“Then we’ll get real systemic change,” says Eugenia Lim when talking about making structural changes in the art world that reflect genuine diversity, “but I think we’re still just the tip of the iceberg. It’s still quite surface, but it’s good to be even pushing and talking about these things I think.”
At a moment where politics and individuals feel increasingly divided, Lim creates videos, film and installations that look beyond divisiveness, capitalism and exploitation, to forefront the power of collectivity—something she speaks to in our latest podcast series Conflated.
This series centres on the ideas of inflation and conflation, linking with a touring exhibition also titled, Conflated. In ways both metaphorical and material, the show looks at ideas of inflation and deflation through creative, environmental, and political ways. And one of the artists in the show is Lim.
Lim is an Australian artist of Chinese-Singaporean descent and her work partly explores this by subverting cultural stereotypes in ways both intelligent and very witty. In past works she’s taken on invented personas, inhabiting them across multiple videos, performances and sites.
Lim is also one of the previous co-directors of the experimental art organisation Aphids, and we talk about one of Aphids’s latest performance works EASY RIDERS, which looks at the gig economy and capitalism—and we discuss how worker exploitation is an ongoing concern in Eugenia’s work. In addition to her thought-provoking practice, Lim also has co-directed the inaugural Channels Festival, and she was founding editor of the journal Assemble Papers.
In our conversation she talks through her latest work with Kyneton locals, an area in regional Victoria, and how her work speaks to collective acts and what this means in a divisive political time like the one we’re living.
You can also listen back to the first episode of this series with artist Zoë Bastin on conflation, bodies and transformative politics, and the second episode with David Cross on inflatables, experimentation and precarity.
With a current showing at Deakin University Art Gallery, NETS Victoria are touring Conflated nationally throughout 2023:
Logan Art Gallery
(Logan QLD)
29 July 2023—3 September 2023
Swan Hill Regional Art Gallery
(Swan Hill VIC)
1 October 2023—3 December 2023
This series is kindly sponsored by NETS Victoria who are nationally touring Conflated, assisted by the Australian Government’s Visions of Australia program and the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria.
Produced and presented by Tiarney Miekus, engineering by Patrick Telfer, and music by Mino Peric.
French-born/Belgium-based Laure Prouvost animates her first major Australian survey with her hallmark absurdism. ‘Oui Move In You’ is showing now at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art.
Kamilaroi/Bigambul artist Archie Moore has won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation at the Venice Biennale for his monumental work, kith and kin. It marks the first time Australia has won the award in the event’s 130-year history.
Endlessly inventive, the work of Hong Kong-born, Melbourne-based artist Scotty So spans photography, painting, video work, and drag performance. With a dual exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ballarat, So talks about pageantry, begonias and queens.
In the most significant exhibition of his career to date at Pinnacles Gallery, Danish Quapoor explores the contradictory emotions of grief while navigating complex shifts in identity and belonging.
Parrtjima—the Northern Territory’s annual festival of lights at the Alice Springs Desert Park—is entering its ninth year, and this time the immersive festival’s focus is interconnectedness.
Nan Goldin’s influential photography can now be seen by Victorian audiences with Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency showing at the Art Gallery of Ballarat. View, in pictures, this iconic, intimate 1980s series that shows how photography and social purpose has defined the artist’s 50-year career.
