Before Zanny Begg was a video installation artist, curator and gallery director, she was an activist and a feminist. “Some of the earliest campaigns I got involved with were anti-apartheid,” Begg recalls. “I used to jump on the train after school to go to meetings in the city.” Lived experiences closer to home shaped a personal investment in the feminist movement and this intertwining of art and activism, with a focus on female-centred storytelling, has informed the award-winning artist’s practice for nearly 20 years. “I just always had this engagement and involvement with questioning how the world is and why it’s like that. My interests in art and activism are so entwined because I think they’re both about questioning the status quo and thinking about new ways of looking at or being in the world.”

Begg’s Museums & Galleries NSW touring exhibition, These Stories Will Be Different, opens at the Western Plains Cultural Centre in Dubbo in early March. By the time it arrives at The Condensery-Somerset Regional Art Gallery in Queensland in September it will have travelled to a dozen regional venues across the country since 2022. These Stories will be Different presents three of Begg’s most significant recent works: The City of Ladies (2017), winner of the 2021 Established Artist Residency Blake Prize Stories of Kannagi (2019), and The Beehive (2018), which explores the unsolved 1975 murder of the still-missing Sydney activist and environmentalist Juanita Nielsen.

“I feel like Juanita’s ghost haunts Sydney and in any conversation about gentrification, inevitably her name comes up,” says Begg, who first encountered her story during the development of There Goes The Neighbourhood, her 2009 collaborative exhibition with artist Keg de Souza for Sydney’s Performance Space. “There’s a really direct through line from that exhibition to The Beehive. There Goes The Neighbourhood was exploring gentrification and what was happening in Redfern, where I lived at the time, but it was through researching that exhibition that I came across the story of Juanita Nielsen.”

Research is a huge part of Begg’s practice and the artist and curator, who also holds a PhD in art theory, enjoys the unravelling that it inevitably provokes.

“When I go digging, I really dig— and then I just keep on digging,” she explains. “You often end up in quite interesting places.”

The Beehive was made possible through ACMI’s inaugural artist film commission and was first shown at UNSW Galleries as part of the 2018 Sydney Festival. Like The City of Ladies, which Begg made in collaboration with filmmaker Elise McLeod during a Cité Residency in Paris in 2016, The Beehive employs an algorithmic structure that offers viewers any one of 1,344 possible versions of the story of Nielsen’s murder and disappearance. This was a modest proposition considering that The City of Ladies contains some 300,000 variations within its 20-minuteduration. But acknowledging this multiplicity of perspectives, iterations and narratives is central to Begg’s own activism and understanding of feminism’s own complexities.

For Begg, part of the joy of the exhibition’s regional tour has been the opportunity to visit so many of the galleries for openings and public programs. “The conversations I’ve had with people right across regional NSW have just really blown me away,” she says. “You make these works, and you hope that you find your audience and so it’s been nice to be in a position to see it connect with different audiences across Australia.”

Begg is well-placed to understand regional audiences. In August 2024 she was appointed Director of Shoalhaven Regional Gallery on the south coast of New South Wales. “A lot of artists live in Nowra and there’s a really strong First Nations community. It’s a beautiful part of the world that has been through a lot with bushfires and storms… I feel like that creates a huge opportunity for the gallery to be a place where community can make great art and can meet and connect.” Begg intends to continue with her own artistic practice while leading the Gallery. “I feel like there’s a reciprocity and a growth between the two roles.”

The connections between community-building, activism and artmaking continue for Begg. She is also working towards a new solo exhibition at UTS Gallery in June. Elsie (and Minnie), which explores the social and political history around Elsie, the city’s first women’s refuge, in Glebe, continues another thread of research that links back to Nielsen, both in its explorations of gentrification and the refuge movement as well as the ongoing epidemic of gendered violence.

The 1970s refuge movement was established by women’s liberation activists, including now-UTS Professor Dr Anne Summers, and was a response to the needs of women and children escaping domestic violence. Had it not been for that same era’s green bans, Elsie, which began as a squat run by volunteers, would have been razed for a new freeway through the city, leaving vulnerable women and children with nowhere to go.

The continued financial and material precarity of these shelters today, amid an escalating national crisis of domestic violence, has only galvanised Begg’s artistic and political agenda. “A lot of the activists I spoke to for The Beehive were also involved in Elsie, which is how [this new work] started,” Begg explains. “Making this work, it’s been so inspiring to learn from those early feminists but also heart breaking to know that everything they fought for, we still need to fight for.”

Zanny Begg: These Stories Will be Different

Western Plains Cultural Centre (Dubbo/Wiradjuri Country)
8 March—25 May

The Condensery–Somerset Regional Art Gallery (Toogoolawah/Waka Waka, Barunggam and Yuggera Countries)
20 September—30 November

Elsie (and Minnie)
UTS Gallery (Sydney/Eora)
17 June—5 September

This article was originally published in the March/April 2025 print edition of Art Guide Australia.