Noula Diamantopoulos, how are you, you?, 2016, neon, acrylic sheet, unique edition, 20 x 110 cm. Courtesy of Artereal Gallery.
Patrick Hall, The Cloud (detail unlit), as installed at DARK PARK – DARK MOFO 2016, printed glass electrical wiring, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Despard Gallery, Hobart.
Aida Tomescu, Under the iron of the moon (diptych), 2017, oil on canvas, 182 x 153 cm. Courtesy the artist and Jensen, Fox Jensen.
Rebecca Baumann, Automated Colour Field (Variation 4), 2013, 44 flip clocks, archival card, batteries, duration 24hours, 143 x 143 x 9 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Starkwhite, New Zealand.
Reko Rennie, Visible invisible II, 2016, synthetic polymer on linen, 150 x 150 cm. Courtesy the artist and Blackartprojects, Melbourne.
Dale Frank, She continually tried to convince everyone she was Jewish, 2016, Shattered glass in liquid glass on Perspex, 200 x 160 cm x 7 cm. Courtesy the artist and Pearl Lam Galleries.
Murray Fredericks, Mirror 11, 2017, digital pigment print, 120 x 155 cm. Courtesy of the artist and ARC ONE Gallery.
Sydney Contemporary is going annual this year. In its third iteration, the event is set to be “wonderful and varied” says Sydney Contemporary CEO and director, Barry Keldoulis, who describes this year’s line-up as the strongest to date.
Silverlens Galleries, Manila, will be showing a selection of work by six of their artists, and Mutt Gallery, from Santiago, will be part of the Future exhibition sector, focused on galleries considered to be on the rise and who have been operating for less than five years.
Installation Contemporary, curated by Rachel Kent (chief curator of MCA) and Megan Robson (assistant curator, MCA), will feature a number of imposing, large-scale works dotted throughout the Carriageworks precinct. Established artists, such as Betty Kuntiwa Pumani, Nike Savvas and Maio Motoko, will be shown alongside a younger cohort including Richard Lewer, Lara Merrett, Sanné Mestrom and teamLab. Interdisciplinary art collective, teamLab will present an ever developing, time-based work that “buds, grows and blooms,” says Keldoulis.
Off the Redfern campus, Sydney Contemporary will extend out to Bangaroo, a new precinct at the southern end of the Harbour Bridge. Joan Ross, winner of a slew of prizes of late including the Sulman this year, will be holding a one-month residency in the area, inviting locals and passersby alike to spend some time among her work and contribute to it. A program of talks – covering everything from aesthetics to art preservation, performances (such as Hayden Fowler’s experiential Together Again which features dystopia, with a dingo) and a night out with Ramesh Nithiyendran flesh out the rest of the four-day contemporary art intensive.
Sydney Contemporary
Carriageworks
7 September – 10 September
Elysha Rei’s exhibition Shirozato to Shinju (White Sugar and Pearls) at Umbrella Studio Contemporary Arts, Townsville QLD, explores the interconnected histories of the Japanese diaspora in Australia.
Described as “a space for reflection, remembrance, and the sharing of truth”, Kattidj Nagãr, now showing at John Curtin Gallery, is dedicated to the Aboriginal people who once resided at the Carrolup Settlement in Western Australia.
With an approach to artmaking drawn from the “fieldwork of life”, twin brothers and artistic collaborators Man&Wah, who are now showing at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, use plant migration to explore duality and movement.
As I walk through the suburban streets, I find myself thinking about the publication Speech Patterns: Nadia Hernández & Jon Campbell. It accompanied their two-person exhibition at The Art Gallery of Western Australia in 2022, which explored their shared preoccupations with class, identity and value systems.
Taja Vaetoru’s debut solo exhibition Idol, now showing .M Contemporary, explores their Polynesian ancestry, questions of tradition and worship, and how to intersect the past with the present.
Blak In-Justice, now showing at Heide Museum of Modern Art, challenges the brutal systems that shape Indigenous incarceration in Australia—while charting the healing power of ancestral knowledge in the process.
