7 minute read
In Conversation with Elias Redstone on PHOTO 2024
from Sullivan+Strumpf Contemporary Art Gallery Sydney & Melbourne, Australia & Singapore – Jan-Mar 2024
Interviewed by Chloe BorichPortrait 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.
Chloe Borich:
Melbourne 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?
Elias Redstone:
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.
Chloe Borich:
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?
Elias Redstone:
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.
Chloe Borich:
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?
Elias Redstone:
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 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.
Chloe Borich:
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?
Elias Redstone:
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.
Chloe Borich:
What are your personal highlights to see at this year’s festival?
Elias Redstone:
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. ■
