Sullivan+Strumpf Contemporary Art Gallery Sydney & Melbourne, Australia & Singapore – Jan-Mar 2024

February ⁄ March

2024 No. 11

Art & Culture

Australia & Asia-Pacific

Tony Albert

Julia Gutman

Barayuwa Munuŋgurr

Alex Seton

Angela Tiatia

Dhopiya Yunupiŋu

Sullivan+Strumpf

Bimonthly Publication

Issue No 23

Feb–March 24

COVER

Julia Gutman, they are the ones who live their lives not as lives but as examples of life, 2024 (WIP)

Photography by Tim Salisbury

BACK COVER

Julia Gutman’s studio at Artspace, Sydney

Photography by Tim Salisbury

INSIDE BACK

Tony Albert, Signified, 2024, (detail)

Photography by Daniel Sherrington

EDITORIAL DIRECTORS

Ursula Sullivan

Joanna Strumpf

MANAGING EDITOR

Claire Summers

CREATIVE DIRECTOR

Matthew J Tambellini, More Studio

GRAPHIC DESIGN

Matthew J Tambellini

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Millie McArthur

Chloe Borich

Elsiena ten Kate

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Sullivan+Strumpf acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians of country throughout Australia and recognise their continuing connection to land, waters and community. We pay our respects to the people, cultures and elders past, present and emerging.

© 2023 Sullivan+Strumpf, all rights reserved.

LOOKING NEAR, LOOKING FAR In this issue, our first for 2024, the local and the global intertwine. From all of us at Sullivan+Strumpf, we stand excited for what lies ahead this year. The ideas that percolate within these pages are ones that span generations and travel across great distances of our world.

Tony Albert presents a deeply symbolic and personal body of work, one that resonates profoundly with writer Daniel Browning; Dr. Anthea Gunn meditates on Alex Seton’s newly unveiled public sculpture at the Australian War Memorial; Léuli Eshrāghi traces the poetry of the emotive cultural language of Angela Tiatia’s most ambitious work to date; Abdi Karya weaves stories of Makassan exploration into an examination of Dhopiya Yunupiŋu’s second solo exhibition; Neha Kale follows the threads of Julia Gutman’s intimate practice; and the ancient tales that lie within Barayuwa Munuŋgurr’s works are brought to the surface.

We also interview directors and curators of landmark cultural events from across the country: José Da Silva, Curator, 18th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art; Elias Redstone, Artistic Director, PHOTO 2024; and Maree Di Pasquale, CEO and Fair Director, Melbourne Art Fair.

As you travel through these pages, may the stories, people and artworks within them connect you to something bigger, to something near or something far, from wherever you find yourself.

Happy reading,

Jo + Urs

Issue No 23

Feb–March 24

Left, For Every Drop Shed in Anguish 2023. Australian War Memorial, Campbell ACT. Photograph Mark Porkony. Previous, Tony Albert, The Garden: Exploration II, 2024, acrylic and vintage appropriated fabric on canvas, 184 x 152 cm

QUICK CURATE

SIOBHAN SLOPER ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR

2024 KICKS OFF AT SULLIVAN+STRUMPF WITH THE

excitement of local and international art fairs: ART SG, Melbourne Art Fair and Art Basel Hong Kong. The Adelaide Biennial, Sydney Biennale and Venice Biennale will hold our attention too, with Seth Birchall included in Adelaide, Dhopiya Yunupiŋu in the Sydney Biennial, and Naminapu Maymuru-White included in the most significant international event on the global arts calendar – the Venice Biennale.

Programming in our Melbourne and Sydney galleries begins with two distinct First Nations exhibitions. In Melbourne we present Djärritjarri - The Woven Cloth by Yolŋu artist Dhopiya Yunupiŋu and the Sydney The Garden & Forbidden Fruit by acclaimed artist Tony Albert. For me, it is a joy to start the year with these two extraordinary artists, whose work exemplifies the breadth of Indigenous practice within contemporary art.

The Melbourne Art Fair returns this year, with the exciting news that we won’t have to wait so long for the next edition as they move into an annual model. The more art the better, I say! Sullivan+Strumpf returns to the fair with the promise of a vibrant presentation, with new works from Gregory Hodge, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, Lara Merrett and Julia Gutman. Sanné Mestrom will also present a sculptural work as part of BEYOND, a sector of the fair devoted to large-scale installation. It’s going to be a fair to remember.

The selection of works in this Quick Curate celebrates all of these significant moments that have characterised the start of 2024 for our gallery. We couldn’t be more excited to share it all with you.

1.

Polly Borland

BOD (Bubbles), 2023

cast aluminium with automotive paint, matte finish

62 × 30 × 16 cm

Edition of 3 plus 2 artist's proofs (#1/3)

2.

Yvette Coppersmith

Cordilla Tapestry, 2023 oil on linen

45.8 × 30.9 cm

3.

Daniel Crooks

Imaginary Object #1, 2006 Lambda photographic print

61 × 51 cm

Edition of 5 plus 2 artist's proofs (#5/5)

4.

Sanné Mestrom Sentinels, 2018 bronze 45cm × 20cm × 20 cm edition of 5 plus 2 AP (AP 2/2)

5.

Julia Gutman

Studio Guardian/Clementine, 2020 embroidery on inkjet print 28 × 20 cm (image) 42 × 30 cm (sheet) edition inscribed lower left recto, signed lower right Edition of 75 (#8/75)

6.

Gregory Hodge

Untitled (Suspension Painting), 2017 acrylic, PVC, aluminium

280 × 122 × 60 cm

7.

Lara Merrett peach dust, 2023 ink and acrylic on cloth and linen

220 × 150 cm (LM2023-08)

8.

Dhopiya Yunupiŋu

Makassans relaxing, 2022 natural earth pigments on stringybark 76 × 51 cm

9.

Kanchana Gupta

Leftover Series #26, 2023

stacked oil paint skins burnt and stripped off jute 160 × 120 cm, 171 × 131 cm (framed)

TONY ALBERT

WORDS DANIEL BROWNING

Left, Tony Albert in his studio, 2023. Photography by Daniel Sherrington. Next page: Tony Albert, Forbidden Fruit, 2023. Installation view.

AS A NEW BODY OF WORK THAT constitutes a certain risk for the artist, Forbidden Fruit is — perhaps surprisingly — numbly homoerotic. These ideograms, pictographs or glyphs of the male pubis and genitalia are literally stripped back to an exaggerated form, devoid of glistening flesh and saturated with ‘skin’ colours so improbable that they might have been synthesised by paint manufacturer Pantone.

If you flip the ideogram vertically, the triple pendant form flips the bird, giving you the extended middle finger. Is this some kind of post-Referendum blak humour? It is perhaps a 2023 version of Albert’s most confrontational work, the monumental Pay Attention, 2009-10. Instead of an exhortation to listen and be more conscious (which is how I read Albert’s declaration, based on a lithograph by Bruce Nauman) Forbidden Fruit reckons with sexualityin a straight-up way, a coming out into full disclosure in his work. It is a declarative statement that this Girramay man from the rainforest country around Cardwell in North Queensland, born blak and queer in Brisbane, will no longer excise from his work in the performative act of self-censorship. Albert’s new body of work also stakes a new claim: a refusal to accept the homophobic tenor that still prevails in many workplaces, public spaces and indeed, within some First Nations communities.

Albert has managed to avoid this confrontation to now. He is identified as an Aboriginal artist first and foremost, although he has declared his indifference to that term by quoting his mentor Tracey Moffatt, who once asked: “If I bake a cake, is the cake Aboriginal?” Albert is one of the least confrontational men I know, yet he tests that theory by sliding unannounced into my DMs every six months or so. We go back a long way, and I would like to think there is both trust and understanding between us, so my inbox is hardly off limits. We first met in 2007, when Albert worked in education at the Queensland Art Gallery. He was long-haired and whippet-thin, his promise masked by a diffident 25-yearold making artwork that, quite plainly, was risk-averse. In his timidity I saw my own embodied trauma response to homophobic bullying and racism, performed mostly (in my case) by cisgendered apparently straight men in antisocial behaviour ranging from daily microaggressions to unprovoked physical violence. Albert was still deep in his apprenticeship, sharing a studio with another mentor, Richard Bell (who once described himself as a “recovering homophobe”), Jennifer Herd, Gordon Hookey, Vernon Ah Kee, Bianca Beetson and Andrea Fisher, the core of proppaNOW, the history-making artist’s collective of which Albert is a key, longstanding member.

When we first speak about this new body of work, Albert is still slightly apprehensive about the way it will be received (and perceived) by the critics who keep most of us blackfellas in check: the mob who, as Bell once put it, will tell you straight to your face if you’ve got snot hanging from your nose. There is an ethics of care at work, that isn’t motivated by professional jealousy or the impulse to simply take a big noter down (some call it ‘tall poppy syndrome’, but I prefer the mud crabs in the bucket analogy). These intracultural critics patrol the limits of ‘Aboriginality’, our collective identity and experience, and how it is projected in the public domain. They (I say they, but we all do it at one time or another) directly or indirectly enforce relational standards

of behaviour that we might call ‘proppa’ – the culturally appropriate, blackfella way of doing things. I sense Albert’s hesitation, and the risk any statement he might make as an individual constitutes, by inflecting the visual cues or signs of Aboriginality – appropriated from mass-produced tea towels and other vintage fabrics – with queerness.

Despite what we may think, rampant homophobia does exist and it’s recruiting now. A subset of this antisocial phenomenon, of intracultural or blak on blak homophobia, was expressed by former professional sportsman Anthony Mundine in a violent anti-gay rant on Facebook in 2013. Mundine claimed that a gay Aboriginal character created for the highly anticipated but entirely fictional ABC television drama series Redfern Now was a distortion, based on the apparent absence of a cultural precedent for homosexuality in our tradition. Mundine went much further, associating homosexuality with aberrant behaviour or moral crime, one which could be punished by sanction according to customary law. The convert to Islam seconded his remarks by invoking a presumably Christian god, for which there is certainly no precedent in traditional culture:

Watching redfern now & they promoting homosexuality!

(Like it’s ok in our culture) that ain’t in our culture & our ancestors would have there [sic] head for it! Like my dad told me GOD made ADAM & EVE not Adam and Steve.

Unedifying though it was, the ‘story’ – Mundine’s violent homophobia – proved one thing: the knife edge on which the lives of many blak queers are poised. As a cultural text, Mundine’s expectorations have possessed some great minds ever since. However wrong or hateful, his comments provoked debate about who speaks for the ancestors in eastern Australia and why we blak queers need a cultural precedent for homosexuality (it just is). Altogether, it is more time than they deserve. The obscene weaponising of ‘our culture’ and ‘ancestors’ to justify homophobia so violent it kills is the lede for me. If, a decade on, Mundine speaks for anyone other than himself, then we’d better shape up because we have a fight on our hands.

“[In] our lives, our Aboriginality actually overrides or supersedes… the queer elements of life”, Albert begins. “[However] we shouldn't be excluded from a [queer] curatorial premise [because] the work is Aboriginal, instead of queer-driven… We shouldn't not be represented [in exhibitions such as the omnibus Queer, curated by Myles Russell-Cook, Pip Wallis and Meg Slater in 2022, drawn from the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, but it should be understood that those nuances and difficulties or politics are deeply attached.” Russell-Cook, the NGV’s senior curator of Indigenous art, ensured that Aboriginal artists such Albert, Moffatt, Destiny Deacon and Dylan Mooney were not left out of the expansive survey, which rather tenuously

Tony Albert, Forbidden Fruit, 2023, detail

Tony Albert, River of tears, 2024, appropriated found vintage object, 20 × 14.5 cm (1)

‘queered’ a woodcut by Albrecht Durer of the interior of a male bathhouse and an indulgent self-portrait by a former director of the National Gallery, whose only credential to be included in the exhibition was his rampant homophobia.

“Yes, this show is stepping into new territory,” Albert says. Overtly, perhaps. I gently remind him that for some of us, his work has always been queer regardless of the content or subject matter – engendered, like me and Albert, at the precise moment of conception, we are unashamedly born this way. His early black velvet paintings of tearful or lost ‘bush babies’ reframed with text, his appropriated pastoral scenes with high-key red fringe curtains that morph into rivers of metaphorical blood, and his assemblages of kitsch Aboriginalia inset into vinyl letters are, for me at least, part of a blak queer aesthetic (as prevalent as Australian Gothic) laid down by artists such as Deacon, Moffatt, r e a and Brook Garru Andrew).

The three-part pendant form Albert uses to signify the penis is also visual shorthand for a mountain, the landform that some of our Ancestors mistook for the tall ships that hove into sight, albeit floating ones. To my mind, the form hangs like overripe fruit. Although cock worship (expressed homosocially as toxic masculinity, the performative aspect of patriarchy) is a global phenomenon practised largely by cisgendered men who identify as straight, this mere reductive sign of the penis is replicated, multiplied and gridded – one-dimensional icons in the semiotic sense, referents like the binary male on the door of a public toilet or the road sign koala giving us the finger (or is it a claw?). Don’t get me wrong: I love cock as much as the next sex-deprived queer living regionally where ‘discreet’ is normal sexual behaviour and closets aren’t just for hanging clothes. I prefer the flesh and the veins pumping warm blood to the organ itself to the symbolic phallus with all its baggage. Pun intended.

Plato taught that Eros is more than just hormonal spermatozoa and oestrogen on the move. It is a life force, with the centre of gravity being the divine. If eros is a term that embodies the human impulse to feel sexual desire (and its fulfilment in sexual acts with the object of our lust) Albert’s images neutralise eros. Nor are they phalluses, the visual representation of male power and sexual energy. Albert replicates the sign to emphasise its commodification, its over-reproduction, its ubiquity (the dick pic). Yet each of the individual works is distinct, even the couplings (Dicktych I and II ). If you use any of the gay ‘dating’ apps, you’ll know it’s a sausage factory out there, churning out cheerios, chorizo and chipolatas in every shade (dimensions variable).

A succession of Catholic popes, whose patronage generated much of Western visual culture and drove the Renaissance, emasculated Classical statues for the sake of modesty. The patriarchs were driven at least in part by Christianity’s morbid fear of the naked human body given its causal relationship with original sin and the eternal shame of humankind’s expulsion from Eden, which condemned us all to die for eternity. From then onwards the censorship of the organ and its repression in visual representation in the West mystified the penis and oxygenated cock worship, expressed throughout history as patriarchy. The act of concealment glamourised and fetishised the penis, anaesthetising the nerve endings of this particular extremity of the male body.

The female form was never quarantined; indeed its primary and secondary sexual organs were splayed for the enjoyment of men and their gaze from the Venus of Willendorf to Manet’s Olympia and Courbet’s L’Origine du monde to British artist Jamie McCartney’s Great Wall of Vaginas. To represent the penis, however, was obscene, and risked exposing the shame visited on all of humanity every day since Adam and Eve were banished (given the choice I’m also not certain I’d prefer a sex-deprived state of grace in paradise, surveilled by a prurient god). As St Paul wrote in his epistle to the Romans: “sin entered the world through one man.” Coming out as gay in an Aboriginal community in eastern Australia in the early nineties, as I did, was to confront a particular kind of homophobia, stoked by Christianity and internalised with self-loathing and risky, self-harming behaviour. The closet was dark and overcrowded, and not in a good way. The absurdity of it hit me as I sheltered in a literal closet on one of those baking hot Brisbane summer days when the humidity is almost visible although it feels as thick as fog on your pheromone-saturated skin. It was 1991, my summer of love, a full year after I’d come out to my parents. When I wasn’t sweating in my jocks in a wardrobe in a basement car park in Highgate Hill, I was swimming in a churning hot sea of oxytocin and dopamine. I was at my sexual peak, and under my skin I was a secreting gland, dripping wet with foaming spermatozoa. That day though, I was flaccid. My first true love, let’s call him Dickhead, was not just closeted – he was empanelled. The only son of a female Anglican deacon, I was his first same-sex partner and soon inherited his Christian shame and homophobic self-loathing, even though I’d buried my own and danced on the grave. Dickhead was from the country west of Brisbane and on that day, his aged parents had decided to pay him a visit, unannounced. My first true love saw them approach through a window, and I was bundled out the back door in my underpants. Expelled from sex paradise and into a basement, I covered my shame in a wardrobe earmarked for the tip. I cried. Hard though it was, my coming out was not enough. The transfiguration was within me. I decided I couldn’t live with shame and denial, and no man was worth that kind of self-flagellation. After my first true love spirited his parents away, I left the closet forever. I ripped the figurative door off its hinges and set that motherfucker, with Dickhead walled up inside, on fire. Broken hearted but utterly resolute, I collected my things from the flat, including my prized 3-in-1 CD player. If not literally, it was metaphorically stuck like a stylus in warped vinyl that hot summer on one song: The Eurythmics’ sublime You Have Placed a Chill In My Heart.

The moral of this long-winded story? Closets, and wardrobes, are not fit for human habitation. The only thing they are designed to accommodate for any extended period of time is clothes. You can fold yourself up like I did on that infernal day in 1991, but it’s no way to live. I see Albert’s latest body of work in much the same light, as the artist broaches a subject that he once may have avoided. These are public statements, and in them he makes explicit his own relationship to the thing once forbade him. ■

FOR EVERY DROP

WORDS DR ANTHEA GUNN (SENIOR CURATOR OF ART AUSTRALIAN WAR MEMORIAL)

PHOTOGRAPHY MARK POKORNY, DAVID WHITTAKER

ALEX SETON

For Every Drop Shed in Anguish 2023. Australian War Memorial, Campbell ACT. Photograph Mark Porkony.

THREE YEARS AND 90 TONNES of marble later, Alex Seton is about to unveil his largest work to date. Eighteen marble ‘droplets’, weighing up to three tonnes each, will soon forever transform the Sculpture Garden at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. Yet Seton is reticent about proclaiming the scale of his achievement. For Every Drop Shed in Anguish represents the suffering and trauma experienced by a community whom Seton has walked alongside for over a decade.

Seton has long mastered using the materiality of marble to convey meaning. Here, he selected Australian Pearl Marble from Wakaman Country near Chillagoe in north Queensland. Pearl marble is famous for its unique white crystalline surface pattern beloved by designers for kitchens and bathrooms. Seton rejected the premium grade blocks however, searching the quarry (in searing February heat) for the blocks considered ‘flawed’ by veins of iron oxide colouring the marble. Seton described the symbolism of the work:

“I chose the dew drop form when contemplating the fragility and tension of the many kinds of suffering experienced by veterans and families. Every droplet has a unique

shape, defined by its delicate surface tension, as if about to burst. Their rounded liquid forms suggest blood, sweat or tears — for every drop ever shed in anguish. Most importantly, when touched these forms reveal themselves to have an inner strength and resilience that provides a hope and promise of healing.”

The concept was honed so that every physical aspect of the work contributes to its meaning. The extraordinary beauty of the marble is showcased by the form of the large, polished droplets, compelling the viewer to move among them, touching the stone and gazing at each droplet’s unique colouring. The dramatic veining alludes to the scars, seen and unseen, borne by many military personnel and their families.

For art historian Sue Malvern this invitation to participation is one of the defining features of contemporary artists’ approach to such public art. She identified Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982, Washington DC) as an historic shift in monumental commemorative sculpture. It ‘invites active participation, not passive admiration… It did not suggest that war was the apogee of manly heroism;

Stone selection, Chillagoe Quarry, Queensland. Photography by David Whittaker.

it offered a space for reflecting on trauma and working towards closure.’ 1 At least one psychology study indicates that Lin’s sculpture offers healing benefit for Vietnam veterans suffering post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), demonstrating the importance of works that acknowledge trauma and offer recognition. 2

It was veterans and families who approached the Memorial with the need for a sculpture that represented their lived experience. Australia proudly remembers those who have died at war, but too often those who survived their service with wounds or injuries, and especially mental illness, have felt forgotten. Too many families felt alone and unrecognised for their sacrifices to care for a loved one who served. Too many have died by suicide.

A committee was formed including representatives from veterans, families, and relevant organisations and government agencies to work together to commission a sculpture. Defining the objectives of the project, it was immediately apparent that this would not be a traditional figurative bronze sculpture. What was required was a place for reflection and recognition, not an heroic focal point.

1. Sue Malvern, ‘Contemporary War; Contemporary Art’, in War and Art: A Visual History of Modern Conflict, ed. Joanna Burke (London: Reaktion Books, 2017), p188.

2. Nicholas Watkins, Frances Cole, and Sue Weidemann, ‘The War Memorial as Healing Environment: The Psychological Effect of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on Vietnam War Combat Veterans’ Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Symptoms,’ Environment and Behavior, vol. 42 (2010): p351–75.

For Every Drop Shed in Anguish 2023. Australian War Memorial, Campbell ACT. Photograph Mark Porkony.

Australian War Memorial, Campbell ACT. Photograph Mark Porkony.

Seton’s proposal was unanimously selected by the committee; one member, a veteran with PTSD wrote:

“The concept of unique drops of blood, sweat and tears touches my soul. It reflects the stories and struggles of many of my friends, their families and their loved ones. It is an open and accessible space that will provide a powerful sense of place for many veterans and their families.”

As a sculptor working in marble, Seton has deeply considered public monuments and memorials and how they can be used to valorise or legitimise those in power. Seton’s practice is part of a much broader cultural reckoning around the meaning of public sculpture, particularly in the wake of the Black Lives Matter and decolonisation movements. It was his work that led to his association with the veterans’ community. As part of his 2011 series of works examining the history and meanings of flags he started to consider the true cost of ‘fighting for the flag’. In response, he started carving a folded flag every time the death of an Australian soldier in Afghanistan was announced:

“Like most Australians, I was aware of the casualties of Operation Slipper, but this seemed far removed from my

everyday life, all too easily overlooked… I wanted to create a work that was as much a testament to our ability to forget or disconnect as it was to the Australian soldiers killed while serving in Afghanistan. The war was ongoing, so this would be a living memorial to the ongoing tragedy it brought about.” 3

Now titled As of today… the work now numbers 47 flags and is on permanent display at the Memorial. What started as a meditation as a civilian on service, became a commemorative work through which Seton formed relationships with the families of those killed, including some who died by suicide. Together they will stand with the public on 22 February 2024 at the dedication of For Every Drop Shed in Anguish for long overdue recognition of the true costs of service. ■

3. Alex Seton, ‘Artist’s Statement’, 2014, https://www.awm.gov.au/visit/ exhibitions/seton/statement.

For Every Drop Shed in Anguish 2023. Australian War Memorial, Campbell ACT. Photograph Mark Porkony.

For Every Drop Shed in Anguish will be dedicated at the Australian War Memorial, Canberra at 9:30am, 22 February 2024, and the public are welcome. For more information, including livestreaming, see www.awm.gov.au/sufferingsofwar

Alex Seton in Chillagoe Quarry, Queensland. Photography by David Whittaker.

Interviewed by Claire Summers

Portrait photograph by Rhett Hammerton

José Da Silva

CLAIRE SUMMERS:

The 18th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art meditates on the thematic Inner Sanctum. What makes this curatorial direction poignant in this moment in time?

JOSÉ DA SILVA:

Inner Sanctum isn’t a biennial that critiques the present moment. I want to create a more timeless exhibition that reminds us of the role artists have in shaping our understanding of the human condition and the public art museum as a place that enlivens the social imagination. I’m drawn to the concept of an ‘inner sanctum’ not only because it describes a space of refuge and sanctuary from the outside world but because figuratively, it can represent the faculty of imagination that allows us to see culture and society differently. Who better than artists, poets, musicians, and writers to demonstrate this insight? This isn’t a radical proposition for a biennial, and Inner Sanctum doesn’t try to use art to solve the social and ecological forces shaping the present and future. In the most straightforward way, it reminds us of the value of imagination and remaining open to new possibilities.

CLAIRE SUMMERS:

Your career has been coloured by diverse and ambitious projects. How has the experience of curating an event of this scale differed from other curatorial projects under your direction?

JOSÉ DA SILVA:

After six years of running a university art museum, working again within a state gallery and accessing the extraordinary collections of the Art Gallery of South Australia has been thrilling. I used to work at the Queensland Art Gallery, so I’m well versed in the complexities of staging exhibitions of this scale and the incredible opportunity that institutional collections offer in creating new dialogues with contemporary projects. I’m taking full advantage of this. Throughout Inner Sanctum, Biennial works are presented in conversation with the collection, and collection works are seen throughout the exhibition to connect artistic knowledge across time and place.

The 18th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art launches on 1 March, 2024 and includes a new suite of works by Seth Birchall.

CLAIRE SUMMERS:

The Adelaide Biennial has defined itself for leaning into risk taking, experimentation and innovation. How have these values governed your curatorial approach?

JOSÉ DA SILVA:

All the artists in Inner Sanctum have used this opportunity to push themselves – to think ambitiously about their practices and make something with immense personal significance. Some of their innovations might appear humble, others more consequential for their careers. What feels like a more significant risk is the absolute trust that AGSA has shown in encouraging a distinct point of view about contemporary practice. I’ve been making exhibitions in public institutions for over 25 years, and I’ve never felt more empowered and encouraged across every aspect of the project without compromise. I’ve endeavoured to share that independence with all the artists, recognising that the most important thing to do is honour the time, energy, and generosity of artists with the freedom to follow their instincts and ideas through to completion.

JOSÉ DA SILVA

CLAIRE SUMMERS:

Art is a crucial tool tasked with expressing and provoking with the most urgent ideas of our time. What are the most vital ideas propelled by Inner Sanctum?

JOSÉ DA SILVA:

When I started working on Inner Sanctum, I thought a lot about why I became a curator and continue to work with artists. I’ve always believed that experiencing art gives us a licence to imagine ourselves and society anew and that exhibitions are essential to civic life because they invite us to participate with new ideas, narratives, and experiences. Both are made with the encouraging spirit of imagination and in a time of great cynicism and distrust of information, this potential feels more vital than ever. Institutions are always looking to artists to find solutions to the deepening inequality and precarity in our communities. I’m not interested in asking artists to bear that responsibility. Their work alone will spark curiosity and imagination, and that’s the sensation I want audiences to leave with. If we see value in our emotional, inner worlds, perhaps we will extend that empathy to others. If we can imagine a better world, we can work towards it.

CLAIRE SUMMERS:

What themes or streams of thought from your years of curatorial practice have permeated this experience at the Adelaide Biennial? Do you find there has been a commonality in your curatorial projects throughout your career or is each project decisively distinct?

JOSÉ DA SILVA:

Artists are always the foundation of my projects, and the ideas that take shape around exhibitions are an extension of their voices and concerns. My instinct for this Biennial was to focus on something poetic, perhaps even spiritual, in contemporary practice. For me, this was a sincere reflection of the work I’ve done previously and, maybe as I get older, my desire for a more tender approach to exhibition-making. While I had a framework for the Biennial when I was appointed, it only took shape through studio visits, conversations over meals and adventures travelling with artists, where I saw how all these different threads and ideas might work together as an exhibition. There are also certain reoccurring subjects on show in Inner Sanctum that you can trace throughout my career: an openness to thinking about contemporary visual and material culture, the public dimension of private experience, and representations of marginalised histories, bodies and experiences that reflect my own experience of the world.

CLAIRE SUMMERS:

How do you see the role of the Adelaide Biennial, or indeed biennials more broadly, as contributing to their local arts ecologies? What elements make them unique in the landscape they exist within?

JOSÉ DA SILVA:

Biennials offer artists a fantastic platform to be ambitious and present work to new, diverse and often larger audiences. The visibility and profile of biennials make raising money for projects easier, the possibility of acquisitions higher, and future exhibition opportunities are inevitable. All good biennials also take something from their location. Those unique qualities become the basis for an exhibition that can give back to a local community and speak to broader issues with local nuance. While there are obvious benefits to local artists in the project, the event brings greater engagement and interest to South Australia. This opportunity has allowed me to develop an entirely new network of artists and practices I might not have encountered otherwise, and you can expect South Australian artists to feature in many future projects.

Seth Birchall, Wonderful Wondrous Waterfall, 2023, 229 × 168 cm, oil on canvas

Presented in association with the Adelaide Festival, and with generous support received from the Art Gallery of South Australia Biennial Ambassadors Program and Principal Donor The Balnaves Foundation. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its arts funding and advisory body and by the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments.

Free exhibition entry biennaleofsydne y.art

COSMIC JOURNEY. BLOOD JOURNEY.

Dhopiya Yunupiŋu

“Leppeq patola lapiq kajému kutiwireng ko, Puang Matoa.

Manajang sebbu leppeq patola, sékua to cinaga gading.

Manajang ratuq sawédi kati kutiwireng ko.”

“The folds of your footwear I brought it for you, Puang Matoa. T housands of pieces of cloth, so is the ivory chest.

Hundreds of fields of gold I brought for you."

–La Galigo, episode: The Birth of The Golden Twins

WORDS BY ABDI KARYA PORTRAIT COURTESY BUKU-LARRNGGAY MULKA CENTRE

the fragment above is a quote from the pre-Islamic manuscript, La Galigo: the genesis of the people of South Sulawesi. It presents a diversity of deep relationships between humans and the spiritual world. For Bugis people, La Galigo not only traces the history of their ancestors, but is a guide or way of looking at the world in the past, present and future. In the text, Sawerigading – the incarnation of a god who has extraordinary powers – loves adventure and travel. Among his entourage was a group of people who always accompanied him wherever he sailed. They were people from the Underworld, dark-skinned, who had the skill of reading waves, understanding animal language and the ability the stars. When I shared this story with my adopted family from the Gumatj clan in Yirrkala, they widened their eyes and said; “They are like Yolŋu people!”.

The Yolŋu word Maŋgatharra, is taken from the word Mangkasara, meaning people from Makassar. During the early periods of trading, all sailors, regardless of ethnicity, that departed from Port Makassar – the central market of the Kingdom of Gowa – were considered as Macassans. The Gowa Kingdom was centered in the southern region of the island of Sulawesi, becoming a trade centre in Southeast Asia from 1500’s to the beginning of 1800’s. Commodities circulating in the archipelago, such as spices, metals, and weapons mainly from areas of eastern Indonesia known as Banda and Maluku, stopped in this region before being moved to other ports in Asia. Among these commodities were trepang (sea cucumber) and cloth.

Cloth has a strong position in tradition in the archipelago. It is recorded in temples spread across various corners of the island of Java as well as ancient manuscripts in Indonesia. In the traditions of the Melanesian people in Flores or the Malay people in Sumatra, they use cloth not only as clothing to mark social status, but also as dowry or a medium of exchange considered as valuable as precious metals and money. In the past, scraps of cloth were used as currency for people in Papua and West Java.

In Bugis and Makassar languages, unconnected pieces of cloth are called caré caré. When both ends of the cloth are sewn together, it is called a lipa or sarung (tubular shape). Sarung or sarong in South Sulawesi tradition are like a second skin. When a baby is born, they are immediately given a special sarung woven by their grandmother, mother or aunt. Babies are swung in a sarung while being lulled to sleep. There are so many children's games that use sarongs. When you grow up and know love, the phrase “Living together in one sarung ” was the most popular love metaphor for a man to propose to his girlfriend. At a wedding, sarungs collectively become an expressive language worn by everyone at the party. When traveling, sarungs become a means of packing, as if a bag. It can be used as a tool for climbing trees, a shade umbrella, or a tool for tying. Even when people died, the body was wrapped in a long sarung. I myself am familiar with sarungs because I grew up in a weaver's family. My grandmother, who died at the age of 94, fed our large family through hand-woven sarungs. My own mother has been weaving since a young age and stopped when she gave birth to me.

In Sulawesi, beside sarongs that are made from hand-woven cotton or natural silk, cloth is also made from fibers of pandan leaves, pineapple leaves, or banyan bark, which is flattened by beating. Another fibre, widely known as karoroq, made by palm leaf, is one of the main elements in maritime life, as it is used in boat sails. In several reliefs depicting boats at the Borobudur temple in Central Java, which was built in 750 AD, the boats use sails made from gebang trees (corypha gebanga or coryphe utan [cabbage palm]). In the seafaring tradition in Sulawesi, traders from the Bugis, Makassar and Mandar ethnicities used boats ( perahu), such as padewakang, to load various commodities in large quantities and sail to all directions, including long distance voyages such as Australia. This boat has a typical rectangular sail called tanjaq. To make the sail, the leaves are soaked and boiled, similar to how Yolŋu prepared gunga (pandanus), and then woven like weaving a sarong.

GLOSSARY

• Caré care: read it like ca in charter, ré in regional. Tjarri Tjarri or Djarridjarri means fabric or sail.

• Karoroq: in Bugis-Makassar language means the material of the sail from palm fiber

• Tanjaq: in Bugis-Makassar language means sail

• Prau/barrawu: in Yolŋu language means boat/ship

• Padewakang: a type of wooden boat that used during the trade of trepang

• Gunga: pandanus or pandanus weaving in Yolŋu

• Makassar: name of a main ethnic in Sulawesi, name or the big port and name of the capital city of South Sulawesi province in Indonesia

• Marege: named by Macassans to refer to Northern Territory Australia

• Padharriba: from Makassar words “pattaripang” means trepang gatherer or sailor

• Djapana: while in Yolŋu means sunset dreaming, it means “see you later” or “I’m going”.

• Yolŋu mätha: Yolŋu language

• Galiku: taken from kaliko or calico, refers to the sail or the material of the sail.

• Ggharuru: from Bugis-Makassar words karoroq means materials from woven-palm fiber

• Dhomala: sometime called djomula. from Makassar words of sombalak: sail

• Bunŋul: Yolŋu language for cultural activities

• Bunŋul djäma: doing/practicing cultural activities. In this case, I was dancing and singing

• Bulaeng: gold, golden. In Yolŋu they called it bulayin

• Yidaki: didgeridoo

1 Dhopiya Yunupiŋu, Galiku, 2023 Bark painting 205 × 84cm

2 Dhopiya Yunupiŋu, Galku, 2023

Natural earth pigments on bark 141 × 93 cm

Karoroq became an important trade commodity as well as being a boat sail. It was also used as clothing material or as part of house buildings such as ceilings or curtains as it was light, flexible, waterproof, and affordable. Later, when plastic materials became popular in the 60-70s, this natural fibre was replaced with plastic, and of course, this tradition almost became extinct. Currently, there are very few families left who can produce karoroq in Sulawesi. This material is significant in relations between the Maccassans of Indonesia and Aboriginal people in Arnhem Land, as Maccassans sailed to Marege to collect the trepang.

Hundreds of years before white colonials arrived on the Australian continent, the people of Arnhem Land worked together as padharribba (gatherers or sailors). Those Arnhem Land residents sailed back and forth to Makassar as family or professional workers. I myself have experienced how deep this cultural connection is, and how important the trail of the Trepangers (collectors of sea cucumbers) is to the Yolŋu people. They give a very special and deep place to the memory of their Macassan family through their lingua franca: songlines, dances, bark painting, rock painting, and even daily gestures. There are many songlines that talk about this relationship. The band Yothü Yindi mentioned it in their Djapana song which roughly means: “as the sun went down, the praus went across and faded through the horizon, we are longing for those who far away.”

When I went to Yirrkala for the first time in 2015, I heard directly hundreds of Bugis-Makassar vocabularies in the Yolŋu mätha like galiku, gharuru, and dhomala These words refer to sail of the prau. In July-August 2023, I experienced even more powerful moments from my interactions with Yolŋu families from other homelands. In the midst of thousands of people sitting around the main stage at the Garma Festival in Gulkula, I was invited to join in dancing on the bunŋul stage, to join in the bunŋul djäma, raising the flags with dances and songlines including the Djapana songlines. There were also scenes of rowing boats, playing cards, working with machetes, raising flags, and moving cloths. All their movements and words brought me to magnificent feelings of experiencing the strong traditions of Makassar in the past.

At Garma festival, I met Dhopiya through her son, Larry Gurruwiwi, son of the yidaki maestro, Djalu Gurruwiwi. When I introduced myself from Makassar, Dhopiya was very happy and invited me to sit near her while she continued painting yidaki. When I showed her the 1x1 meter piece macassan sail that I brought from Makassar, she stopped, stunned, and said; "This is the sail from the boat that carried my grandfather and my husband's grandfather.” This reaction was exactly the same when I introduced myself and showed this object to her other sisters.

Dhopiya Yunupiŋu

Galiku, 2023

Bark painting 205 × 84cm

Dhopiya Yunupiŋu Galiku, 2023

Natural earth pigments on bark 179 × 82 cm

Dhopiya Yunupiŋu

Galiku, 2023

Natural earth pigments on bark 106 × 46 cm

Dhopiya Yunupiŋu

Galiku, 2023 Bark painting 194 × 84 cm

The sail, as well as the bandhirra or flag, is like a jewellery for the boat. People treat these objects well. Like the sarong, it is important because it carries power and soul, they represent the spirit of the owner. Red represents blood and brave, blue for calm, green for nobility and yellow for leadeship. For pricier ones, sometimes they inserted copper or gold threads to give a bulaeng (golden) look, for prosperity.

Staring at images of Dhopiya's works made me re-open again the sarung collections from my family that I have kept since I was a student. The fine lines of her brush made from strands of hair reminded me of the silk fibers woven by my grandmother and mother and the threads of the palms. The vertical and horizontal lines in sarungs that are inserted with shapes of diamonds, zig zag, and sizes of square patterns represent the memories of the maker between their life, body, nature and spiritual realms. The colours of the sarung tell the story of the human soul, the weather, the sky and the stars. These knowledges have been systematically passed through generations, intertwining creative thoughts, values and actions. In Dhopiya's works, the colours appear like the sail and the old-style natural-dyed sarungs. The texture itself shows untwined and intertwined threads of the palm-fibres where we can see delicate and durable sitting together side-by-side. I was not surprised to hear that the meanings were similar to what they inherited from her parents, her clans and people in Arhem Land. I am not surprised, because they are like me. In their blood, there is my blood. ■

REFERENCES

• Manuscript NBG No.188 Collections of KITLV Library of Leiden University, Netherland

• Campbell C. Macknight. 2017. The Voyage To Marege: Pencari Teripang dari Makassar di Australia. Ininnawa Publishing. Makassar

• Muhammad Ridwan Alimuddin. 2016. Mandar dan Buton dalam Kenangan Lembar Layar “Karoroq”. 2016 (paper)

• Muhammad Ridwan Alimuddin. 2005. Orang Mandar Orang Laut. KPG. Jakarta

• Gene Amarell. 2016. Navigasi Bugis. Ininnawa Publishing. Makassar

• Abdul Rahman Hamid. 2011. Orang Buton: Suku Bangsa Bahari Indonesia. Ombak Publishing. Yogyakarta

• Adrian B. Lapian. 2009. Orang Laut, Bajak Laut, Raja Laut: Sejarah Kawasan Laut Sulawesi Abad XIX. Komunitas Bambu. Depok, Indonesia

• Horst H.Liebner. 2003. Berlayar ke Tompo tikkaq. Sebuah Episode I La Galigo. 2003 (paper)

• Alfred Russel Wallace. 2009. Malay Archipelago. Kepulauan Nusantara: Kisah Perjalanan, Kajian Manusia dan Alam. Komunitas Bambu. Depok, Indonesia

• Christian Pelras. 2006. Manusia Bugis. Nalar Publishing. Jakarta

• Mattulada. 1985. Latoa: Satu Lukisan Analitis terhadap Antropologi Politik Orang Bugis. Gajah Mada University Press. Yogyakarta

• L. Burarrwanga, R.Ganambarr, M. Ganambarr-Stubbs, B. Ganambarr, D. Maymuru, S. Suchet-Pearson, S. Wright & K. Lloyd. 2013. Welcome To My Country. Allen & Unwin. Sydney, Australia

• L. Burarrwanga, R.Ganambarr, M. Ganambarr-Stubbs, B. Ganambarr, D. Maymuru, S. Suchet-Pearson, S. Wright & K. Lloyd. 2008. Weaving Lives Together at Bawaka. Center for Urban Regional Studies. University of Newcastle. NSW, Australia

Abdi Karya is a multi-disciplinary artist and curator from Makassar-South Sulawesi, Indonesia. He has been a key figure in developing QAGOMA's Yolngu/Macassan Project, liasing with with Indonesian artisans, and artists of the Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Arts Centre in Yirrkala, providing unique insights into their contemporary experience of this historic connection.

Dhopiya Yunupiŋu

Galiku, 2023

Natural earth pigments on bark 106 × 46 cm

Dhopiya Yunupiŋu

Galiku, 2023

Natural earth pigments on bark 189 × 79.5 cm

THE DARK CURRENT Angela Tiatia

Angela Tiatia, The Dark Current 2023. Single-channel High Definition video, colour, sound. 17 minutes, 19 seconds. Edition of 5 plus 2 artist's proofs.

as with the tentacles of a giant feʻe, octopus, the deep-time kin constellations spanning the many shores of the Great Ocean, relate and bind each of our peoples, associated more-than-human relations and homelands to one another, as integral parts of a living entity. The Great Ocean is a translation of many but not all Indigenous language concepts of the third of the planet’s surface that newcomers call Pacific. It is in fact, the same planetary ocean connected around the continents which can be understood as islands in an archipelago. Taranaki Māori scholar and museum director Te Rangi Hīroa is widely recognised today as having in the first half of the 20th century preserved complex understandings of the interrelated histories of Indigenous peoples in the western half of the Great Ocean, widely termed with the racist and flattening term Polynesia. Following in the routes well-paddled by our ancestors, Angela Tiatia returns in both The Pearl (2022) and The Dark Current (2023) to sacred mālumālu, temples, particularly the Taputapuātea marae complex on Raʻiātea island which hosted cosmopolitan ceremonial-political gatherings for many centuries.

To gain a deeper understanding of Tiatia’s practice in siapo viliata, what I call animated barkcloth or digital imprinted screens, it is important to centre our Sāmoan art histories, and those of related Indigenous peoples of the Great Ocean. The artist has shared that the penina, pearl, present across the trilogy, has a dual genealogy, both the penina of Greek classical goddess Venus, and the penina of our oceanic god born in a clam shell called many names: ʻOro (Tahitian), Ono (Marquesan), Rongo (Mangarevan), and Lono-nui-noho-i-kawai (Hawaiian) among others. The Dark Current is described as a visual poem, which can be understood as an honouring of kinships and spiritual solidarities that criss-cross the northeastern and southwestern archipelagos. The deeply related cousin cultures of the central triangle—Sāmoa, Viti, Tonga—as well as the next ring of related cousin cultures, Rotuma, ʻUvea, Futuna, Alofi, Niue, Tokelau, are represented in the dancers’ ancestral homelands in the middle sequence, similar to the numerous national delegations which will gather at the Festival of Pacific Arts in Honolulu in June 2024.

Like many of our neighbouring as well as distant kin Indigenous cultures in the Great Ocean, Sāmoan culture reveres oval architecture, genealogical binds, and lunar cycles. In The Dark Current, the perspective is resolutely pluralist and the tone warm. This work moves through three related time-space moments that are not necessarily linear in a Western sense. Instead, apply the lens of Sāmoan scholar Lana Lopesi’s compelling work on our precolonial sacred menstrual matriarchy, and on the Moana cosmopolitan imaginary enacted through suʻifefiloi, cultural remixing, present over thousands of years and now accentuated in this digitally-led era. Over the months of December 2023 and January 2024, I am witness from afar to multiple saofaʻi, chiefly investiture ceremonies, across the Sāmoan archipelago. Friends new and less new, living and working in Montreal, Port Vila, Sydney or Brisbane, are among the Sāmoan women theorists and practitioners who have been invested as matai responsible for the sovereign balance of life in specific vā, relational spaces.

One of these women is my mother, Afitu Soné, who, after more than 30 years living in vibrant small-town communities across the eastern seaboard of Australia, returned home 10 years ago this month to care for our ailing artist grandmother Manō Nātia. With the first sequence of penina in the eye tableau vivant on a pink mat floating and then submerged in dark waters, The Dark Current places glamour, beauty and strength in the cultural memory of generations of Indigenous women of the Great Ocean who moved to the British-, United Statesand French-settled colonies of the so-called Pacific Rim. These are generations of our mothers, aunties, cousins, grandmothers, greataunts and great-grandmothers who worked in feminine-connoted fields allowed to them by diasporic English- and French-speaking cultures. It is important to contrast what we remember of our ancestral teachings of interconnectedness based in matriarchy and good behaviour with all living beings and spaces, with the continuous, extractive consumption of bodies, genders, sexualities, strengths, softnesses, families and communities.

The Dark Current directly addresses our sordid, imposed history of visual and material sexualisation across the Great Ocean, to demonstrate resistance and refusal as sovereign embodied moves towards futures where we are collectively well. This work “...takes a new direction in unravelling these complex visual and racial politics (...) seduc[ing] the viewer with its highly polished beauty but reveal[ing] the artifice of such idealised fantasy. With the artist behind the camera, rather than in front of it, the film is also a statement of self-determination.” (Castagnini, acmi, page 3) As highlighted by acmi curator Laura Castagnini, the breaking of the fourth wall where the group choreography and the supporting crew are depicted in an extended overhead shot is a very effective way of inviting audiences into the mechanics and ethics behind montage. The moving image is not neutral, particularly for Indigenous bodies of the Great Ocean whose likenesses, as our homelands, have been places to trash, play or get rich for Eurasian empires for hundreds of years.

Throughout The Dark Current, it is striking to remember the significant misogyny, racism, hardship and abiding humour of Sāmoan matriarchs including both our mothers Lusi and Afitu Soné, as well as my grandmother Manō Nātia who worked in South Auckland factories in the 1960s before returning home to work as an artist in customary artforms. The closing sequence is a compelling example of siapo viliata demonstrating actualised futurities—tomorrow and morning are the same word in our language—which Indigenous women of the Great Ocean craft together. These are distinct to the linear death-drive of Eurasian empires and their extractive systems that destroy both the image and everything which is referenced. Instead sacred foods, flowers, shells and luscious pink costumes contrast with industrial debris flowing over new temple platforms. The precolonial percussive sound composition adds to the videogame aesthetic which here empowers team members and dancers in writing their relations and stakes to futurities of collective ceremony across this majority water planet. ■

Angela Tiatia, The Dark Current 2023. Single-channel High Definition video, colour, sound. 17 minutes, 19 seconds. Edition of 5 plus 2 artist's proofs.

The Dark Current (Blue Screen 2), 2023

Words and photography

Claire Summers

Book Review

OPEN QUESTIONS

Helen

Molesworth

HELEN MOLESWORTH IS, FIRST AND BEFORE anything else, a viewer. And by her own definition, viewers must stand curious in front of works of art. Such is the case in Open Questions: Thirty Years of Writing About Art, recently published by Phaidon and compiling 24 essays written by Molesworth over three decades.

“Molesworth never postures that she has absolute answers to the questions she lays down. Rather, it is apparent that she takes great satisfaction in proposing only possible answers”

THIS TOME DOES PRECISELY WHAT its title suggests: it poses questions, often and in great number. The question is Molesworth’s primary motif. She deploys them liberally, puncturing the page with proposition. She asks: What is criticism? (in Why Is the Sky Blue and Other Questions Regarding Writing) What forms of history can feminism offer in the space of the museum? (in How to Install Art as a Feminist) Is individuality “private” and equality “public”? (in Lari Pittman: Décor, The Decorative, Decorum). Molesworth never postures that she has absolute answers to the questions she lays down. Rather, it is apparent that she takes great satisfaction in proposing only possible answers. It is precisely this absence of absolutes and this flirting with possibility that categorises Molesworth’s questions as open ones.

I appreciate Molesworth’s questions for the same reason I value text-based works, where words function as both form and content. Text-based works, for me, provoke thought patterns in a very directional manner, as opposed to say a more swelling and swooning feeling I experience standing before a great (or even simply good) painting. Molesworth’s mode of questions functions much to the same effect, proposing directions and send the reader skipping merrily along to find where they lead. In House Work and Art Work, Molesworth references artist Martha Rosler in conversation with art historian Benjamin H. D. Buchloh. Rosler states: “My work is a sketch, a line of thinking, a possibility.”

Excising it from the context in which it appears, this quote feels most apt for describing Open Questions on the whole.

We encounter Marcel Duchamp, on whom Molesworth wrote her PHD dissertation, repeatedly throughout these essays, either in great detail or as a passing reference. In Work Ethic, Molesworth traces the relationship of the artist to the work of being an artist, referencing the manner in which Duchamp’s pioneering of the ‘readymade’ altered the labour of artmaking. She states: “Far from destroying art, Duchamp’s profound challenge ultimately served to create an enormous field of aesthetic possibilities.” Through reclamation and redistribution of purpose, Duchamp’s readymades expanded the realm of materiality, a shift that Molesworth cites as ones that moved art into “…a realm of ideas.” Molesworth’s questioning function in much the same way: they expand the realm of ideas, the limits of what is possible, simply by the act of asking without relying on a question-answer binary.

To me, an enduring devotee to the painting and its power, Molesworth is at her finest in the final essays gathered together under the title After All This, It Turns Out I Really Love Painting. Her descriptions of life’s minutiae in Dike Blair: Hook and Eye are grimy but profound; her humility in Noah Davis: The Forest and the Trees is candid if not casual. But Molesworth is at her most evocative, most instinctive, in Lisa Yuskavage: Meissen v. Hummel. In this essay, a piece

that Molesworth declares in the text’s post-script as one of her first written from a post-institutional position and her most “explicitly queer”, we see a writer freed. Yuskavage’s paintings are unabashedly erotic, and Molesworth writes about them as if in the midst of a full body blood rush: “Yuskavage’s work opens up the rich minefield of desires formed when you didn’t have much agency over your life, when you weren’t in control of your own visual field, desires formed long before you had any language of describing them.” Here, the words feel as if they run over the page at a clip, coming fast and instinctual.

In essays published in her early career, there is a sense that Molesworth feels a need to show that she knows her stuff; the later essays express a need to show that she knows herself. Indeed, the most interesting thing about the way Molesworth writes is her offering of her own point of view–it’s the presence of the ‘I’ that holds us so closely to the text, vesting something of ourselves in the pursuit for each question’s conceivable reply. Molesworth’s essays are proof of her most important claim: that art and life are inextricably linked. Each of the essays in this compilation refer back to this on repeat, each one laced with a hair-raising urgency. Through its examination of the lives of artists, of critical thinking in art, of the modus operandi of institutional halls, Open Questions offers an intimate examination of Molesworth’s own life and the ways in which art is the realm

of the personal for her. Everything is intimate, even when it’s intellectual. Her queerness, her politics, her tastes, her expertise, her vulnerabilities are all interwoven into the manner in which she looks at art or the systems that uphold and propel it. This intimacy with which we glimpse Molesworth’s own inner life is most acute in two places: in the overarching forewords of each section and in the brief postscripts on a select number of essays, all penned by Molesworth in the present. In this way, we witness Molesworth in a state of reflection, in conversation with the writer, curator or thinker she used to be. In an interview promoting the book’s launch with podcast The Art Angle, Molesworth said, “I’m not rewriting history, but annotating it,” and it is in these annotations that we experience her interiority most profoundly.

Increasingly, I find that there is great hazard in looking to anyone for answers. Yet, from reading Open Questions, I have found that there is comfort in looking to someone for questions. Answers purport to be a final destination, where questions offer a rolling encounter with the way we think and feel or are capable of thinking and feeling. Molesworth gave me her questions, to which I have added my own. This cycle will never be complete, but that’s the whole point. ■

Julia Gutman is grappling with an affliction that’s been part of her life since childhood. In the presence of other people, she’s torn between two impulses. An intention to participate versus the desire to observe.

STRANGERS TO OURSELVES

Julia Gutman

WORDS NEHA KALE

AT A PARTY THE PREVIOUS SATURDAY, she tells me, she found herself standing in a corner with a group of artists and writers and directors. She watched them watch each other.

“We are all such voyeurs,” she laughs. “We were trying to observe the social dynamics. She shakes her head. “It became apparent to me that some people have a scribble in the brain. I grew up in a house where we were creatively encouraged but I was the only one with this neurotic itch to explain what was happening.”

The act of sewing, she says, can empty her mind. The thoughts disappear. She is back in her body again. “It is so physical. It is just process.” A smile crosses her face. “It is delightful.”

The words text and textile famously share a Latin root. Writers refer to the subjects they wrestle with as their material. The first time I encountered one of Gutman’s ‘patchworks’, in which clothes donated by friends and family are stitched together, re-assembled, to recall the surface of a painting, I felt like I was reading rather than seeing something.

The work, The Black Jeans, was propped up against a wall at the Fairfield City Gallery. I circled it twice, this portrait of the artist lounging in a chair. I knew the pose: Antoinette, from Balthus’s The White Skirt. But her expression was downcast, her gaze distant, sombre. The figure, rendered in cotton and thread and calico, seemed to me like a character in a short story. It didn’t so much describe a likeness as hint at a world beneath the surface that I could sense but never know.

In Gutman’s world, people aren’t abstractions. They are specific. Particular. There was Devra, her studio mate in New York, whose death changed her artistic trajectory.

In Gutman’s world, people aren’t abstractions. They are specific. Particular. There was Devra, her studio mate in New York, whose death changed her artistic trajectory. “I was grieving,” she says. “I asked ‘what could I do with Devra’s clothes?’ – and then I realised that all my favourite artists were making figurative paintings.”

There are the young women who starred in Muses, her first exhibition at Sullivan + Strumpf: reading and swimming and watching Buffy in front of the television. Limbs intertwined. Rope and chain tethering tableaux together, ordinary intimacy turned profound connection.

“I was so grateful to be with my friends,” she says. “To be alive. I still feel that way.”

Then there is her Archibald-winning painting of the singer Montaigne.

“It was the first time someone had called my work portraiture,” she says. “And I realised, wait a second! I am a portrait artist. Maybe this is about a very strong desire to understand someone else’s interiority. [Jung talks about] making the unconscious conscious. Otherwise it will control your life and you will call it fate.”

Gutman’s art, I think, exists in the space between self and other. But when we meet, during a cloudy Monday at her high-ceilinged Artspace studio, our conversation returns again and again to the idea of the self as other. We talk about our favourite writers: Zadie Smith, Siri Hustvedt.

Gutman plays with short fiction. Her ‘patchworks’, she tells me, start as text paragraphs. She owes the name for her upcoming Sullivan+Strumpf show – Everyone you are looking at is also you – to a quote by the great James Baldwin.

I notice that Gutman often articulates literary instincts. The desire to reveal our delusions of moral purity. To explore how we project our fear and fantasies. To reflect how the abject or shameful or violent might exist on a continuum of which we are also part.

The artist that appears in The Black Jeans was mysterious, but also secure in her subjectivity. In a new work, They are the ones who live their lives not as lives but as examples of life, she’s split in two. Her back is turned to face her own reflection. She’s watching herself watch herself, trapped by her own perspective, newly conscious of her limits. To prepare for the show, Gutman spent a month researching. She became interested in witch hunts. She revisited realisations from her Jewish childhood.

“The thing that was so pertinent for me about my upbringing was that Nazis were normal people,” she says. “I could have been a Nazi. Whenever there is a mob mentality, people have an inability to reflect on themselves and this desire to absolve themselves by pointing at each other.” The artist is very interested in “critically engaging with emotions.” She counts among her best friends a psychologist and a theatre director. She shows me the preliminary drawings for new works in the show. Two figures embrace. A couple sprawl on a picnic rug. Here, interiority – the depth of feelings – manifest as moments of tenderness. But what happens when connection ruptures? When all that goes unwitnessed, inside us, ripples out into the world?

Gutman has recently become fascinated by a painting Arrest for Witchcraft, an 1866 painting by John Pettie, part of the collection at the National Gallery of Victoria. In the show’s central installation, she reimagines its composition. She casts versions of herself as both ‘witch’ and an angry mob. The point is not to paint a picture of persecution but to explore how easily we vilify others when we refuse to confront our multiplicity.

“I think that’s what James Baldwin was talking about when he said, ‘walking down the street, you could be that cop, you could be that child’,” she says. “You could be any of them. I struggle with this the other way – maybe having compassion and absolving people of accountability. The desire to turn someone into a witch, is the witch.”

There’s power, still, in standing back, observing. “I do feel like if we look in the mirror, there is a bit of hope.” ■

Founding

Barayuwa Munuŋgurr

Barayuwa Munuŋgurr, Yarrinya, 2023

Etched metal panel

Barayuwa Munuŋgurr, Yarrinya, 2023 Etched steel panel 74.5 × 74.5 cm

Barayuwa Munuŋgurr, Yarrinya, 2023 Natural pigment on bark, 207 × 93 cm

TO TRULY UNDERSTAND THE FOUNDATION of Barayuwa

Munuŋgurr’s art practice is to grasp the significance of ancestral stories of the Munyuku clan, to see their symbology within the intricate crosshatching of each work. The authority, confidence and energy of Munuŋgurr’s practice and his bravery in continually embracing fresh approaches is a clue to the influence of that heritage. Known for the precision of his hand, honed through years of supporting other artists at Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka art centre, Munuŋgurr work is highly detailed, emulating an atmospheric complexity that creates the watery world of these traditional histories.

The works in this new body of work exhibiting at Sullivan+Strumpf extends the traditional gestures that are foundational to Munuŋgurr painting technique and cross into contemporary materiality, etching into steel panels. Munuŋgurr was a key early adopter of the Found movement in contemporary Indigenous art practice, initiated by Gunybi Ganambarr. This movement, defined by the reclamation of abandoned and weathered metal sheets often used for road signs, came to prominence with Murrŋiny– a story of metal from the east, 2021, a group exhibition presented by Salon Art Projects in association with Northern Centre for Contemporary Art and Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre. This technique of etching traditional stories and histories into a modern materiality marks an important frontier in experimentation for many artists working in the region.

The undercurrent of each work in this exhibition refers to or directly portrays the life and movement of waters in Northeast Arnhem Land, in Australia’s Northern Territory. Munuŋgurr illustrates the language of water, the unending path it travels as it impresses upon the shoreline and pulls back into the ocean or waterways. His intricate technique–delicate dotting or innumerable lines crosshatched across either bark or steel–appear as the undulating surface of the water or the light sea foam gathering as ocean meets land. Submerged within the abstracted elemental surfaces of these sophisticated works are forms that symbolise narrative elements, imbedding into the work notions of place and deep time. The incorporation of these symbolic forms beneath the surface of the work is an art practice known by the Yolŋu people of Yirrkala as buwayak and has become increasingly prominent in Munuŋgurr’s work since 2013.1

Munuŋgurr is a long-time staff member of Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Art Centre in Yirrkala, providing meaningful assistance and support to all the artists of the community in many ways. The art centre is a community-based project that has been instrumental in drawing international recognition to the work of Yolngu artists and expanding the understanding of what contemporary Indigenous Australian art practice looks like. Having spent many years assisting other artists, Munuŋgurr has now become an established artist in his own right, painting both his own Djapu clan designs as well as his mother’s Munyuku clan designs. His mother is recently deceased Beŋgitj Ŋurruwutihun, a sister to the great Dula, who was a renowned ceremonial expert and painter. Munuŋgurr is a member of a younger generation of Yolngu artists, all of whom carry with them an unending connection to their cultural lineage. Through their emerging art practices, these traditional storylines meet with contemporary methods of artmaking.

1. Barayuwa Munuŋgurr, MCA Collection Handbook, 2015, Cara Pinchbeck, Curator, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art, Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Barayuwa Munuŋgurr, Yarrinya, 2023 Natural pigment on bark 143 × 80 cm

[ ancestral legend ]

the work of barayuwa munuŋgurr honours his matrilineal Munyuku clan, belonging to the Yirritja moiety. Major spiritual themes relate to marine life and the rising cumulus clouds of the monsoon season. Mirinyunu (the ancestral whale) also connects to the clouds, the steam that rises from its blowhole being the bridge between animal and the skies above.

Munuŋgurr’s work draws on the inherited story of the death of the Mirinyuŋu at the beaches of the Munyuku saltwater estate of Yarrinya within Blue Mud Bay. The story speaks of the Yarrinya Ocean in which Munyuku spirit men (Wurramala or Matjitji) unknowingly hunt their own brother – according to Yolŋu kinship classifications – a whale named Mirinyuŋu. After the dead whale washes up onto the beach, the spirit men use garapana (stone knives) to cut its body into strips. Upon realising that they have eaten their brother in contravention of their laws, in an act of self-disgust and cleansing, they fling the knives into the ocean where they become a dangerously hidden and potent reef. The remains of the whale, the knives and the ocean rocks are combined in a spiritual manner that remains extremely significant to Munyuku people. Elements of this scene, such as the tail of Mirinyuŋu, its bones and even the lines from the surface of the water, are incorporated as sacred motifs in ceremonies. The presence of hidden forces remains strong in the Yolŋu mindset, with

Munuŋgurr life as an artist has gained to it steady momentum over more than a decade, with his work exhibited overseas and widely across Australia including the Museum of Contemporary Art, NSW; National Gallery of Australia, ACT; Museum & Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, NT; Dark Mofo, TAS; Art Gallery of South Australia, SA; Monaco Oceanographic Institute, Monaco; and Seattle Art Museum, Seattle. Significant milestones in the narrative of his practice include exhibiting as part of the 2014 edition of Primavera, curated by artist Mikala Dwyer. A major feature of the exhibition, Munuŋgurr exhibited a large-scale work that combined bark with digital screens, intersecting traditional practice with contemporary media. In 2017 his ten-metre wall work Yarrinya was purchased by the MCA for the permanent collection and exhibited for three years. This exhibition with Sullivan+Strumpf marks his debut solo with the gallery, a meaningful moment in the advocacy of his work to new audiences and as an important artist working in contemporary art in Australia. ■

many of the artists of the clan often starting paintings around the curves and structure of the whale’s skeleton, which then disappear, buried underneath meticulously applied patterns.

The designs contain symbols of fratricide, shame, death and rotting of the whale, corruption and the loss of discipline in greedy consumption. Importantly, they also speak of redemption: in flinging the knives into the sea they cleanse themselves of the crime against kin. Their realisation prevents further harm and absolves them of the crime. But the danger remains hidden within the sea and must be avoided, a reminder of errors never to be repeated. To go to this area is to court disaster and be cut to ribbons by these contaminated hidden knives.

The bones of the whale are also said to have become a part of the rocks in the ocean. Bones are thought of as someone’s essence. From this description it is evident that the rock and the whale are combined in a spiritual manner, a union whose significance to the Munyuku people cannot be understated.

The directions of the bands of miny’tji (sacred clan design) relate to the sacred saltwater of Yarrinya, the surface chop of the water and the ancestral powers emanating from it. The dynamic patterning of dots and fluid filigree hatching suggest seaweed, mangrove stalks and monsoon waters. These finely wrought designs of this important cultural story describe the powers within the salt waters of the bay of which he is custodian.

Barayuwa Munuŋgurr, Yarrinya, 2023

Etched metal panel 75 × 75 cm

Barayuwa Munuŋgurr, Yarrinya, 2023

Etched metal panel 59 × 59 cm

Barayuwa Munuŋgurr, Yarrinya, 2023

Etched metal panel

Interviewed by Chloe Borich

Portrait photograph by Hoda Afshar

in a hyper-digital world, the ways we communicate have become ever more visual. Phone cameras have become extensions of our bodies, attached to our fingertips and at the ready to document our everyday moments, however ordinary or extraordinary. Despite the rapid rate images are made, shared and exchanged, photography has only gained relevance as a medium in contemporary times. Through photography, artists can empower viewers to learn about and connect to broader global cultures, communities and lived experiences. Embodying this sentiment is Melbourne’s biennial photo international festival of photography. The next edition, PHOTO 2O24 will platform and celebrate the work of Australian and international photographers at all stages of their careers, including Sullivan+Strumpf artists Tony Albert, Darren Sylvester, Angela Tiatia and Jemima Wyman, throughout 100 exhibitions staged across the city. Ahead of the festival commencing this March, Chloe Borich spoke with co-founder Elias Redstone about all that’s to come.

CB M elbourne is home to some of the country’s best photographers and most exciting developing talent. Why do you think photography is so prolific in Melbourne? And why does the medium resonate so strongly with the city’s art audience?

ER Photography has emerged as the medium of our age, and Melbourne has a special and enduring relationship with photography. RMIT has the longest running photography school in the world and cultural institutions such as the Centre for Contemporary Photography and Museum of Australian Photography provide year-round platforms for the art and craft of photography. PHOTO festival is a time where photography is placed front and centre across Victoria’s museums and galleries, as well as through large-scale installations on the streets of Melbourne that bring important local and international voices directly to the public’s attention.

Audiences connect instinctively and strongly with photography as it is an artform we all use in our daily lives. The familiarity of the medium provides a way for audiences to connect in an immediate way with artistic practice and encourages people to explore the depth of research and thinking that comes with this.

CS The theme for PHOTO 2024 is The Future Is Shaped by Those Who Can See It. Can you speak to the inspiration and meaning behind the theme? What kinds of speculative futures we can expect to unfurl throughout the festival?

ER Each edition of the festival is focused on one central theme inspired by the interests we see coming through in artists’ practice, as well as broader societal shifts taking place in the world. The idea to look to the future took hold as a reflection of the psychological shift many of us felt living through, and emerging from, the pandemic. Previously, there seemed to be a clearer sense of where we were heading – both as a society, and individually. Suddenly, this ability to project into the future vanished. The trajectory we were moving towards was swept away and the march towards progress seemed to have taken a few wrong turns. Humans are responsible for a climate crisis, the impact of which is being felt strongly in Australia, and the stripping away of human rights that we have taken for granted in different regions around the world. At the same time, artists such as Nan Goldin have taken it on themselves to actively shape the future through activism. Other artists include Carmen Winant who has been looking at the impact of regressive policies on women’s rights in the USA, and Mous Lamrabat has been merging Eastern and Western cultures to create a utopian future that brings people together. It is time we look to artists to make us ask questions about what is happening in the world today, and how this is pointing to possible and parallel futures that lie ahead.

CB PHOTO 2024 places a focus on the work of both emerging and leading Australian artists working now. What is it about Australian photography that is exciting you currently?

ER First and foremost, it is the strength of photographic practice in Australia that is most compelling for me. There is an incredible amount of talent and a diversity

Darren Sylvester, Body Be A Soul 2023

Cindy Sherman (US), Untitled Film Still, 1980. Installation view, Atrium, Fed Square, Melbourne. Exhibited as part of PHOTO 2022.

ELIAS REDSTONE

Top, Tony Albert, David C Collins, Kieran Lawson, Warakurna Superheroes

#1 2017, archival pigment print on paper 100 × 150cm.

Bottom, Jemima Wyman, Haze 14, 2023.

of practice that is ready for international attention. For previous festivals we have commissioned the likes of Hoda Afshar, Atong Atem, Anu Kumar, Naomi Hobson that are now receiving broader acclaim. For PHOTO 2024, we are placing some of Australia’s most exciting artists such as Angela Tiatia, Amos Gebhardt and Darren Sylvester alongside renowned international names – Ryan McGinley, Cao Fei, Omar Victor Diop, Edward Burtynsky to name a few – to position our homegrown talent within a global community of image makers.

CB For your icons selection this year, exhibitions by Nan Goldin, Malick Sidibé and Rennie Ellis each evoke distinct moments in time from the 1960s to 1980s. Each artist has been seminal in forming contemporary photography as we know it today, what do you hope their work will contribute to the festival discourse?

ER Nan Goldin, Malick Sidibé and Rennie Ellis present three very different and important approaches to image making, and a specific time and place. From Goldin’s documentation of friends and chosen family living through the AIDS crisis in New York, to Sidibé’s portraits of youth celebrating a post-colonial future in Mali, these artists show the power of photography to both document a moment in time and create powerful images that are both specific in context and universal in appeal. They speak to society in flux, and I am excited for audiences to see these powerful works as large-scale public art in Melbourne’s CBD, as well as an exhibition of Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency on display in Ballarat. Ellis is our first Australian photographer to be acknowledged as an Icon for his dedication to documenting Melbourne’s changing society, from important moments of protest and activism, the people and places that have helped shape this city’s identity.

CB What are your personal highlights to see at this year’s festival?

ER The trail of outdoor artworks across central Melbourne is not to be missed. A few highlights for me include being able to see Tony Albert’s Warakurna Superheroes on huge lightboxes overlooking the Birrarung, a new commission by Jemima Wyman documenting protests and demonstrations around the world, and a special program on the Fed Square screen with exclusive works by Cao Fei, Noémie Goudal and more. I can’t wait to see PHOTO 2024’s Icons as part of this trail, including a 20-metre installation by Nan Goldin and large-scale works by Malick Sidibé on the forecourt of State Library Victoria.

Elsewhere, New Photographers is our pick of the best emerging talents in Melbourne, and Queer PHOTO is a whole festival-in-a-festival celebrating LGBTQIA+ voices from Australia and overseas at Footscray Community Arts, The Substation, and other venues in Melbourne’s western suburbs.

Across Victoria, I am looking forward to seeing Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency at Art Gallery of Ballarat, the Australian premiere of Ryan McGinley’s epic Yearbook installation at Shepparton Art Museum, and a new commission by local Hong Kongese artist Scotty So at Benalla Art Gallery that projects young people 50 years into the future. ■

ELIAS REDSTONE

LAST WORD

Maree Di Pasquale

CEO, Melbourne Art Foundation

Interview and portrait by Claire Summers

CS

Each iteration of Melbourne Art Fair proposes a thematic, a key word that functions as invitation to artists or gallerists to respond to in their work or curation. This 2024 Fair invites response to the theme of ‘Ketherba ’ a Boonwurrung word meaning ‘together’. How are you seeing this thematic manifesting in the curation and programming of the 2024 Melbourne Art Fair?

MDP The thematic influences the curatorial selection of works across our video, installation, performance, commissioning, and conversations program, which is this year driven by a group of outstanding female curators; Tamsin Hong, Exhibitions Curator at Serpentine, London; Shelley McSpedden, Senior Curator at ACCA’s; and Anador Walsh, Director of Performance Review.

This year, the theme ‘Ketherba ’ a word of Victoria’s Boonwurrung First Peoples, expresses, in this context, a togetherness that is imbued with promise, one that embraces difference and gives reason for hope. In a time of great challenge, we see Melbourne Art Fair as an agent for connection for the Australian art world. A chance to bring together artists, galleries, collectors, arts professionals, and the art loving public from diverse backgrounds, to share knowledge and experiences, to develop new ideas, to learn and to unlearn.

M elbourne Art Fair is principally a commercial platform, focused on connecting our collectors and buyers with some of the most exciting artists working today, however it is also a playground in which to be inspired. We take seriously our responsibility to build new audiences

for contemporary art and the program under the theme of ketherba plays a fundamental role in this.

I will give you an example. In the installation program BEYOND, Sullivan+Strumpf’s Sanné Mestrom presents, The Whole is Greater Than the Sum of Her Parts (2023), where fair goers are invited to play together on the figure of a monumental abstracted female form and engage with female representation through the physicality of motherhood. Mestrom’s focus is on merging sculpture and the body to examine art’s role in shaping contemporary interpretations of play in the context of place. Her work softens the separation of art and the everyday, and its very inclusion in the fair presents an opportunity for young and old, people of all backgrounds and experiences, to engage with art together, inclusively, and in the context of Melbourne Art Fair.

CS Art fairs the world over represent a meaningful coming together of arts communities and reflect to us the market we exist within. What function do you see ‘community’ serving in the context of market strength?

MDP The ‘community’ serves as a catalyst for growth, collaboration, knowledge sharing, advocacy, and adaptation within the art market. By fostering a sense of belonging and collective support, communities contribute to the strength and resilience of the market. In the context of Melbourne Art Fair this community is artists, galleries, collectors, arts professionals, where connection and collaboration are fundamental to the development of the market as a whole.

Sanné Mestrom, The Whole Is Greater Than The Sum Of Her Parts, 2023, foam, fibreglass, pigment, brass, 5.5 m × 5.5 m × 1.45 m. Installation view, University of Sydney. Photography by Mark Pokorny.

CS M elbourne Art Fair is a leading cultural event in Australasia. In what ways is the Fair a reflection of the arts ecology of its namesake city and the region it is positioned within?

MDP M elbourne Art Fair reflects and contributes to the vibrant arts ecology of Melbourne and the region through its exhibiting artists, engagement with galleries and institutions, reflection of artistic trends, support of collectors, and the presentation of Australian First Nations artists. It plays a vital role in promoting and strengthening the arts ecosystem in Melbourne and Australasia more broadly.

In addition to the diverse range of artists from Australia, New Zealand, and the broader Asia-Pacific region exhibiting, the fair also collaborates with 50+ galleries, museums, and cultural institutions to promote exhibitions and special projects during the week. This collaboration strengthens the ties between the fair and the local arts community, fostering a sense of partnership and support indicative of Melbourne’s collaborative nature.

At its core, Melbourne Art Fair serves as a hub for dialogue, exchange, and networking within the arts community and facilitates meaningful conversations and connections to foster a vibrant and interconnected arts ecology.

CS What does the next generation of art collectors look like to you? What is most important to them?

MDP We have thought about this a lot in our efforts to rebuild a fair that is for the next generation of artists, dealers, and collectors. They are the digital native generation and have access of course to a vast array of art online, which allows them to discover and explore contemporary art from around the world. But importantly, they also recognise the power of direct engagement with the artist's intent and value the experience of viewing art in person, at a gallery or at an art fair for example.

They demand accountability and ethical practices in artist representation and art production. They seek out artworks that represent a plurality of perspectives, cultures, and identities, reflecting a social consciousness and a commitment to embracing different voices and narratives. This understanding of the importance for diversity not only enriches collections but will also contribute to a more inclusive and representative art world.

Melbourne Art Fair 2018. Photo: Michaela Dutkova.

Melbourne Art Fair 2022. Photo: Marie-Luise Skibbe.

Top, Gregory Hodge, Grove 2023, acrylic on canvas 160 × 230 cm. Photograph by Aaron Anderson.

Bottom, Lara Merrett, 2024, ink and acrylic on cloth and linen, 168 × 107 cm.

CS M elbourne Art Fair underwent a prolonged period of reinvention and evolution to arrive at the event it is today. How do you see its current position in the market?

MDP There is no doubt that Melbourne Art Fair historically had a significant place in the market, but it was clear that it needed to evolve. The position of a fair in the global market changes over time… this is normal. Factors like market conditions, competition and the ability to adapt to changing trends all impact a fair's position. At the very start of my tenure in 2017, Melbourne Art Fair was facing a number of existential threats that were put in motion after the fair’s cancellation in 2016. The Australian art world was up in arms… but I realised that if they care enough to be so provoked by the fair’s end, it meant that they care enough to engage and take it into the future. So, I set out to identify the strengths of Melbourne Art Fair and understand the full potential of its role in a future Australian arts sector.

Leveraging its reputation as the region's most established art fair, while moving forward with a strong curatorial vision, we elected to differentiate the fair from our competitors with a focus on uncompromising quality, community, and market.

We vowed to always best represent and support the artist in the context of a commercial setting, and introduced an expanded commission and grant program which has in 2024 alone seen $AUD 187,000 distributed in artist and curator fees, with $AUD 1M reinvested into the sector since the Melbourne Art Foundation’s establishment in 2003.

This investment has enabled artists to take risks and exhibit ambitious work, which can be hard to achieve in a fair context where commercial realities often result in the need to exhibit ‘safe’.

We have prioritised the representation of First Nations' voices and embedded protocols and programs into the fair framework to ensure the ethical exhibition and sale of Indigenous Australian art. This has led to significant programs in support of First Nations artists, including the fully funded participation of some of the country’s most exciting Indigenous-owned art centres under the William Mora Indigenous Art Centre Program. Thanks to partners Morgans and Bennelong Funds Management, this year we welcome Moa Arts, Munupi Arts & Crafts, Papunya Tjupi Arts and Wik & Kugu Arts Centre.

The efforts to rebuild and reposition have resulted in a Melbourne Art Fair that is not only focused on showcasing high-quality art but also on supporting artists, promoting inclusivity, and contributing to the vibrant cultural landscape of Australasia as the country’s most significant contemporary art fair.

CS Your tenure as the CEO of Melbourne Art Foundation and as Director of Melbourne Art Fair has come with it extraordinary change for the organisation, along with great pressure to be adaptive and agile. What do you hope to see as the next frontier for the fair?

MDP M elbourne Art Fair can play a vital role in connecting the Australian art sector to the global art market, fostering growth, and creating opportunities for artists

to thrive on an international stage. So, with the world reopened, we plan to increase engagement with an international network of collectors and curators through our expanded VIP Program, providing opportunities for artists to gain exposure on a global scale and fostering connections with international institutions and markets through our commission and grant programs.

It is necessary that we have outward focus. We hope this will facilitate cultural exchange and dialogue, allowing for the sharing of ideas, perspectives, and artistic practices. This exchange will enrich the local art scene and contribute to the growth and development of Australian art globally. ■

Julia Gutam All Adults Here (detail) 2021, donated textiles and embroidery, metal chain 205 × 262 cm. Photograph by Simon Hewson.

Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, Figure with Gold Face I 2023, earthenware and glaze. Photograph Mark Pokorny.

UP NEXT

eX de Medici, opening May 2024

Sullivan+Strumpf Eora/Sydney

Alex Seton, opening May 2024

Sullivan+Strumpf Naarm/Melbourne

Ry David Bradley, opening May 2024

Sullivan+Strumpf Eora/Sydney

Daniel Crooks, opening May 2024

Sullivan+Strumpf Eora/Sydney

Ten Thousand Suns, The Biennale of Sydney, White Bay Power Station, 9 Mar – 10 Jun

Art Basel Hong Kong, 28 – 30 Mar 2024

Inner Sanctum, Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia, 1 Mar –2 Jun 2024

60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia

Venice, 20 Apr – 24 Nov 24

Daniel Crooks, Figure with Gold Face I 2023, earthenware and glaze. Photograph Mark Pokorny.

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