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
Gaypalani Waṉambi has just won the 2025 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award (NATSIAA), Australia’s longest running and most prestigious art awards of its kind.
A survey exhibition spanning the 30-year practice of Jennifer Mills brings together bodies of works grounded in precision and tenderness at Bunjil Place Gallery.
‘North Terrace: worlds in relief’ showing at Samstag Museum of Art, invites viewers to reflect on the complicated legacies of the cultural institutions that line Adelaide’s North Terrace.
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.
Step inside Monica Rani Rudhar’s space at Parramatta Artists Studios, where she works across ceramics, sculpture, video, performance, and latterly, public art. Rudhar is working towards her solo exhibition at Martin Browne Contemporary, while reflecting on the value of play, how imitation leads to authenticity, and why she’d be lost without her sketchbook.
In our ongoing series, Shelf Portraits, Art Guide writers recommend the books—recently published or deserving of more attention—that shed new light on an idea that has long simmered in the art world or has helped them see a familiar medium in a different light.
