Reko Rennie has been awarded the second Artbank + ACMI Commission. The artist will receive $70,000 to make a new video work titled What Do We Want.
On receiving the award the artist said, “This commission is an amazing opportunity to create a new work that I’ve wanted to make for some time and I look forward to sharing it with you.”
Rennie’s Artbank + ACMI Commission will debut at ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image) in Melbourne in 2020.
“Reko Rennie is a vital voice at the forefront of Australian contemporary art and we are thrilled to award Reko the Artbank + ACMI Commission, providing him with the support to pursue and extend his practice,” said ACMI’s director and CEO Katrina Sedgwick. “Reko’s probing cinematic artworks defy categorisation and it’s exactly these types of works that the Artbank + ACMI Commission was designed for.”
Artbank’s assistant director Emma Crimmings said, “Set in a dojo studio and paying homage to Blaxploitation films of the 70s, What Do We Want is a highly stylised and choreographed examination of urgent questions facing Aboriginal people today.”
The aim of the Artbank + ACMI Commission is to support innovative works that blur the boundaries between film and art. The inaugural $70,000 commission went to Zanny Begg for her video installation The Beehive, 2018.
The Artbank + ACMI Commission is a three-year-long initiative.
ACMI is currently closed for renovations and will reopen in mid 2020.
65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art is an extraordinary account of the unique art of this continent, published alongside a landmark exhibition at the Potter Museum of Art. Necessary and urgent, it tells the story of Indigenous Australian art; a new art history unlike anything we’ve seen. For Jane O’Sullivan, it’s a remarkable and must-read book.
In a new series of illustrated postcards available as a free gift with purchase only at the Art Guide Bookstore, Oslo Davis takes on classic and contemporary art terms and genres and reimagines what they could be referring to.
With so much to choose from, we’ve rounded up the major summer exhibitions in each capital city, open all summer long. Spanning Yayoi Kusama, Magritte, the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, and many more.
In his latest exhibition at Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Jack Ball challenges the extractive history of the archive while searching for shapes that can articulate the complexity of trans life.
In Anmatyerr artist Elizabeth Mbitjana Pitijana’s first solo exhibition in Melbourne—which focuses on the Central Desert food source Arnwekety (bush plum)—the influence and love of her Country and culture is palpable. Elizabeth Mbitjana Pitijana is now showing at Niagara Galleries.
About Face is a smart piece of marketing. The new book on portrait painting from Australia and New Zealand has a mission to change buyers’ minds about the field. But as Jane O’Sullivan discovers, any sales pitch wears thin if it’s repeated often enough, and the close attention to how portrait painting is received by the market means that other important conversations fade to the background.
