David Wadelton, Northcote Plaza, 1995, photograph. Courtesy the artist.
Somali weaver Muhubo Sulieman of The Social Studio. Photograph: Teva Cosic. Courtesy The Social Studio.
Kerrie Poliness Parliament Steps Walking Drawing 2021. Commissioned by the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne. Photograph: Andrew Curtis.
Beth Arnold and Sary Zananiri, Within foundations, 2012, bricks, porcelain tiles, render, plantings, dimensions variable. Eastern Pocket Park, Corner Bridge Road and Celestine Drive, Officer, Melbourne, VicUrban public art commission. Photograph: Beth Arnold. Courtesy the artists.
With its lens aimed at the complexities of how we inhabit and perceive public space, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art’s (ACCA) new offering could have been entirely theoretical had it been limited to its Southbank gallery. In an extraordinary move, Who’s Afraid of Public Space? extends outward, stretching as far as Melbourne’s outermost suburbs to engage with all sorts of unexpected artists and audiences who might not usually go to the Sturt Street arts precinct.
Although ACCA director Max Delany is clear that Who’s Afraid of Public Space partly functions as a research project, it also resembles a mini-festival. Across exhibitions, performances, talks, meeting spaces, installations and more, a breadth and geographical spread of content will grapple with tough questions about surveillance, private incursions on “public” spaces, occupying Country, and the place of public artworks.
Conceived in 2019, Who’s Afraid of Public Space? has gained momentum and relevance during the pandemic. “It has been fascinating watching the changes in our relationship to public space during the lockdowns,” Delany says. “We abandoned public space and rapidly migrated to the digital realm. But, equally, over the past 18 months we have had a much more intense relationship with it—walking and engaging with local parks, people improvising with public spaces, occupying the outdoors in interesting ways and generally having a more intense relationship with neighbourhoods.”
At ACCA itself, several spaces have an audience-first premise to encourage meeting and debate, with one space focusing on the history of Melbourne’s public sculptures, featuring engaging maquettes, and another—the Gathering Place— exploring materiality and Country. The program’s satellite shows range from Northcote-based photographer David Wadelton occupying disused shopfronts with his well-known photography, to a community project about a new housing estate in Cardinia, using house floor plans as a muse.
Who’s Afraid of Public Space?
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art
4 December 2021—20 March
This article was originally published in the January/February 2022 print edition of Art Guide Australia.
Have you ever wondered if someone who is no longer alive could create art? In answer to this question, biological artists Guy Ben-Ary, Nathan Thompson and Matt Ringold, in collaboration with the now deceased Alvin Lucier, have extended the experimental composer’s “ideas about the resonance of sound” for their immersive exhibition, Revivification at the Art Gallery of Western Australia.
A quiet power pulses through It’s Always Been Always at Fremantle Arts Centre, where six First Nations women artists reflect on kinship, Country and cultural memory.
Under Sammy Hawker’s gentle guidance, whale song takes shape, ocean water becomes collaborator, salt crystals scatter themselves like stars across analogue film, and ashes murmur secrets onto silver nitrate-soaked paper. Through what she terms “facilitated acts of co-creation,” Hawker gives voice to places, materials, and the more-than-human world.
An exhibition at Perc Tucker Regional Gallery pays tribute to Staffordshire-born Josiah Wedgwood (1730-1795) and his eponymous pottery company, featuring rare, valuable and ornate pieces, as well as “grandma’s good china”.
Mungari, a landmark exhibition at Sydney’s Chau Chak Wing Museum, marks the return of the Gweagal spears to their ancestral country while speaking to the constellation of relationships that knit together people, objects and place.
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.
