Acca Podcast

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 Saturda

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

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://rowano

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/ Sovereignt

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_Burni

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://

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. Pre

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-dum

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://tcba

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 Ugl

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 wo

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-gan

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)