With its lens aimed at the complexities of how we inhabit and perceive public space, ACCA’s new offering stretches from the gallery to the Melbourne suburbs, with a truly incredible program spanning exhibitions, performances, talks, meeting spaces and installations.
Contemplating First Nations art as a tool of resistance and as offering alternative versions of Australian history, Ever Present: First Peoples Art of Australia at AGWA covers enormous cultural territory, with more than 80 artists.
In Sydney, Manly Art Gallery & Museum, S.H. Ervin Gallery and Mosman Art Gallery have come together to explore how nine female artists reflect on and represent the natural world, from Robyn Stacey’s inversion of Brett Whiteley, to Joan Ross’s clever subversion of Sydney Harbour.
“Dear 2022, I don’t want to write any more essays about the pandemic. Signed, Sophia Cai.” As we push ourselves to the finish line of 2021, Sophia Cai looks back on the last 12 months, reflecting on a year defined by the swiftness of loss and the struggle for optimism.
Considering most of us will be spending summer in Australia, we’ve curated our top pick of regional exhibitions to see across the country this holiday season. From Bendigo to Cowaramup to Mackay, they’re well worth making the trip for.
The inaugural show in the new custom-designed space for Science Gallery Melbourne, MENTAL: Head Inside, is a young person-led take on mental health featuring more than 20 interdisciplinary projects from around the globe.
Kate Bohunnis works both with and against what she calls the “tired traditions” of gender stereotypes, creating steel and textile sculptures that inhabit a liminal zone between artificially imposed binaries, now showing at COMA gallery.
Based in Toronto, Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore is showing her first Australian solo exhibition, creating acts of Indigenous resistance through art, language and bodies.
UK artist James Capper is bringing his insect-like, walking hydraulic sculptures to Hobart’s Mona, heralding an art practice of engineering, design and biology—all for a more sustainable future.
Lorraine Connelly-Northey’s tough barbed wire sculpture meets the rhythmic assemblage of Rosalie Gascoigne.
The work of Gordon Hookey is a meeting point of Indigenous resistance, activism, and the power of art—and his acclaimed paintings are currently showing in QAGOMA’s mammoth exhibition, the 10th Asia Pacific Triennial (APT10).
From depictions of Milngiyawuy (the Milky Way) to paintings on flattened bark, the exquisite Bark Ladies at NGV centres 11 female Yolŋu artists who practice from the Buku-Larrŋggay Mulka Centre in north-east Arnhem Land.
Fresh Material at Perc Tucker Regional Gallery sees 20 artists transcend conventional ideas of textile art, looking at the medium’s materiality and social resonance, whether that’s through Indigenous culture, queer theory, diaspora or the representation of women.
Experimenta Life Forms: International Triennial of Media Art looks at sentience, interspecies communication, and definitions of ‘life’.
Jeffrey Smart’s paintings are distinctive. Sparsely populated, some of his near-empty metropolitan scenes have a melancholic, almost cataclysmic, air—like prescient glimpses of cities in lockdown—while others seem infused with an irreverent and sophisticated sense of play.
“I decided that art essentially is a communication, so my basis of my work is conceptual,” says artist Bonita Ely, a pioneer in environmental art in Australia, in our latest episode of The Long Run, a podcast talking with artists who have 60-year practices.
In art, a sense of mystery can capture a viewer’s imagination, creating a reprieve from our current reality. But as market forces risk turning identity into commodity, who is granted the privilege of artistic mystique?
From his alter ego Blak Metal to exhibiting the figure of a saddened black air dancer, Steven Rhall is embarking on a new artwork: renaming Wi-Fi networks to ABORIGINAL LAND, which will be showing as part of ACCA’s vast summer exhibition Who’s Afraid of Public Space?
“I decided that art essentially is a communication, so my basis of my work is conceptual,” says artist Bonita Ely, a pioneer in environmental art in Australia, in our latest episode of The Long Run, a podcast talking with artists who have 60-year practices.
Since the 1970s Margaret Dodd’s ceramic holden cars, which are pioneering feminist artworks, have forged pressing questions on femininity, masculinity, sexuality, capitalism and identity.
A pioneer in feminist and community driven art, Vivienne Binns talks about 60 years of interrogating what art truly is, and how art is a human activity.
First held in 1990 at Araluen Arts Centre in Alice Springs, Desert Mob is the oldest of Australia’s thriving annual program of Aboriginal art fairs. With its 30th anniversary coming up in September 2020, Kate Hennessy looks back on Desert Mob 2019.
Robin Boyd’s 1960 book The Australian Ugliness is a seminal critique of both Australian architecture and culture. In After The Australian Ugliness, 20 architects, landscape architects, architecture and design academics, writers, social commentators, curators, historians, publishers, archivists and editors put Boyd’s work in a contemporary context.
In Truth Bomb: Inspiration from the Mouths and Minds of Women Artists, Abigail Crompton presents the work of more than 20 Australian and international artists that, in her words, tell a story of “resilience, tenacity, sacrifice and steely determination.”
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