and The Lifted Brow, Writing in the Expanded Field explores new methodologies for art writing and criticism, opening writing to an ‘expanded field’ in which the encounter between writer and artwork, and the relations of this engagement, may be animated by various writing positions between the critical, the personal and the imaginary.
Writing in the Expanded Field was developed in collaboration with Lucinda Strahan, writer and researcher at the RMIT non/fictionLab.
More info: http://acca.melbourne/program/writing-in-the-expanded-field/ https://www.rmit.edu.au/research/research-institutes-centres-and-groups/research-groups/nonfictionlab
In a few years time, there will be more dead people than living people on Facebook. This lecture by Professor Larissa Hjorth explores how social media affects how we think about life, death, afterlife and the everyday.
Hjorth considers the role of social media in art practice to consider how emotional and social playbour is presenting new forms of digital intimate publics. Drawing on her research and recent book, Haunting Hands (with Katie Cumiskey 2017), which investigates practices of loss and trauma in, and around, mobile media, Hjorth discusses how loss and grieving on social media creates new ways of understanding the relationship between life, death and afterlife in everyday life.
Distinguished Professor Larissa Hjorth is an artist, digital ethnographer and currently the Design & Creative Practice ECP Platform director at RMIT University. Hjorth has two decades experience working in cross-cultural, interdisciplinary, collaborative creative practice and socially innovative digital media research.
Presented by Abercrombie & Kent, ACCA’s 2018 lecture series, 'Uncommon knowledge: artists on their special interests' gives eight artists a microphone and an hour to speak about topics that inspire their art and thinking. Featuring a trans-generational cast of artists, Uncommon Knowledge brings together elements of history, lifestyle, philosophy, sound studies, sexuality, cultural politics and more, to challenge us to think differently about society and the world around us.
More info: https://acca.melbourne/program/uncommon-knowledge-larissa-hjorth-on-the-lives-deaths-and-afterlives-of-social-media/ Image: Larissa Hjorth, Still Mobile 2010. Courtesy the artist
How can we make traces of suffering into visual poetry? How do we map emotional data?
Tai Snaith and Stanislava Pinchuk talk about the different ways we can make our art practice meaningful to our lives, and the lives of others. They discuss how Stan has managed to include travel, meeting people, tattooing and even beekeeping as integral parts of her practice. She explains her deeply thoughtful process of ‘data mapping’ and how it relates to her tattooing practice via shared modes of intimacy, trust, intensity and visual economy or minimalist language. We discuss the long-practiced traditions of making and wearing decorative motifs on the body and the utopian idea of exchanging honey and art and ideas in place of money.
Additional resources: http://m-i-s-o.com/ https://www.forbes.com/profile/stanislava-pinchuk/#1a542922a073 https://chinaheights.com/exhibitions-/2018-borders-the-magnetic-fileds-stanislava-pinchuk-miso https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/feb/28/national-gallery-of-victoria-dumps-wilson-security-over-offshore-detention
How might an artwork be part of the language of interiors or functional design? How important is understanding scale and process?
Tai Snaith and Esther Stewart go deep into process during this conversation. They discuss Esther’s studio process and what it means to adopt a more design-based practice and apply it to painting. Esther outlines the different stages of making a body of work from the ‘suitcase of patterns’ and ideas phase through to experimenting, ‘jiggled out thinking’, trialling, planning, making models and finally the labour or making stage. They unpack the notion of thresholds, taste, perspective and the uncomfortable but interesting problem of what happens when a visual artist’s work becomes part of the decor.
Additional resources: 'How to Decorate a Dump' at Heide: https://www.heide.com.au/exhibitions/esther-stewart-how-decorate-dump Gertrude Contemporary: http://www.gertrude.org.au/studios/studios/current-22/esther-stewart.phps 'The world is waiting for the sunrise' at TCB: https://tcbartinc.org.au/the-world-is-waiting-for-the-sunrise/ MPavilion: http://mpavilion.org/collaborator/esther-stewart/
This discussion focuses on the intersection of form, space and movement in contemporary practice, alongside ACCA’s exhibition 'Eva Rothschild: Kosmos' (2018).
Speakers include multidisciplinary practitioners working across art, architecture, design, choreography and theory. Together they will consider the social potential of sculpture, the idea of deceptive materiality, as well as the negotiation between colour, space, scale and disruption in relation to our experience of sculpture and acts of ‘hard looking’.
Speakers:
Jane Caught, architect and co-founder of multi-disciplinary collective, SIBLING Jo Lloyd, choreographer and dancer; and choreographer of CUTOUT in collaboration with Eva Rothschild at ACCA Simone Slee, artist and academic at the Victorian College of the Arts Fleur Watson, curator and editor specialising in architecture and design; and Executive Curator, Lyon Housemuseum, Melbourne
More info: https://acca.melbourne/program/roundtable-form-space-movement/
How does architecture shape identity? How do artists, architects, power-brokers, nation-states, immigrants and insurgents make and mark territory?
In this lecture, artist Eugenia Lim explores the space between the personal and the geopolitical, selfhood and sovereignty. Lim draws from her research, archives and experiences to navigate a subjective journey through architecture, earthworks and islands.
Eugenia Lim is an Australian artist of Chinese–Singaporean descent who works across video, performance and installation. In her work, Lim transforms herself into invented fictional personas who traverse through time and cultures to explore how national identities and stereotypes cut, divide and bond our globalised world.
Lim’s latest project 'The Australian Ugliness' surveys the role of architecture in marking a society and shaping national identity. The work has been titled after the bestselling book by Robin Boyd, arguably one of Australia’s most prominent architects and Modernists. Boyd’s The Australian Ugliness denounces the conservative, kitsch and decorative tastes of post-war 1950s Australia, warning against parochialism and insularity. In Lim’s project of the same title, she will build upon Boyd’s ideas, transporting them into 21st century Australia.
Presented by Abercrombie & Kent, ACCA’s 2018 lecture series, 'Uncommon knowledge: artists on their special interests' gives eight artists a microphone and an hour to speak about topics that inspire their art and thinking. Featuring a trans-generational cast of artists, Uncommon Knowledge brings together elements of history, lifestyle, philosophy, sound studies, sexuality, cultural politics and more, to challenge us to think differently about society and the world around us.
https://acca.melbourne/program/uncommon-knowledge-eugenia-lim/
Image: Eugenia Lim, 'The Australian Ugliness' 2018. Courtesy the artist. Photograph: Tom Ross
Gabrielle de Vietri is an Australian-based artist with a concept-driven, socially-engaged collaborative practice. Her work has taken the form of pedagogical systems, community events, interactive public performances, documents, invented languages, fictional historical insertions, lectures and gardens.
In this lecture, Gabrielle de Vietri disobedience as a creative act through the theft of Picasso’s famous 'Weeping Woman' from the National Gallery of Victoria in 1986, by the Australian Cultural Terrorists who demanded better State funding for the arts.
Presented by Abercrombie & Kent, ACCA’s 2018 lecture series, 'Uncommon knowledge: artists on their special interests' gives eight artists a microphone and an hour to speak about topics that inspire their art and thinking. Featuring a trans-generational cast of artists, Uncommon Knowledge brings together elements of history, lifestyle, philosophy, sound studies, sexuality, cultural politics and more, to challenge us to think differently about society and the world around us.
https://acca.melbourne/program/uncommon-knowledge-gabrielle-de-vietri-the-stolen-picasso-and-activism-in-art/
Image: Artists’ Committee, Weeping Woman 2017, unauthorised performative intervention at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Courtesy of the artists. Photograph: Tatjana Plitt
How important is it to make yourself and others visible? What can a photograph achieve, and what is the power of the photographer?
Tai Snaith and Atong Atem discuss all the different aspects of Atong’s identity and how making sense of them informs her artwork. Atong explains what it is like to grow up ‘between cultures’ as a South Sudanese person in Australia and the liminality that exists as part of that. Atong openly addresses the complex nature of racism and the very real issue of ‘everyday racism’, often by ‘good’ people. With a practice that has always leaned towards portraiture and self-portraiture, this conversation with Atong very much revolves around ideas of the self, the power of the photographer, and power of accessing and owning your family history.
Additional Resources: Atong’s website: https://www.atongatem.com/ Native Tongue by Mojo Juju: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLQ4by3lUJo https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/jul/17/turnbull-says-there-is-real-concern-about-sudanese-gangs-in-melbourne LightWork website: http://www.lightwork.org The Bakehouse Project: http://bakehousestudios.com.au/art-project MECCA M-Power: https://www.vogue.com.au/beauty/news/mecca-teams-up-with-the-national-gallery-of-victoria-for-a-beautymeetsart-prize/news-story/8034beb56a5cd05cb5eb22fa7e353e7b
Can we maintain a lightness of being using heavy materials? What is the role of a public artist and how is this changing?
In this spirited conversation, Tai Snaith and Sanné Mestrom discuss what it means to be a self-made woman interested in the relationship between the lived world and the perceived world.
They talk about depicting women with ‘gravity’ and a new way of how the female form might fit into the landscape. They discuss embarking on motherhood as an early to mid career artist and being okay with breastfeeding in the foundry, amongst many other things.
Additional Resources: Sanné’s website: http://www.mestrom.org/ Les Demoiselles d’Avignon: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79766 Prudence Flint: http://www.prudenceflint.com/ Architectural follies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folly Manifesto: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifesto_(2015_film)
What is Conceptual Art? How can we do away with Visual Litter?
Tai Snaith and Agatha Gothe-Snape talk about the practice of deep thinking and the process of taking ideas apart. They discuss the fine balance of keeping all the parts of the ‘plait’ of one’s life even and neatly braided, and what it means to follow a series of decisions to consciously take away anything extraneous to create strong, clear work. Agatha talks about her ongoing desire to ‘cut through the conceptual fog with a sharp knife’ and even her lifelong goal to be a mascot for Puzzling World.
Additional Resources: Mitch Cairns’ Archibald-winning portrait: https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/prizes/archibald/2017/29825/ Every Artist Remembered: https://agathagothesnape.net/every-artist-remembered-2017/every-artist-remembered-2017 Lawrence Weiner; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Weiner Puzzling World NZ: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puzzling_World
How can mockery and humour be used as a tool for survival? How do you write yourself into a history that has always favoured men?
In this conversation Tai Snaith and Paola Balla go on a raucous storytelling romp through Paola’s vibrant past, recounting her ‘triple-whammy of Otherness’ as a young Wemba Wemba/Gunditjmara woman, with an Italian dad and a Chinese surname in Echuca/Moama in the '80s. Paola talks about the strong influence of indigenous women’s voices like Aunty Marge Tucker, and the links to the incredibly powerful artwork she continues to make around this to this day.
Additional resources: https://www.facebook.com/WARcollective/ https://www.vic.gov.au/aboriginalvictoria/community-engagement/leadership-programs/aboriginal-honour-roll/2013-victorian-aboriginal-honour-roll/margaret-tucker-mbe-c.html http://www.fnawn.com.au/the-bennelong-letter-voice-of-a-wangal-diplomat/ https://www.djukimala.com/ https://www.naidoc.org.au/news/2018-national-naidoc-theme-announced https://www.naidoc.org.au/about/history https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/sovereignty/ http://www.miriamrosefoundation.org.au/about-us/who-miriamrose
Is a painting like a poem? How do we make our own rules when we are painting?
In this conversation Tai Snaith and Laura Skerlj discuss their migrant roots in Australia and how this affects the ethics of how they live and work. Laura shares her secret practice of writing ‘tragic poems’ and how these are slowly creeping into her paintings. They share their love of double meanings and layering of possibilities in our palettes alongside other women painters they admire.
Additional resources: http://lauraskerlj.com/ http://www.xavierhufkens.com/artists/lesley-vance http://www.anncraven.com/
How can we share an experience without using words? What is it like to feel the push and pull of presence and hiding?
Tai Snaith and Archie Barry chat honestly about what role identity plays in Archie’s practice and how they are interested in expressing that identity in a non-visual way. They discuss the beautiful and sometimes frustrating ‘slipperiness’ of language and how cultivating the agency and capacity to connect with an audience can be a truly energising and grounding experience.
Additional resources: https://archiebarry.com/tatsache/ https://archiebarry.com/hypnic/ https://www.discovervedanta.com/equation-you-are-that.htm
How can we make Culture rather than Art? Is the sky a black velvet blanket?
Tai Snaith's podcast series returns with 13 more conversations with mid-career and emerging women and non-binary artists whom she admires. In episode one, Tai and Lucreccia Quintanilla discuss how having a punk attitude and how not necessarily wanting to fit in can be a good thing. Lucreccia talks about a process of finding ‘her people’ and then simply asking ‘what do we wanna do?’ as a way to begin making work. Together they share their love of the power of the dance floor and the mystery of the conch. Additional resources: http://lucreccia-quintanilla.squarespace.com/ https://www.banffcentre.ca/programs/banff-artist-residence-summer-2018 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octavia_E._Butler https://acca.melbourne/explore/podcasts/a-world-of-ones-own/
Internationally acclaimed Irish-born, London-based artist Eva Rothschild discusses her new and recent sculptural works with Max Delany Artistic Director and CEO, ACCA in the lead up the first survey exhibition of her work in Australia at ACCA.
This conversation is presented in partnership with the National Gallery of Victoria.
This event was recorded on Saturday 22 September 2018, hosted at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.
Further references: https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/eva-rothschild/
This forum considers the role of the curator in relation to Indigenous artists and communities, and address some of the challenges and recent trends in curating Indigenous art today, as well as what the future might look like for Indigenous art and curatorial practice in Australia and internationally.
Convened by Hannah Presley, Curator, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne Guest speakers: Tina Baum, Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Bruce McLean, Curator of Indigenous Australian Art at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane Coby Edgar, Assistant Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art, Art gallery of New South Wales, Sydney;
This event was recorded on Monday 27 August 2018
Resources: https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/a-lightness-of-spirit-is-the-measure-of-happiness/ https://acca.melbourne/program/indigenous-art-and-curatorial-practice/
Diversity has become an increasingly popular concept, but what if we thought about diversity as more than the inclusion of difference? In this lecture, writer, arts worker and community organiser, Eugenia Flynn explores alternative narratives, ideas of re-centring and notions of multiplicity in order to challenge and provoke.
This lecture is presented by WRITING & CONCEPTS alongside ACCA’s exhibition 'A Lightness of Spirit is the Measure of Happiness' (2018).
This lecture was recorded on Thursday 13 September 2018.
Resources: https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/a-lightness-of-spirit-is-the-measure-of-happiness/ http://writingandconcepts.com.au/index.php/2018-speaker-series/ https://acca.melbourne/program/writing-concepts-eugenia-flynn-beyond-indifference-more-than-difference/
Jenny Schlenzka, recently appointed Artistic Director of Performance Space New York, speaks about new challenges for Performance Space New York and focus on the new direction she is bringing to the organisation, and reflect upon new developments and challenges curating and exhibiting performance art.
This keynote lecture is presented as part of MEL&NYC, a citywide cultural festival celebrating all things Melbourne and New York City from June to August 2018. Supported by the Victorian Government. This lecture was recorded on 16 August 2018 at ACCA. Resources: https://performancespacenewyork.org/ https://acca.melbourne/program/jenny-schlenzka-new-challenges-for-performance-space-new-york/
Peter Waples-Crowe on Sexuality and Aboriginal Community Health Work: In this lecture, Ngarigo queer artist Peter Waples-Crowe discusses how Aboriginal community health work has influenced his art and sense of identity. This talk was recorded at ACCA on Monday 16 July 2018 Further information: https://acca.melbourne/program/uncommon-knowledge-peter-waples-crowe-on-sexuality-and-aboriginal-community-health-work/
https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/a-lightness-of-spirit-is-the-measure-of-happiness/
Image: Peter Waples-Crowe, Black Magic series 2017–18 (detail), mixed media on canvas, 30 x 30 cm (each). Courtesy the artist
Uncle Jack Charles speaks about his work in prisons and with the community, and sings 'Son of Mine' a poem by Oodgeroo Noonuccal put to music by Uncle Jack Charles.
This is track 9 of 9 for Dhumba Narbethong, an afternoon of storytelling and song around the fire in the ACCA courtyard.
Recorded on Saturday 7 July 2018. Specials thanks to Aunty Fay Muir, Boon Wurrung Language Custodian for the name Dhumba Narbethong (lively chats/stories).
Program made possible with support of Program Partners: Indigenous Languages and Arts Program, Victorian Aboriginal Corporation for Languages, Presenting Partner Creative Victoria and Lead Media Partner The Saturday Paper.
Further info: https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/a-lightness-of-spirit-is-the-measure-of-happiness/
Black Elvis (Gnarnayarrahe Waitairie)performs at the fire for Dhumba Narbethong.
This is track 8 of 9 for Dhumba Narbethong, an afternoon of storytelling and song around the fire in the ACCA courtyard.
Recorded on Saturday 7 July 2018. Specials thanks to Aunty Fay Muir, Boon Wurrung Language Custodian for the name Dhumba Narbethong (lively chats/stories).
Program made possible with support of Program Partners: Indigenous Languages and Arts Program, Victorian Aboriginal Corporation for Languages, Presenting Partner Creative Victoria and Lead Media Partner The Saturday Paper.
Further info: https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/a-lightness-of-spirit-is-the-measure-of-happiness/
Robert Fielding talks about fire at Dhumba Narbethong.
This is track 7 of 9 for Dhumba Narbethong, an afternoon of storytelling and song around the fire in the ACCA courtyard.
Recorded on Saturday 7 July 2018. Specials thanks to Aunty Fay Muir, Boon Wurrung Language Custodian for the name Dhumba Narbethong (lively chats/stories).
Program made possible with support of Program Partners: Indigenous Languages and Arts Program, Victorian Aboriginal Corporation for Languages, Presenting Partner Creative Victoria and Lead Media Partner The Saturday Paper.
Further info: https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/a-lightness-of-spirit-is-the-measure-of-happiness/
Story by Vicki Couzens. This is track 6 of 9 for Dhumba Narbethong, an afternoon of storytelling and song around the fire in the ACCA courtyard.
Recorded on Saturday 7 July 2018. Specials thanks to Aunty Fay Muir, Boon Wurrung Language Custodian for the name Dhumba Narbethong (lively chats/stories).
Program made possible with support of Program Partners: Indigenous Languages and Arts Program, Victorian Aboriginal Corporation for Languages, Presenting Partner Creative Victoria and Lead Media Partner The Saturday Paper.
Further info: https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/a-lightness-of-spirit-is-the-measure-of-happiness/
Robbie Bundle performs his song 'Know Who You Are'. Introduced by Uncle Larry Walsh.
This is track 5 of 9 for Dhumba Narbethong, an afternoon of storytelling and song around the fire in the ACCA courtyard.
Recorded on Saturday 7 July 2018. Specials thanks to Aunty Fay Muir, Boon Wurrung Language Custodian for the name Dhumba Narbethong (lively chats/stories).
Program made possible with support of Program Partners: Indigenous Languages and Arts Program, Victorian Aboriginal Corporation for Languages, Presenting Partner Creative Victoria and Lead Media Partner The Saturday Paper.
Further info: https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/a-lightness-of-spirit-is-the-measure-of-happiness/
Story by Uncle Larry Walsh. This is track 4 of 9 for Dhumba Narbethong, an afternoon of storytelling and song around the fire in the ACCA courtyard.
Recorded on Saturday 7 July 2018. Specials thanks to Aunty Fay Muir, Boon Wurrung Language Custodian for the name Dhumba Narbethong (lively chats/stories).
Program made possible with support of Program Partners: Indigenous Languages and Arts Program, Victorian Aboriginal Corporation for Languages, Presenting Partner Creative Victoria and Lead Media Partner The Saturday Paper.
Further info: https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/a-lightness-of-spirit-is-the-measure-of-happiness/
Introduction by Uncle Larry Walsh and Vicki Couzens.
This is track 3 of 9 for Dhumba Narbethong, an afternoon of storytelling and song around the fire in the ACCA courtyard
Recorded on Saturday 7 July 2018. Specials thanks to Aunty Fay Muir, Boon Wurrung Language Custodian for the name Dhumba Narbethong (lively chats/stories).
Program made possible with support of Program Partners: Indigenous Languages and Arts Program, Victorian Aboriginal Corporation for Languages, Presenting Partner Creative Victoria and Lead Media Partner The Saturday Paper.
Further info: https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/a-lightness-of-spirit-is-the-measure-of-happiness/
Jason Tamiru introduction to Dhumba Narbethong.
This is track 2 of 9 for Dhumba Narbethong, an afternoon of storytelling and song around the fire in the ACCA courtyard
Recorded on Saturday 7 July 2018. Specials thanks to Aunty Fay Muir, Boon Wurrung Language Custodian for the name Dhumba Narbethong (lively chats/stories).
Program made possible with support of Program Partners: Indigenous Languages and Arts Program, Victorian Aboriginal Corporation for Languages, Presenting Partner Creative Victoria and Lead Media Partner The Saturday Paper.
Further info: https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/a-lightness-of-spirit-is-the-measure-of-happiness/
Welcome to Country by N'arweet Carolyn Briggs, Boon Wurrung Elder and Director, Boon Wurrung Foundation.
This is track 1 of 9 for Dhumba Narbethong, an afternoon of storytelling and song around the fire in the ACCA courtyard
Recorded on Saturday 7 July 2018. Specials thanks to Aunty Fay Muir, Boon Wurrung Language Custodian for the name Dhumba Narbethong (lively chats/stories).
Program made possible with support of Program Partners: Indigenous Languages and Arts Program, Victorian Aboriginal Corporation for Languages, Presenting Partner Creative Victoria and Lead Media Partner The Saturday Paper.
Further info: https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/a-lightness-of-spirit-is-the-measure-of-happiness/
Hear Yankunytjatjara artist Kaylene Whiskey from Indulkana community on the APY Lands, SA, talk about her new series 'Seven Sistas' 2018 commissioned by ACCA for 'A Lightness of Spirit is the Measure of Happiness'.
Recorded on Saturday 7 July 2018. Program made possible with support of Program Partners: Indigenous Languages and Arts Program, Victorian Aboriginal Corporation for Languages, Presenting Partner Creative Victoria and Lead Media Partner The Saturday Paper.
Further info: https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/a-lightness-of-spirit-is-the-measure-of-happiness/
Hear Western Arrernte artist Vincent Namatjira from Indulkana on the APY Lands, SA, talk about his new work 'Welcome to Indulkana' 2018 commissioned by ACCA for 'A Lightness of Spirit is the Measure of Happiness'.
Recorded on Saturday 7 July 2018. Program made possible with support of Program Partners: Indigenous Languages and Arts Program, Victorian Aboriginal Corporation for Languages, Presenting Partner Creative Victoria and Lead Media Partner The Saturday Paper.
Further info: https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/a-lightness-of-spirit-is-the-measure-of-happiness/
Hear Western Aranda and Yankunytjatjara artist Robert Fielding from Mimili community on the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands, talk about his new work photographic, video and installation works commissioned by ACCA for 'A Lightness of Spirit is the Measure of Happiness'.
Recorded on Saturday 7 July 2018. Program made possible with support of Program Partners: Indigenous Languages and Arts Program, Victorian Aboriginal Corporation for Languages, Presenting Partner Creative Victoria and Lead Media Partner The Saturday Paper.
Further info: https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/a-lightness-of-spirit-is-the-measure-of-happiness/
Western Arrernte artist Mervyn Rubuntja represented by Iltja Ntjarra Many Hands Arts Centre with exhibiting artist Benita Clements speaks about the watercolour landscape painting tradition of Ntaria/Hermannsburg.
Recorded on Saturday 7 July 2018. Program made possible with support of Program Partners: Indigenous Languages and Arts Program, Victorian Aboriginal Corporation for Languages, Presenting Partner Creative Victoria and Lead Media Partner The Saturday Paper.
Further info: https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/a-lightness-of-spirit-is-the-measure-of-happiness/
Hear Sydney-based Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi artist Jonathan Jones speak about his new work 'untitled (gidyirriga)' 2018 commissioned by ACCA for 'A Lightness of Spirit is the Measure of Happiness.'
Recorded on Saturday 7 July 2018. Program made possible with support of Program Partners: Indigenous Languages and Arts Program, Victorian Aboriginal Corporation for Languages, Presenting Partner Creative Victoria and Lead Media Partner The Saturday Paper.
Further info: https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/a-lightness-of-spirit-is-the-measure-of-happiness/
Hear the introduction to ACCA's exhibition 'A Lightness of Spirit is the Measure of Happiness' from curator Hannah Presley.
Recorded on Saturday 7 July 2018. Program made possible with support of Program Partners: Indigenous Languages and Arts Program, Victorian Aboriginal Corporation for Languages, Presenting Partner Creative Victoria and Lead Media Partner The Saturday Paper.
Further info: https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/a-lightness-of-spirit-is-the-measure-of-happiness/
Fiona Hall on Global Politics, Brexit and the EU: One of Australia’s best known contemporary artists, Fiona Hall is best known for extraordinary works that transform commonplace materials into vital organic forms with both contemporary and historical resonances. In this lecture, Hall discusses the climate of disunity and conflicts within the European Union, Brexit and conflicting ideas for society, drawing on research for a new work in development 'All along the watch towers' commissioned by the Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire, France.
Recorded at ACCA on Monday 18 June 2018 Further info: https://acca.melbourne/program/uncommon-knowledge-fiona-hall/
Master of slapstick existentialism, Ronnie van Hout’s large scale sculptures, installations and photographs tread the line between humour and the macabre.
In this lecture Ronnie van Hout discusses his lifelong interest in UFOs: exploring the truth behind flying saucers, alien abductions, and the future of planet earth in relation to art and feeling special.
Presented as part of ACCA's 2018 Lecture Series 'Uncommon Knowledge: Artists on their special interests' presented by Abercrombie & Kent.
Recorded at ACCA on Monday 21 May Further info: https://acca.melbourne/program/uncommon-knowledge-ronnie-van-hout-on-ufos-and-amateurism/
'Bill Henson: The Wilderness Within: The body as the last frontier'
This talk by internationally renowned photographer Bill Henson launched ACCA’s 2018 lecture series, 'Uncommon knowledge: artists on their special interests', presented by Abercrombie & Kent.
In this talk, Bill Henson explores his lifelong fascination with the human figure and the tension between representation, voyeurism, the gaze and the body.
Recorded at ACCA on Monday 30 April
In cinema, Mexico City could be seen as a protagonist in its own right. As a central subject of many films, it has been given various roles throughout the history of cinema.
In this lecture, Mexican-born, Melbourne-based film scholars Antonio González and César Albarrán-Torres explore the evolution of urban space and how it has been portrayed by a myriad of Mexican filmmakers, as well as by international contemporary artists. Illustrated with a range of examples by directors such as Luis Buñel, Alfonso Cuaron, Maria Novaro or Guillermo del Toro, the talk focuses on the tension between tradition and (post)modernity, social struggles and political upheaval, global cultural forces and local identity.
Additional resources: https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/dwelling-poetically-mexico-city-a-case-study/
Recorded at ACCA on Wednesday 13 June
This event included a screening of works by Melbourne-based Mexican artist Diego Ramirez followed by a conversation between Ramirez and Anabelle Lacroix, ACCA’s Curator of Public Programs at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) at Federation Square, Melbourne.
The screening included My superstar (2015), aXolotl’s Happiness (2014) and Postcard eXotica (2016).
This event is presented in partnership the Australian Centre for the Moving Image as part of their ART+FILM program, as a parallel program to ACCA’s exhibition Dwelling Poetically: Mexico, a case study.
ABOUT DIEGO RAMIREZ: Diego Ramirez is a Mexican-born, Melbourne-based multidisciplinary artist and writer, working primarily with video and pictures to develop installations for gallery contexts. His research based practise explores the legacies of colonialism in visual culture; the rhetoric of the image and concept of terror as a response to the ‘other’. Ramirez Often seeks to reconfigure vernacular archives and popular images that embody these themes.
Ramirez completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at RMIT University and an Honours Degree of Fine Art at Monash University. He has held solo exhibitions at MARS Gallery; The Substation; Seventh Gallery and the Perth Institute for Contemporary Art. In addition, his work has been included in group exhibitions at Art Central, Hong King; 17th Media Art Biennale WRO, Wroclaw; Torrance Art Museum, Los Angles and the Hong-Gah Museum, Taipei. In 2016, he was awarded a City of Melbourne Arts Grant for Postcard eXotica. Ramirez is currently represented by MARS Gallery, Melbourne.
Recorded on Monday 7 May 2018
Guest curator, Chris Sharp discusses the curatorial process developing and realising 'Dwelling Poetically: Mexico City, a case study' at ACCA (21 April–24 June 2018). Chris reflects more generally on the subject of curating, and in relation to his curatorial projects and co-direction of Lulu, a project space in Mexico City.
ABOUT CHRIS SHARP: Chris Sharp is a writer and independent curator currently based in Mexico City, where he runs the project space Lulu with Mexican artist Martin Soto Climent. He has curated numerous international exhibitions, including most recently, Against Nature, co-curated with Edith Jerabkova at the National Gallery of Prague, 2016; A Change of Heart at Hannah Hoffman gallery, Los Angeles, 2016, and As if in a foreign country, at Galerie Nächst St. Stephan Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, Vienna, 2016. A contributing editor of Art Review and Art Agenda, Sharp was recently appointed co-curator (with Dr Zara Stanhope) of New Zealand artist Dane Mitchell’s presentation for the 58th Venice Biennale.
ABOUT ACCA MASTERCLASSES: ACCA’s masterclasses are a series of presentations designed to cater to art and curatorial students at a postgraduate tertiary level. This particular masterclass is suited for artists and students studying art history, curatorial practice and arts management at postgraduate tertiary level.
Recorded on Monday 23 April 2018
Further information: http://www.luludf.com/ http://acca.melbourne/exhibition/dwelling-poetically-mexico-city-a-case-study/
A conversation between 2017 winner of The Stella Prize Heather Rose and Dr Natasha Cica, with an Introduction from Executive Director and Co-Founder, The Stella Prize Aviva Tuffield.
This event is presented by The Stella Prize with the Trawalla Foundation and hosted by ACCA in the gallery during the 2017–18 exhibition 'Unfinished Business: Perspectives on art and feminism'.
Heather Rose is the Australian author of seven novels. Heather writes for both adults and children and her books have been shortlisted, long-listed or won awards for literary fiction, crime fiction, fantasy/ sci fi and children’s literature. Rose was awarded the 2017 Stella Prize for her novel 'The Museum of Modern Love', inspired by the life and work of the artist Marina Abramovic who appears (with permission) as a character in the book.
Recorded on Wednesday 21 March 2018
Further information: http://thestellaprize.com.au/ https://heatherrose.com.au/ http://www.trawallafoundation.com.au/ https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/unfinished-business-perspectives-on-feminism-and-art/
A conversation between Chief Political Correspondent, 7:30, ABC Laura Tingle and Chair of Trawalla Foundation and Pathways to Politics Advisory Committee member Carol Schwartz.
This event is presented by The University of Melbourne, School of Government for the Pathways to Politics Program for Women with the Trawalla Foundation and hosted by ACCA in the gallery during the 2017–18 exhibition 'Unfinished Business: Perspectives on art and feminism'.
Laura Tingle is a journalist, author, former Political Editor of the Australian Financial Review and current Chief Political Correspondent for the ABC's 7:30 program.
The Pathways to Politics Program for Women based at the University of Melbourne’s School of Government is modelled on the Harvard Kennedy School program ‘From Harvard Square to the Oval Office.’ It is a non-partisan initiative funded by the Trawalla Foundation that will provide a select group of female University of Melbourne students and alumni with the skills and networks to reach elected office at local, state and national levels.
Recorded on Monday 26 February 2018
Further information: https://government.unimelb.edu.au/engagement/pathways-to-politics-program-for-women#home http://www.trawallafoundation.com.au/ https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/unfinished-business-perspectives-on-feminism-and-art/
A conversation between academic psychologist Professor Cordelia Fine and Chair, Trawalla Foundation; Founding Chair, Women's Leadership Institute of Australia Carol Schwartz.
This event is presented by the Women's Leadership Institute of Australia and The University of Melbourne and hosted by ACCA in the gallery during the 2017–18 exhibition 'Unfinished Business: Perspectives on art and feminism'.
Cordelia Fine is an academic psychologist and writer, and described as "a brilliant feminist critic of the neurosciences". Her latest book, 'Testosterone Rex: Unmaking the Myths of our Gendered Minds', won the prestigious Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize 2017, and was named an Amazon Best Book of the Year.
Recorded on Wednesday 21 February 2018
Further information: http://www.wlia.org.au/ http://www.trawallafoundation.com.au/ https://acca.melbourne/exhibition/unfinished-business-perspectives-on-feminism-and-art/
As part of ACCA's exhibition 'Unfinished Business: Perspectives on art and feminism', ACCA presents Learning From Each Other, a special leadership and professional development seminar.
This seminar set out to create a productive space for discussion and mentoring amongst a small group of arts administrators, curators and students to share experiences, unpack pathways and build networks.
Convened and chaired by ACCA’s Executive Director, Linda Mickleborough and Senior Curator, Annika Kristensen with guest speakers: Charlotte Day: curator, writer and Director, Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) Julie Ewington: curator, writer and broadcaster, co-curator of Unfinished Business and previously Head of Australian Art, Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art (GAGOMA) Genevieve Grieves: Koorie educator, curator, filmmaker, artist, oral historian, researcher, writer and Manager, First Peoples Department, Museums Victoria Patrice Sharkey: curator, writer and Director, West Space
This program is supported by the Trawalla Foundation, the Office for Prevention and Women's Equality and The University of Melbourne.
Recorded on Monday 19 March 2018
This is the fourth and final symposium in ACCA's Symposium Series 'Unfinished Conversations'. Convened by Vikki McInnes with guest speakers Janine Burke, Jacqueline Milner, Elvis Richardson and Gemma Weston, this symposium explores how gender bias effect the arts, and what the gender representation in national art collection tell us about our society.
This symposium is introduced by Angela Goddard, Board Member, SHEILA, A Foundation for Women in Visual Art, and current Director of the Griffith University Art Museum.
Recorded at ACCA on Saturday 17 March
This is the third symposium in ACCA's 'Unfinished Conversations' symposium series. Chaired by Wemba-Wemba and Gunditjmara artist, curator, academic and Co-Curator of Unfinished Business, Paola Balla, with guest panellists Maddee Clark, Neika Lehman, Kate Just, Nina Lykke, this panel discussion set out to identify and question the challenges of blak feminism and intersectionality today in Australia and more widely.
Recorded on Wednesday 7 March 2018.
Next Gen(der) is the second symposium in ACCA's 'Unfinished Conversations' symposium series. This conversation invites young people to take over ACCA and explore the role and significance of feminism and gender diversity for the next generations.
Members of Melbourne school feminist collectives, FHS Feminist Collective (Fitzroy High School), The Violet Fems (Eltham High School), TUHF: The Uni High Feminist (University High School), discuss why feminism is important to them, and challenge some of the works in Unfinished Business: Perspectives on art and feminism.
How are women, non-binary and gender diverse people represented in the media? What are the alternatives? Presented at MPavilion, this symposium explores feminist analyses and strategies in relation to the media, writing, new forms of publishing and text as form with guest speakers Brigid Delaney, Nayuka Gorrie, Natalie Thomas and Deb Verhoeven.
This panel discussion launches ‘Unfinished Conversations’, a symposium series taking the form of collective discussions to unpack how feminism is critical and relevant today.
- inclusive of non-binary and gender diverse people
Making dreams come true: A conversation with visual artist Maree Clarke
How important is it to visualise your work coming to life? How well do you know your self, your history and your place in the world?
Tai and Maree get pretty heavy and emotional in an electric conversation about making contemporary work from loaded memories and histories. They talk about how important it is to avoid being put in a box, seize opportunities and be true to your self and your people. Maree talks about how she uses her work to explore and tell stories of grief, belonging and perhaps most important of all, healing.
Photograph: James Henry
Stepping into the Circle: A conversation with Rachel Nolan
How does design incorporate memory and materiality?
What would our built environment be like if clients and architects revived the world of imagination?
Tai and Rachel discuss the language of landscape in relation to and as an integral part of Architecture. They talk about the very personal process of designing a house and how it can influence families by making us WAIT and SHARE. They explore how rules in your practice can evolve from instincts, which in time evolve into built patterns. They also address the changing landscape of women architects careers, flexible working models and juggling it all.
Wild Thing: A conversation with artist Jenny Watson.
What does it mean to be an 'Aussie Artist'?
What is wildness and how do we allow it space to thrive?
Tai and Jenny share their love of horses and the freedoms they offer to us as young girls whilst taking a close look at the Australian and international gallery scene and the ‘sober business of art'. They talk about the importance of depicting ‘broken women’ and female iconoclasts in paintings and the power of imagining other versions and stories for yourself.
Additional resources: 'The Fabric of Fantasy' at Heide Museum of Modern Art, 2017–18: https://www.heide.com.au/exhibitions/jenny-watson-fabric-fantasy
'I, Tonya' (2017) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Tonya
Image: Jenny Watson 2009, Chandigarh. Photograph: Andrew Wilson
Painting Yourself out of the Dark: A conversation with painter Diena Georgetti.
What is it like to live with a mental illness and make art?
How important is editing when it comes to being an artist?
Tai and Diena discuss how difficult it can be when we are critical not only of our work but also of ourselves. They talk about finding consolation in successful works we have made and painting as a way of existing when life itself is really really hard.
Image: Diena Georgetti, 'Compass' 2017, acrylic on canvas, custom frame, 79.3 x 52 x 4.8 cm. Private collection, Sydney. Image courtesy The Commercial, Sydney. Photograph: Sofia Freeman/The Commercial, Sydney
Natural Woman: A conversation with Patricia Piccinini
How do we use work to explore ideas of motherhood and morality?
Tai and Patricia discuss what it means to be a mother and continue a successful art practice. They talk about issues of postnatal depression and anxiety, partners and family life. They also talk about owning and celebrating your fecundity and creating ‘finely crafted love letters’ to your audience with your work.
Big Horizons: A conversation with visual artist Sally Smart
How do our gestures and bodies become part of our work? And how is the act of cutting a feminist action?
Tai and Sally talk about female identity and archetypes of women such as pirates, witches and more- ideas which have been present in Sally’s life and imagination since she was a child. We talk about the act of cutting and how the female identity is both fragile and sturdy, but ultimately ‘re-arrangeable’ and fluid.
Control / Escape: A conversation with dancer and choreographer Shelley Lasica
How and what do you present to an audience? Where does the line between yourself and your work begin?
Tai and Shelley discuss the assumptions about ‘revealing the truth’ in dance and how creating complexity and a kind of ‘unhooked narrative’ that is not linear or logocentric might be a more exciting way of looking at things. We also discuss the idea of playing with ‘the gaze,’ the fraught relationship between needing approval from an audience and making work within a female body.
Tempering Tenacity: A conversation with visual artist Lou Hubbard
How can we find our true methodology and maintain a healthy obsession?
Tai and Lou talk about taking your time in life to find your true creative path. They also talk about tenacity, bossiness and learning how to defer control and practice patience. Lou says ‘The artist in me doesn’t sit down’ and they explore what it means to be truly obsessed by your work, but how to keep a healthy balance with your family and ‘shave away the extraneous’ aspects of your life.
Her Life in The Nude: A conversation with performer and director Maude Davey
How can we be open and honest and take risks, but still feel safe?
Tai and Maude talk about making work about women and what exactly does it mean to take risks in front of an audience? They share the frustration of finding it easier to write about other people’s work than their own and how to deal with failure. They ask the hard question; ‘What happens as you get older and your body can’t perform in the same way anymore?’
Non Binary Futures: A conversation with guitarist Tonié Field
Don’t put me in a box! How can we celebrate and encourage fluidity?
Tai and Tonié discuss what it means to be a non-binary and progressive artist in a classical world. How might we express overtly political ideas through an abstract language like music. They share a boisterous and heartfelt journey through the worlds of Drag, Burlesque and Fashion as well as the serious issues of feeling safe within the educational institution and getting ‘Tired of the fight.’
Dark Laughs: A conversation with sculptor Claire Lambe
How do we dig up dark memories from our past and make them funny?
Tai and Claire share a lively chat about dark satire as a way of communication in art practice and how the past, present and future can all exist in an artwork right now. Claire shares tales of the ‘white-knuckle-ride’ that is making work and how she manages to deal with feelings of vulnerability and stress.
Window to the Inside: A conversation with painter Katherine Hattam
How do we access our True Selves?
Tai and Katherine discuss how making and depicting space can merge the inside (mental) world with the outside (public) world of politics and ideas. Reflecting on Katherine’s interest in psychoanalysis and unconscious time vs real time and how family life can be political.
World Weaver: A conversation with visual artist Chaco Kato How do we fit into the art world? Can we create our own world?
Tai and Chaco explore ideas of how and why you might create your own support network, collective or cross-community project. Chaco literally weaves her own context and explores traditionally domestic crafts on a giant scale.
As a prelude to ACCA’s major exhibition, 'Unfinished Business: Perspectives on art and feminism' (15 Dec 2017 – 25 March 2018), this panel discussion starts the conversation about the historical legacies and new debates within feminism and discuss the ‘unfinished business’ of feminism today. Speakers: Atong Atem is a South Sudanese artist and writer whose work explores postcolonial practices in the diaspora, the relationship between public and private spaces and the politics of looking and being looked at.
Paola Balla is a Wemba-Wemba and Gunditjmara artist, curator and academic, Victoria University, and co-curator of Unfinished Business.
Emily Floyd is an artist and collaborator with Mary Featherson on the exhibition Round Table.
Anne Marsh is a Professorial Research Fellow at the Victorian College of the Arts, The University of Melbourne, whose work focuses on performance art, photography, feminist art history and theory.
Editing and sound by Eric Demetriou
An open discussion with Danny Butt, Professor Nikos Papastergiadis, Professor Barbara Bolt and Professor Ashok Mathur discussing the state of artistic research in the academy and its future.
This event was supported by Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne 24 October 2017
Diego Ramírez-Lovering, Deputy Dean and Associate Dean (Engagement) MADA and Co-founding Managing Director of Monash Architecture Studio (MAS) explores the west Mexican city of Guadalajara. In particular, Professor Ramírez-Lovering focuses on the city’s ‘Opportunistic Urbanism’, how Guadalajara is increasingly governed by opportunity, and shaped by the ad hoc, the contingent and the easily obtainable.
Presented by Abercrombie & Kent at ACCA. Monday 16 October 2017
Justine Clark, Editor, writer and Honorary Senior Research Fellow at The University of Melbourne and Maryam Gusheh, Director of Architecture at The University of New South Wales explore the central Iranian city and former Persian capital Isfahan.
Presented by Abercrombie & Kent
Image: Courtesy Abercrombie & Kent
Founding editor of The Saturday Paper, Erik Jensen discusses the pluses and minuses of digital technologies and presents the current state of traditional media with the rise of digital technologies and communications.
Wednesday 6 September 2017 Future Forums Media Partner: The Saturday Paper
Hosted within the common space of Céline Condorelli’s installation, this discussion responds to expanded notions of organised labour in the arts, who the risk-bearers are and what their reward. Speakers: Colleen Chen – Lawyer and President, Young Workers Centre and founder of Interns Australia Ben Eltham – Writer, Journalist, Researcher, Creative Producer & Social Commentator Sarah Gory – General Manager, un Projects and former Director, Queensland Poetry Festival Lucie McIntosh – Artist, Curator and Chair of Directors at BLINDSIDE
Tuesday 29 August 2017
'Public Art and the City: creating meaning by disrupting the everyday and enhancing the human experience' is a discussion about building relationships between people, how public art will play a role in the City of Melbourne’s Southbank Boulevard transformation project, and the future of public art in Melbourne.
Speakers: Charlotte Day — Director, MUMA (Chair) Rob Adams — Director City Design and Projects, City of Melbourne Vaari Claffey — Curator and Public Art Strategist for Southbank Jefa Greenaway — Director, Greenaway Architects Introduction from Max Delany — Artistic Director and CEO, ACCA
Presented by Public Art Melbourne & The City of Melbourne at ACCA Saturday 19 August 2017
Open Spatial Workshop (OSW) – a collaborative art group comprising Bianca Hester, Terri Bird and Scott Mitchell – delivers a WRITING & CONCEPTS lecture reflecting on the relationship between the process of writing and the development of social, political and philosophical questions within contemporary arts and cultural practice.
Thursday 24 August 2017
In this Future Forum ACMI Director Katrina Sedgwick discusses the future of workplaces for humans and non-humans; including the origins of ACMI X, a 60-seat co-working space for selected creative enterprises designed to encourage collaboration between different creative industries.
The Future Forums series is supported by The Saturday Paper Wednesday 23 August 2017
Mark Burry, Executive Architect and Researcher at the Sagrada Familia Basilica, Barcelona & Professor of Urban Futures at the Melbourne School of Design at The University of Melbourne speaks about his experience of Barcelona and Antonio Gaudí’s iconic La Sagrada Familia, which has been under construction for over 130 years. Monday 14 August 2017 Presented by Abercrombie & Kent
Lecturer and practitioner Jacqui Alexander discusses spaces for cohabitation. How we might live and work together more sustainably into the future and how the sharing economy is affecting our cities and communities. Wednesday 9 August 2017
Media Partner: The Saturday Paper
New Financial Year Visioning: Obligate Parasitism: Shop/Work by WORK/SHOP participating artist Debris Facility Pty Ltd Thursday 3 August 2017
The Debris Facility Pty Ltd was founded in 2015 as a means to illuminate processes of resource repurposing, affective labour exchanges, dematerialisation of value, and mutations through transport and logistics. Operating across an intersection of sculptural installation, performance and wearable works, The Facility works from a parasitic framework, implicating other life forms, situations and spaces through processes of chance, accumulation, mutation and entropy.
James Brearley Director of Brearley Architects & Urbanists (BAU) explores the architecture, contemporary life and culture in Shanghai and what this might look like into the future.
Presented by Abercrombie & Kent Monday 17 July 2017
Stuart Harrison, co-founder and co-host of ‘The Architects’ (2004–14) on Melbourne 3RRR and Director of Melbourne architecture practice HAW, explores the different histories and personalities of Venice in terms of contemporary life, living and architecture.
Presented by Abercrombie & Kent 10 April 2017
Field Theory – a group of Melbourne-based artists discuss their practice and process of working together, previous projects and their work 'Final Visions – Bunker' in ACCA's exhibition Greater Together.
Tuesday 25 July 2017
In the first of ACCA's Future Forums for the exhibition Greater Together, philosopher Peter Singer discusses working together for positive change in terms of the environment with special guest Fiona Gruber to facilitate audience discussion.
Supported by Media Partner The Saturday Paper. Wednesday 26 July 2017
A talk on the architecture, culture and history of Madrid, Spain with Qianyi Lim, Founding Partner and Architect at SIBLING. Monday 19 June 2017
Dutch artist duo Bik Van der Pol (Liesbeth Bik and Jos Van der Pol) speak about their practice and process of making, as well as their newly commissioned work, 'Letters to the Land' in ACCA's 2017 exhibition 'Greater Together'. Introduced by 'Greater Together' curator, Annika Kristensen. 13 July 2017
A keynote address by artist and art historian A.D.S. Donaldson will be followed by reflections by Helen Johnson, Helen Maudsley and Geoff Newton on the role of painting as a critical practice and its reception in contemporary art discourse.
Sound as Consequence is convened by NEW16 artist Julian Day and brings together a community of artists to explore the possibilities for sound within an exhibition context.
NEW11: Annie Wu In Conversation With Warren Taylor, 8 March 2011 by ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art)
NEW11: Hannah Mathews In Conversation With Fiona Abicare, Mark Hilton And Dan Moynihan by ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art)
NEW11: Hannah Mathews In Conversation With NEW11 Artists At The Private View by ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art)
NEW11: Hannah Mathews In Conversation With Rebecca Baumann, Brendan Van Hek And Annie Wu by ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art)
NEW11: Hannah Mathews In Conversation With Greatest Hits And Tim Coster by ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art)
In Conversation With Artist, Nathan Coley And Artistic Director, Juliana Engberg 30 05 11 by ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art)
Yael Bartana ...and Europe will be stunned: Forum - A Sort Of Homecoming by ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art)
Power to the People: Juliana Engberg In Conversation With Hannah Mathews & Agatha Gothe - Snape by ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art)
Silent Partners - Angus Cameron, Emissary Of Swedish Artists Goldin+Senneby Looking For Headless by ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art)
Jeff Khan In Conversation With NEW12 Artists Katie Lee & Charlie Sofo, 21 March 2012 by ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art)
Jeff Khan In Conversation With NEW12 Artists Kate Mitchell & Angelica Mesiti, 28 March 2012 by ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art)
Jeff Khan In Conversation With NEW12 Artists At The Private View, 19 March 2012 by ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art)