2016

Morbis Artis: Diseases of the Arts

RMIT Gallery

17 November - 18 Feb 2017

Morbis Artis explores the radical conjunction between the biomolecular and the artistic, and the thin doorway between life and death housed within discourses of disease.

What constitutes life, what counts as a sentient being, and who gets to determine what lives are saved, punished, exploited and destroyed?

Composed of eleven separate but connected installation works, Morbis Artis explores the question of organic life through particular artistic lenses, each taking on the moniker of disease to represent and embody the issues that challenge bare life today.

Drawing upon Frances Stracey, the artists working on this exhibition consider Bio-art to represent ‘a crossover of art and the biological sciences, with living matter, such as genes, cells or animals, as its new media’.

“Just as disease leaks its way into all matter and anti-matter, so does our understanding of the biological in the age of species and habitus destruction,” said co-curator Sean Redmond.

“Disease as metaphor and viral and toxic threat is employed to both condition our responses to non-human life, illness, and to regulate the way we inhabit both professional life and everyday encounters.

“Of course, what counts as the human condition in the age of augmentation is also pertinent. There is a frightening collision, then, between the possibilities and limitations of human and non-human life.

Curators: Sean Redmond and Darrin Verhagen.

Artists: (((20Hz))), Alison Bennett, Drew Berry, Cameron Bishop, Chris Henschke, Harry Nankin, Andrea Rassell, Sean Redmond, Joshua Redmond, Simon Reis, Jodi Sita, Lienors Torre, Anne Wilson.

Radical Actions

RMIT Gallery

9 September - 22 October 2016

Radical Actions presents work by five high-profile Irish artists who identify with the politics of social agitation, revolution and rebellion.

This year of commemoration of the 1916 Rising in Ireland is the starting point for an international exhibition that is reflexive and responsive to the defining period around the Great War in an international context.

Radical Actions will look at how events in recent and distant history, attitudes to rebellion, revolution and agitation have formed societies and national identities, questioning the role of the artist in imagining future states and explore the impact this revolutionary period has had on Irish citizens.

Revolutions are about antagonism and agitation, and this is above all, true of events a hundred years ago. A dramatic and emotionally driven gesture, the 1916 Rising is rumoured to have inspired revolution in India, Vietnam and many parts of Africa. It was planned by men and women who feared that without a dramatic action of this kind, the sense of national identity that had survived all the hazards of the centuries would flicker out ignominiously within their lifetime.

According to curator Linda Shevlin, the 1916 Commemoration should not be a time for “soft words or a gazing backwards through a green-tinged prism at an idealised past.”

“There is an urgency for an assessment of Irish identity within broader international and global contexts. Radical Actions questions the role of the artist in imagining future states and explores the impact this revolutionary period has had on Irish citizens,” she said.

Among the works in this exhibition will be the film Bernadette by Turner Prize winner Duncan Campbell. One of a trilogy of films, it focuses on female Irish dissident and political activist Bernadette Devlin. Campbell’s film works with already mediated images and writings about her in an effort to do justice to her legacy while also striving for what Samuel Beckett terms, “a form that accommodates the mess”.

Jesse Jones has been chosen to represent Ireland at the 2017 Venice Biennale. Her work in Radical Actions, The Other North casts professional Korean actors to re-enact scenes from a conflict resolution therapy session in 1970s Belfast. The sessions were organized by American psychologist Carl Rogers, known as a proponent of psychotherapy, documented and long ago forgotten.

The exhibition will also present a piece by one of Ireland’s top young artists Seamus Nolan, The 10th President, a political campaign to commemorate victims of institutional abuse. Nolan’s recent works include F**K IMMA for ‘What we call love, Surrealism to now’ in the Irish Museum of Modern Art 2015/16 and What if we got it wrong? Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, while Kennedy Browne, the collaborative practice of Gareth Kennedy and Sarah Browne will be revisiting their work The Special Relationship which looks at Ireland’s position as a neutral State that allows the use of airports as a stop-off point for US military.

As part of its 2016 commemorative programme Culture Ireland is supporting the exhibition of Radical Actions in Melbourne at RMIT Gallery, which is a very fitting location for this important contemporary Irish exhibition. RMIT Gallery is housed in Storey Hall, first built as a Hibernian Hall in 1887 and remodelled in 1995 where its Irish Heritage is referenced in the buildings exterior architecture.

Culture Ireland’s international culture programme entitled I Am Ireland is part of the Ireland 2016 Centenary Programme. I Am Ireland will enable Irish artists and companies to present their work across the globe. The programme, a key element of the Ireland 2016 Global and Diaspora strand, is one of celebration through contemporary arts while also reflecting on Ireland’s cultural journey over the last one hundred years. I Am Ireland marks the centrality of the arts to Irish identity, and acknowledges the key role artists play now, as they did in the 1916 Rising.

Curator: Linda Shevlin

Artists: Kennedy Browne (Gareth Kennedy and Sarah Browne), Duncan Campbell, Jesse Jones, Seamus Nolan.

This project is funded by Culture Ireland and supported by Roscommon Arts Centre and RMIT Gallery, Melbourne.

ELISION Ensemble: 30 years

RMIT Gallery

9 September - 22 October 2016

ELISION Ensemble has led the international dissemination of Australian contemporary classical music work and ideas over the past 30 years.

From the Paris Opera House, to Kings Place London, to the Fomenko Theatre Moscow, ELISION has re-invented performance practice and musical form.

Through films, recordings, press, posters, sketches and drawings, this exhibition celebrates thirty years of contemporary practice and ELISION’s involvement with artists such as theatre directors Barrie Kosky, Michael Kantor, writers Allison Croggon, Beth Yahp, visual and new media artists Justine Cooper, Heri Dono, Judy Watson, Per Inge Bjørlo, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Ensembles Modern and CIKADA, and composers Liza Lim, Brian Ferneyhough, Richard Barrett, Aldo Clementi, Franco Donatoni, John Rodgers, Aaron Cassidy, Dmitri Kourliandski, Turgut Ercetin, Timothy McCormack, Matthew Sergeant, and Luke Paulding amongst others.

This project is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria.

Bijoy Jain Studio Mumbai: Making MPavilion 2016

RMIT Gallery

9 September - 22 October 2016

An insight into the practice of celebrated Indian architect Bijoy Jain of Studio Mumbai, the designer of the 2016 MPavilion.

Since 2013, The Naomi Milgrom Foundation had commissioned an outstanding architect to design the annual MPavilion for the Queen Victoria gardens.

This exhibition offers an insight into the practice of celebrated Indian architect Bijoy Jain of Studio Mumbai, the designer of the 2016 MPavilion, and into the design process and the building of MPavilion 2016, to coincide with its construction and launch.

Jain is one of the world’s most fascinating architects. His approach to design reflects a deep concern for craft, sustainability and community.

The essence of Studio Mumbai’s approach lies in the relationship between locality and architecture. The practice draws on the traditional skills and local building techniques of artisans and technicians in the creation of its works.

The concept of ‘lore’, the way in which traditions and knowledge are typically passed on by word of mouth, is central to Jain’s practice and philosophy, and is a guiding principle that underpins all Studio Mumbai projects. Jain leads a team of skilled artisans and craftspeople to create buildings based on human competences, local building techniques, materials and an ingenuity arising from limited resources.

The RMIT Gallery exhibition showcases the process models, material samples, sketch books and texts used in the 2016 MPavilion design and construction, including images of the work in progress in India by Sydney photographer Nick Watt.

Jain has said he wants his MPavilion installation to be a “symbol of the elemental nature of communal structures” and that he sees MPavilion as a place of engagement: a space to discover the essentials of the world – and of oneself.

The MPavilion 2016 will be presented free to the public from 5 October 2016 through 5 February 2017.

Key people:

Architect Bijoy Jain received his M. Arch from Washington University in St Louis, USA in 1990 and worked with architect Richard Meier before returning to India in 1995 to establish his practice, Studio Mumbai.

He has received numerous awards, including the Global Award in Sustainable Architecture (2009), Spirit of Nature Wood Architecture Award (2012), BSI Swiss Architectural Award (2012), and most recently, awarded Grande Medaille d’Or from the Academie D’Architecture in Paris (2014).

Studio Mumbai has exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Architectural League of New York and the Canadian Centre of Architecture. Its most celebrated projects include Copper House II, Palmyra House, Ahmedabad House and Saat Rasta.

Occupied

RMIT Design Hub Gallery

28 July - 23 September 2016

This is the era of the metropolis.

By 2050, it is estimated that 70% of the world’s population will be urban with Australia’s major cities expected to nearly double in size. We don’t yet know where or how this growing population will be housed, as most of the buildings that will make up these cities have already been built. Furthermore, the city is occupied not just by buildings but also by the political and economical structures that dictate the use of those buildings, and which, at present, hinder sufficient and equitable access to housing.

It’s clear that the transformative ideas of our time will not be sweeping and grandiose visions. Unlike the great architects of the 20th Century – who wishfully imagined the city as a tabula rasa or accepted exile on the urban fringe – today’s creative thinkers must find space for an ever-growing populace within a finite and decaying urban fabric. The ideas that thrive in this context were small-scale, contingent and combinatory, operating at the margins or the in-between, within bureaucratic grey-zones or emerging economies.

Occupying the dramatic spaces of the Design Hub Gallery, this exhibition brought together local and international practitioners and showcased proposals for housing more with less, retrofitting, adapting and repurposing existing structures and environments.  Ranging from the pragmatic to the utopian, the research-driven to the purely speculative, Occupied anticipated the critical design approaches, ideas and strategies of the imminent future.

Occupied also included Supershared – a shared loft-like space projecting out and into Design Hub Gallery. Supershared was open for students to book and occupy throughout the duration of the exhibition. The project speaks to the dexterity and responsiveness of the ‘shared economy’ and explores where the boundaries between private and public space are blurred.

Exhibitors: 5th Studio, all(zone),  Jacqui Alexander and SIBLING Architecture, Baracco + Wright Architects, Peter Bennetts, BKK Architects, Peter Elliott Architecture and Urban Design, Taylor Cullity Lethlean, Robert Owen, Sense Architecture and M.A.P, The Blink Fish (Gi­acomo Boeri and Matteo Grimaldi) with Stefano Boeri, Breathe Architecture, Atlanta Eke, Fake Industries Architectural Agonism and MAIO, Flores & Prats Architects, Andrés Jaque Architects / Office for Political Innovation, Ash Keating, Lacaton & Vassal and Frédéric Druot Architecture, Lyons Architecture, NMBW Architecture Studio, MvS Architects, Maddison Architects, Harrison and White, MAPA (Moline Axelsen: Public Art / Participatory Architecture), Callum Morton and Toby Reed, Otherothers, Jack Self, Spacemarket, TOMA, Vokes and Peters, Liam Young.

Curators: Grace Mortlock, David Neustein, Fleur Watson

Exhibition design: Otherothers

Light moves: contemporary Australian video art

RMIT Gallery

1 July - 20 August 2016

Light moves presents projected and screen-based works by internationally recognised contemporary Australian artists which explore the body performing in a range of real and imagined spaces.

Drawing on work acquired over the last three years for the National Collection of Australia, the seven works featured in Light moves explore the possibilities of movement, in most cases the body moving in space, in contemporary video.

Each is an example of contemporary storytelling, inviting viewers to think about the place and significance of real bodies in a contemporary world. A world which is increasingly digitised, where many interactions happen in virtual spaces and online. The exhibition is on tour from the National Gallery of Australia.

New Zealand born Daniel Crooks is interested in the manipulation of time and space, taking small slivers of video sequences and stretching them across the frame, creating fluid, abstract fields of colour. He uses an array of stop-motion animation, time-lapse and precision camera motion control techniques to create his distinctive ‘time-slice’ imaging process which has slivers of images stretched and transformed into abstract amoebic forms. His work Pan no. 9 (Dopplegänger) 2012 is a large projected work showing an athletic young man shadowboxing in a gym, moving both toward and away from viewers.

New Zealand born Hayden Fowler grew up observing animals on his grandparents’ farm and initially studied biology, focusing on animal behaviour. His work looks primarily at the suppressed emotions of loss that arise from our alienation from nature. New world order (from the series New romantic 2013) is a large projection where Fowler has painstakingly constructed elaborate sets in his studio and populated them with birds.

Shaun Gladwell is a champion skateboarder and internationally successful Australian multimedia artist. The six monitors presenting his work Centred Pataphysical suite (2009) shows Gladwell and four other performers – each an expert in skateboarding, breakdancing, classical dancing, capoeira or BMX riding – revolving like a dervish around various still points and structures in urban settings.

Gabriella and Silvana Mangano are sisters who undertook an International Studio and Curatorial Program residency in New York. In unfamiliar territory, but hugely symbolic as an art world capital, they set out to understand and become part of the city by walking the streets and gathering abandoned objects of different sizes, shapes and weights. The nine videos that make up Performance compositions for sculpture (1-9) show the objects manipulated by hands and limbs, with objects becoming elements of abstract composition.

David Rosetzky’s works explore identity, subjectivity and relationships and bring together elements of theatre, film, performance art and dance. For Half Brother (2013), Rosetzky collaborated with renowned choreographer Jo Lloyd and well-known dancers Gideon Obarzanek (founder of the contemporary dance group Chunky Move) and two eminent members of the company, Alisdair Macindoe and Josh Mu.

Julie Rrap has continually challenged societal norms about the body and gender, and asks questions about the place of women and women’s bodies in art history. Her work scape artist: castaway (2009), is a self-portrait where we see the artist in a physically challenging situation, entangled within overlapping planks of wood. The movement morphs from one pose to the next as the artist struggles within the wood that contains her.

Christian Thompson is a member of the Bidjara people; his work focuses on the exploration of identity, sexuality, gender, race and memory. The warm, golden palette which provides the backdrop for Thompson’s video HEAT (2010) combines with the effect of wind to evoke the desert heat of the central areas of Queensland – especially Thompson’s father’s country, where he spent time in his youth.

Quiddity

RMIT Gallery

1 July - 20 August 2016

Quiddity explores the ways in which our approach to artworks can change outside the context of a traditional gallery setting.

Quiddity takes a behind-the-scenes look at the RMIT University Art Collection and questions what happens after paintings come down off the wall, when we stop seeing art as objects laden with meaning or expressing emotion, and begin to simply see them as objects.

Coming from the Latin meaning ‘the essence of a thing’, Quiddity examines the way in which both exhibitions and collections are customarily built.

Featuring work by artists represented in the RMIT Art Collection, including: George Baldessin, Stephen Benwell, Chris Bond, Peter Ellis, Clare Humphries, Geoff Lowe, Greg Moncrieff, Hisaharu Motoda, Nick Mourtzakis, Anthony Pryor, Hugh Ramsay, Norma Redpath, Marika Wanyubi, Ah Xian, Ken and Julia Yonetani, and Paul Zika.

The exhibition has been researched and designed in collaboration with students from the RMIT Master of Arts Management program, and asks audiences to engage with artworks not from the perspective of the artist or curator, who privilege narrative, purpose and iconography, but from that of the conservator or registrar, who see art in terms of materials, taxonomy, provenance, condition, and size.

To that end, the pristine order of RMIT Gallery’s exhibition spaces will be translated into the relative anarchy of the storeroom, in which artworks have come down off the walls, ceasing to be concepts, and becoming objects.

Streets of Papunya: the re-invention of Papunya painting

RMIT Gallery

6 May - 11 June 2016

Celebrating the renaissance of painting that has occurred in one of the best-known locations of art production in Central Australia, since the establishment of the Papunya Tjupi Arts Centre in 2007.

Highlighting the work of early, established and emerging Papunya painters, Streets of Papunya reiterates the rich cultural history of painting in Central Australia through the eyes of the contemporary generation.

In particular, Streets of Papunya includes some of the first women painters in the desert, who joined the original Papunya art movement in the early 1980s, and reveals the remarkable art of the women painters of Papunya today in its contemporary sociological and historical contexts. This new generation of artistic talent are the daughters of the men who founded the desert art movement at Papunya in the 1970s.

Curated by eminent scholar of Papunya art Vivien Johnson, Streets of Papunya features key works borrowed for the exhibition from public institutions: Albert Namatjira’s final paintings, executed in Papunya days before his death in 1959; and paintings from Papunya’s glory days of the 1970s and ’80s, through to its inspirational resurgence today as its artists reinvent Papunya painting for the twenty-first century.

In addition to new paintings from Papunya Tjupi, the exhibition at RMIT Gallery includes important loans from private Victorian collections that illustrate these connections.

“It was the sheer brilliance of the paintings … produced in Papunya’s so-called seminal era – and beyond it – that liberated Aboriginal art from the timeless realm of ethnographic museums to take its place in art museums as part of contemporary art,” said Johnson, author of the companion book Streets of Papunya: the re-invention of Papunya painting (NewSouth Publishing 2015).

Curator: Vivien Johnson

Out of The Matrix

RMIT Gallery

6 May - 11 June 2016

Out of the Matrix presents artworks from a diverse group of practitioners who employ the various histories and methods of print production to create for our time.

Using the premise of the matrix, from which all prints emanate, Out of the Matrix showcases a group of artists who activate an expanded understanding of print practice.

Curated by Dr Richard Harding, Senior Lecturer of Print Imaging Practice at RMIT, the intention of this exhibition is to evoke an extended sense of history the RMIT printmaking studio generates as much as evidence its present agency within the wider print community.

All practitioners in this exhibition have a connection to the RMIT printmaking studio either as staff or alumni. Oscillating between analogue, digital and spatial positions this exhibition privileges and extends print practice highlighting the universal nature of printmaking today.

By evoking printmaking’s ‘mother’ matrix through reproducibility this exhibition reflects back into printmaking’s multiple pasts to extend and thus project out to imagined futures.

“Print does not necessarily have to be on paper. This folds into notions of the multiple, ready made and mass production. Print has a strong relationship to sculpture and this is highlighted even more by the advent of 3D printing and the move into spatial practice,” said Harding.

“This plays with printmaking qualities such as sameness and difference. Artists use this to springboard to wider concepts such as gender, sexual orientation, the original and the copy.”

The installation of works at RMIT Gallery will run from floor to wall to ceiling and back, to open up new ideas and advance concepts artists are dealing with today, such as the environment, abstraction, and the combination of different media.

“One of the interesting things about artists that are print informed is that they are quite taken with media that do not appear to immediately relate, such as the moving image.”

Enhancing this link is the direct popular cultural connection of the 1999 Wachowskis’ cinematic hit The Matrix.

This science fiction film cross­reference initiates Jean Bauldrillard’s Simulation and Simulacra by means of repetition, the multiple, overlay and moving elements within various dimensions.

The harnessing of space and time within the perceived stasis of print allows these artists based within print practice the fluidity of numerous positions and mediums from which to reflect, make and perform.

Curator: Dr Richard Harding

Design & Play

RMIT Design Hub Gallery

24 April - 13 May 2016

Design & Play probed the interdisciplinary and poetic role of play within the everyday through the eyes of designers and artists. Through a diverse range of research projects, installations and artist works, this exhibition explored play as a creative, social, cultural and political act and mode of practice.

Design Hub Gallery housed a full-scale, experiential full dome entitled DomeLab – a world-leading research project developed collaboratively by 15 investigators and 11 organisations worldwide, including RMIT.  DomeLab was the first mobile, ultra-high resolution dome-based video projection environment in Australia. Shown in Victoria for the first time, its unique and low-cost display system integrated technical innovation, computing power and graphics capability with aesthetic innovation in content delivery. DomeLab featured video, animation games and virtual art experiences including works by Jonathan Duckworth, James Hullick, Ross Eldridge, BOLT Ensemble, John Power, Adam Nash, Stefan Greuter, Sarah Kenderdine, Paul Bourke, Tamara S. Clarke, Finger Candy (Jack Sinclair and Jadd Zayed), James Manning, Christopher Barker and Matthew Riley. Also in the gallery, visitors could experience the virtual art experience Out of Space, which made use of the most recent virtual reality gaming technology.

Throughout the exhibition visitors were invited to respond to ideas of play via a series of interventions. There were works by renowned international artist Erwin Wurm that teased us to partake in a series of interactive art exercises. Fleur Summers married ping-pong games with library desks while Ronnie Van Hout blurred the boundaries between toys and the art ‘artefact’.  Collaborators Arlo Mountford and Nick Selenitsch utilised movement sensors to track and comment on the audience’s motions while TextaQueen was ‘mindful’ well ahead of the current colouring phenomena. Additional works by Emily Floyd, Kate Rohde, Laresa Kosloff, Rohit Khot, Chad Toprak, Amani Naseem, Soren Dahlgaard, Paul Woodand Michael Georgetti further expanded upon and experimented with ideas of practice-based play.

The Design & Play workshop, masterclass and public lecture were part of an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery grant on Games of Being Mobile co-hosted by the Digital Ethnography Research Centre (DERC) and Centre for Games Design Research (CGDR), School of Media & Communication, RMIT University.

Curators: Larissa Hjorth and Lisa Byrne

Design Hub Curator: Fleur Watson

Creative Producer: Nella Themelios

Exhibition & Graphic Design: Tin & Ed

Exhibition Technician: Erik North

Exhibition Assistants: Kate Riggs, Chloë Powell

Quiet Voices

RMIT Gallery

11 March - 23 April 2016

These two works of art by Mithu Sen and Pushpa Rawat poetically address issues women face with obligation, patriarchy and the inter-generational dynamic.

Mithu Sen

New Delhi–based artist Mithu Sen is an influential and prominent figure on the contemporary Indian art scene. Her drawings, sculptures, and installations push the limits of acceptable artistic language and subject matter. Sen obtained her BA and MFA in painting from Kala Bhavan at Santiniketan, and later, completed a postgraduate program at the Glasgow School of Art on the prestigious Charles Wallace India Trust Award for 2000-2001.

I have only one language; it is not mine

For her multi-media installation I have only one language; it is not mine renowned Delhi-based artist Mithu Sen spent time at a Kerala orphanage for marginalised young girls who are victims of sexual and emotional abuse.

For this project Sen interacted with children as her alter-identity “Mago” – a seemingly displaced person in a state of transit with no recognisable verbal communication, who does not understand the concept of time.

Sen placed her character in the situation as if she and the children themselves were all fictional, yet the situation, circumstances and future of these children is a genuine issue.

Sen explains “Language imposes a strange and alien logic that tells us not to smell poetry, hear shadows or taste lights. Escaping this rigid framework, this project seeks not only to locate communication outside the narrow alleys of comprehension, but also tries to envisage dialogue in a way that cannot be read, heard or understood.”

Pushpa Rawat

Pushpa Rawat lives in Ghaziabad, Uttar Pradesh, a large industrial city close to Delhi and has an MA in Philosophy and works as a freelance photographer. She was one of the filmmakers of the 2007 acclaimed short documentary Kyon, a group project that was shown at many film festivals and workshops.

Nirnay

Nirnay (Decision) the debut film of director Pushpa Rawat, is set on the outskirts of Delhi, and explores Pushpa’s life journey and that of her young, educated female friends. These women feel powerlessly obligated when it comes to taking any major decision regarding their future be it career or marriage.

Filmed over three years, the documentary shares the young women’s daily struggles and negotiations with their families as they search for their true voice.

In fearlessly questioning society’s expectations of young women, the film explores whether they have a say in the most important decisions in their lives, or whether they are afraid to make some choices.

Elizabeth Gower: he loves me, he loves me not

RMIT Gallery

11 March - 23 April 2016

Women in all cultures are encouraged to seek validation at an early age, by conforming to prescribed behaviours, sanctioned body image, fashion, career and lifestyle choices.

In the handwritten phrase ‘he loves me, he loves me not’ Elizabeth Gower poses the question 21,319 times symbolically representing a lifetime of re-evaluation and wavering, resilience and resolve.

The seemingly endless repetition of the phrase ‘he loves me, he loves me not’ written by hand on 20 lengths of semi- transparent drafting film that are suspended between the ceiling and the floor represents the number of days Gower has asked this question.

The number is calculated from when Gower was five years old to the exhibition opening to symbolically represent a lifetime of re-evaluation and wavering, resilience and resolve.

Gower explains that the phrase is written on behalf of women across cultures who are conditioned to seek approval, permission and sanction from the generic ‘he’.

“The ‘he’ is representative of male presence in the form of the father, the brother, the boyfriend, the lover, the husband and the son, as well as the various concepts of a male deity. The ‘he’ can also be read more generally as the colleague, the boss, the critic and the audience,” Gower said.

“In some societies the behaviour and choices available to women are more restrictive and require cultural authorization and consent. The phrase ‘he loves me, he loves me not’ can also have more negative connotations that signify the trauma of domestic instability and violence.”

There is a correlation between continually seeking approval through asking the question and the physical endurance required in repeatedly writing the maxim.

The relentless repetition of the phrase and the ephemerality of the long drops of suspended drafting film adds to the implied futility of continually asking a question to which there can never be a fixed answer.

Elizabeth Gower has held over 30 one-person exhibitions throughout Australia and in New York, Paris, Sharjah and London. She is represented by many notable public collections including the the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Art Gallery of South Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Australian National Gallery, Queensland Art Gallery as well as Monash, Tasmanian, Deakin and Queensland University collections; as well as numerous private collections in Australia, France, Italy, UAE, UK and USA. Gower has a Master of Arts from RMIT and a PhD from Monash University.

Richard Bell: Imagining Victory

RMIT Gallery

11 March - 23 April 2016

Leading Australian artist Richard Bell’s trilogy of video projects digs beneath the veneer of cultural integration to expose how racism can be deeply embedded and passed on to future generations.

Imagining Victory is a significant solo exhibition of Bell’s highly acclaimed and provocative works Scratch an Aussie (2008) and Broken English (2009) as well as the culminating work The Dinner Party (2013). These videos expand upon narratives and concepts developed within Bell’s artistic practice that draw heavily upon the mechanisms of activism.

Scratch an Aussie adopts the form of a Freudian therapy session in which Bell opens up to a therapist (played by Gary Foley) about his perceptions of race relations. This session is interspersed with Bell assuming the role of therapist for a group of young blonde-haired Australians as he urges them to frankly discuss their concerns and attitudes to Aboriginal people and issues.

Broken English concentrates upon issues relating to Aboriginal political empowerment. Incorporating the diverse contexts of a chess game, a gallery opening and an Australia Day re-enactment of Captain Cook’s landing, the work questions how history is recorded and framed within the present, and how both politics might contribute to and be embedded within the arenas of cultural production and presentation.

The Dinner Party is a provocative work that utilises Sydney’s iconic harbour as a backdrop for a well-catered dinner party in a luxurious mansion. Over the course of the dinner, the guests speak of their views of the interrelationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people in this country. These conversations and discussions occur within a context of privilege, both economic and social, and far-removed from the most obvious sites of Aboriginal disaffection and political, cultural, social and economic inequities.

An Artspace exhibition, toured by Museums and Galleries of NSW.

Richard Bell describes himself as ‘an activist masquerading as an artist’. He has been a leading force within the field of contemporary Australian art since the 1990s, making works that confront the histories and present issues surrounding race relations.

Bell frequently integrates expressions of political, cultural, social and economic disenchantment emerging out of the uneasy relationship between Aboriginal peoples and colonial migrants to Australia.

100 Chairs in 100 Days: Martino Gamper

RMIT Design Hub Gallery

25 February - 8 April 2016

Renowned for his cross-disciplinary and culturally responsive approach to design, London-based Martino Gamper came to major acclaim with 100 Chairs in 100 Days. In this project Gamper collected disused chairs from alleyways and friends’ homes and reassembled them — one per day — into poetic and often humorous forms.

Shown in Australia for the first time, 100 Chairs in 100 Days was an experiment in transforming limitations into possibilities. For RMIT Design Hub Gallery, Gamper created a new version of the 100th chair, fabricated within a single day and only using found materials, structures and designs. The exhibition incorporated a workshop or ‘ideas exchange’ where Gamper discussed his process-driven practice with local invited designers.

A project by: Martino Gamper

Collection loaned by: Nina Yashar - Nilufar Gallery

Graphic Design: Åbäke

Curated for RMIT Design Hub Gallery by: Fleur Watson

Part of the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival Cultural Program Project Series.