Sarah Goffman, I am with you 2017 (detail), cardboard, permanent marker, approx. 7.0 x 7.0 m. Courtesy the artist. Photograph: Andrew Curtis.
Hissy Fit, 19.12.15, 2015, digital video, 60.00 mins. Courtesy the artists.
Elizabeth Pulie, #63 (Sampler for Fear and Paranoia), 2016, acrylic, mixed fibre, hessian, cane, 220 x 100cm. Courtesy the artist and Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney.
Elvis Richardson and Virginia Fraser, Femmo Issue # 3, 2014; Femmo Issue #1, 2014. Courtesy the artists.
Unfinished Business tracks the course of feminist art making in Australia, proposing new ways of addressing feminism’s legacy and trajectory. This ambitious and timely project has been developed by a curatorial team of six (including ACCA’s artistic director Max Delany and curator Annika Kristensen) and features over 40 artists with widely diverse voices and practices.
Drawing on contemporary dialogues in feminism and intersectionality, the exhibition presents a number of important feminist artworks spanning the last 40 years, alongside new commissions from artists including Salote Tawale and Sarah Goffman.
Alongside these, Fiona Foley’s renowned 1996 series Black Velvet – cotton dilly bags with appliquéd red and black motifs – interrogates the stereotypical representation of black women’s sexuality.
Text, image, publications and the political poster are examined through a number of recent works: Linda Dement’s Feminist methodology machine, 2016; Kelly Doley’s Things learnt about feminism, 2014; and Virginia Fraser and Elvis Richardson’s Femmo posters, 2014-15. Harking back to third-wave feminist practice, Maria Kozic’s legendary 1992 billboard, Maria Kozic Is Bitch, will be re-presented at its original 8 x 13 metre scale.
In Cigdem Aydemir’s 2011-12 Extremist Activity series, three video works document the artist performing in a voluminous expanded niqab: a playful exploration of freedom, constraint and pleasure.
Inviting public engagement, debate and doubtless further responses, Unfinished Business promises an enriching study of feminist artwork and dialogues, over the past four decades and into the future.
Unfinished Business: Perspectives on Art and Feminism
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA)
16 December—25 March 2018
For decades, beginning well before the advent of social media, Barbara Kruger’s prescient use of words and text has invited people to consider their context in contemporary society. In Brisbane, between 4–7 September, audiences may experience her concise, dynamic aesthetic within the internationally acclaimed Gems delivered by choreographer Benjamin Millepied and the L.A. Dance Project.
New South Wales-based artist Sophie Cape, has won the Hadley’s Art Prize for 2025. The winning piece, alongside the 28 finalists, will be on display at Hadley’s Orient Hotel, Hobart until 21 September.
For Listening Acts at the Now or Never Festival, the music and performance company Chamber Made invited artists to interrogate the intersection between the body, listening and technology.
A new exhibition by Melbourne painter Lisa Radford is animated by a deep interest in the way ideas circulate—and the connections between people that unfold over time.
Grace Wood’s new exhibition for Heide Museum of Modern Art intertwines personal, familial, and artistic archives. Consisting of textile and digital collage, Wood traces lines of inheritance and influence to position the garden as a site of both personal and artistic cultivation.
In its 18th year, the National Photographic Portrait Prize celebrates photographic portraiture from emerging and established artists, highlighting what it means to be Australian, through photographs of its people.
