I’ve worked as an art curator both independently and in a range of organisations. My key curatorial roles have been at Monash University Museum of Art, as an Assistant Curator and Curator (2005-2010), the Centre for Contemporary Photography in Melbourne, as Associate Curator (2010-2014) and Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, in curatorial roles in the Australian Art department including Acting Curatorial Manager (2015-17).
More recently, I have been a curator of Academic Engagement at the University of Melbourne, a pedagogical and research role in the Museums and Collections department that connects academics and students from all faculties with exhibitions and collections. I collaborate closely with their art museums curatorial team working into Buxton Contemporary, Old Quad and The Potter.
In this role, I convene the annual The Potter Museum of Art Interdisciplinary Forum. Each of the Forums in this ongoing series addresses a pressing theme of our time, and features academic researchers from across the University of Melbourne, alongside contributions and commissions by creative practitioners. The Forums propose art-making as a form of knowledge creation alongside other academic fields of inquiry. To date, the Forums have explored the themes of WATER, LANGUAGE, MACHINE, CONSENT, CARE and TIME.
Below are some key curatorial projects I’ve delivered over the years:
Australian Art Collection rehang, QAGOMA 2017
As Acting Curatorial Manager, Australian Art, I led the team on a major reimagining of the Australian Art Collection at Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, presented in September 2017.
Asia Pacific Triennial 8, QAGOMA, Brisbane 2015-16
APT is Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art’s flagship exhibition focussed on the work of Asia, the Pacific and Australia. For APT8 I curated the development and presentation of key performance and installation commissions by Australian artists Gabriella Mangano and Silvana Mangano; Justin Shoulder and Bhenji Ra and Super Critical Mass collective in the context of APT8.
From 1968-71, high school teacher Angus O’Callaghan walked Melbourne in the evening in his spare time, photographing its streets, people and events on two Yashicaflex medium format cameras. Commissioned by the City of Melbourne to work with his archive, I developed an exhibition focusing on O’Callaghan’s cinematic observations of iconic city locations in low light: at dusk, in winter and on neon-filled nights. The exhibition repositioned O’Callaghan alongside mid-century photographers of Melbourne’s streets, such as Croatian Mark Strizic, and introduced him to a new generation of Melburnians.
Guest curatorship of ACCA’s flagship national emerging artists commissioning exhibition, featuring ambitious commissioned works by Charles Dennington, Andrew Hazewinkel, Taree McKenzie, Daniel McKewen, Kenny Pittock, Jelena Telecki and Danae Valenza.
‘NEW14 Review: Seinfeld, grand pianos and talismans’, Fiona Gruber, The Guardian, 20 March, 2014.
The Sievers Project – early career artists’ commissions, CCP, Melbourne and Melbourne Art Fair, 2014
In this exhibition, six early career artists, working in photography through to installation, responded in diverse ways to renowned Australian photographer Wolfgang Sievers (1913–2007), icon of 20th century Australian photography. Sievers’ commercial practice exemplifies mid-century positivism and modernity, and the mythmaking role of photography. As a German Jewish immigrant, he had a strong interest in refugees and human rights issues as well as an expressed commitment to representing the dignity of labour. The Sievers Project presented key historical works as a context for engaging the past through the present. Co-curated with CCP Director Naomi Cass.
Read The Sievers Project catalogue online.
Notes on Performance, Objectifs Photography and Film, Singapore, 2014
This exhibition gathered together a selection of objects, ephemera, documentation and relics relating to performance art practice in Singapore, or by Singaporean artists, developed while on an Asialink residency. After spending time at the Independent Archive and Resource Centre and with Singapore’s visual arts community, I embraced the partial knowledge gained from a curatorial residency by gathering historical and documentation material chosen by Singaporean performance artists and their community for the exhibition. Contributing artists included Lina Adams, Chua Chye Teck, Jeremy Hiah, Amanda Heng, Koh Nguang How, Sean Lee, Lee Wen, Elizabeth Lim, Loo Zihan, Angie Seah, and Jason Wee. This local perspective was shown alongside a recent series of photographs Audience, by Australian artist Ross Coulter. Shot in gallery spaces in Melbourne, these small, silver gelatin prints have the look and feel of documentation shots from 1970s performance art, but without any evidence of the performance. The project was a record of art-world spaces and faces, as well as an intriguing reflection on looking, and the nature of performance itself.
True Self: David Rosetzky Selected Works, CCP, Melbourne, 2013
One of Australia’s foremost exponents of video art, David Rosetzky creates intensely beautiful videos, photo-collages and installations exploring identity, subjectivity and interpersonal relationships. Drawing on fifteen years of practice, this was the first comprehensive survey of his work to date. This national touring exhibition was ground breaking in its innovative presentation of multiple video works, developed in collaboration with architects, technical consultants and NETS Victoria. Co-curated with CCP Director Naomi Cass.
Read the True Self catalogue online.
CCP Declares: On the Nature of Things, CCP, Melbourne, 2012
This was a major ‘declarative’ exhibition featuring work by artists working at the forefront of contemporary Australian photography and video and its expanded field. My inaugural iteration of this intended occasional exhibition series featured bodies of work by eight artists from around Australia: Jane Brown, Ross Coulter, Yavuz Erkan, Andrew Hazewinkel, Amy Marjoram, Nasim Nasr, David Nixon and Jacky Redgate. The ambition of this project was to promote a strong curatorial voice for CCP as a leading institution focusing on lens-based art.
A Different Temporality brought together feminist approaches to temporality in the visual arts, with a focus on late 1970s and early 1980s Australia. Rather than an encyclopaedic summation of feminist practice at that time, selected works reflected prevalent debates and modes of practice; with a focus upon the dematerialisation of the art object, the role of film theory, and the adoption of diaristic and durational modes of practice, including performance, photography and film. This group exhibition and publication successfully combined research with collaboration with participating artists. Significantly, A Different Temporality had a reflexive relationship to the question of how Australia’s recent art history might be curated. Arising from our studio visits and discussions, two of the exhibiting artists, Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley, developed their own archive of the period, which they presented as part of their body of work in the exhibition. A Different Temporality was a keynote visual arts project in the 2012 Melbourne Festival, the exhibition and publication is recognised by a wide community of stakeholders, including artists, curators and art historians, as a significant contribution to an under-represented area of Australian art practice. It led to involvement in a round table discussion in Art and Australia, chaired by Julie Ewington.
Without Words, CCP, Melbourne, 2010
A group exhibition on the relationship between photomedia and emotion featuring Cate Consandine, Paul Knight, Ricky Maynard, Tom Nicholson, Mike Parr and Campbell Patterson. Heightened emotion and empathy are responses often associated with documentary practice, through its historical connection to ‘lived reality’ and ‘event’. Still and moving images have documented protest, war, perpetrators and victims of crime and are often co-opted for political effect. Using this as a starting point, Without Words brought together photographic and video works from both art and documentary realms that engage with emotional affect, sincerity, passion and empathy. When art photography has abandoned its indexical relation to the real, how might it convey sorrow, humiliation, love or grief? Equally, can austerity be a powerful force in the historical record?
Dan Rule, ‘Love, Fear, Pain and a Wrinkle in Time’, Sydney Morning Herald, June 22, 2011.
Hiroharu Mori: Speech Rehearsals, Faculty Gallery, Monash University, 2010
Working largely in video, installation and public interventions, Hirohari Mori makes critical works that comment on the mechanics of mass culture. Through his ongoing exploration of slippages in translation, questions of identity and the tensions and contradictions of everyday life, Mori never losses sight of the capacity contemporary art has for poetry and play. Hiroharu Mori presented two major video installations, focusing on ideas of acting, speech and social role playing, together with a selection of new and recent works.
Co-directors of Hell Gallery and occasional artistic collaborators Jess Johnson and Jordan Marani presented a new exhibition following their artists’ residency at Monash University’s Gippsland Centre for Art and Design in April 2009. Dredging through the detritus of their own and others’ lives, Johnson and Marani drew on shared obsessions including comic books, doom metal, overdue bills and talkback radio. For Switchback Gallery, they created a ‘hothouse environment … incorporating installation, sculpture, drawing, collage and a soundtrack too. A polyglottal simmering of words, images, shared memories,
fantasies, associations and neuroses.’
Photographer Unknown, Monash University Museum of Art, Monash University, Melbourne, 2009
The snapshot, the amateur photograph, the flea market find, the postcard, videos uploaded to youtube, and the work of the anonymous, jobbing photographer have all provided material fodder, or acted as conceptual springboards for making new work. Engaging with this material, the artists in Photographer Unknown enacted a series of reversals, reprisals and re-workings – bringing the snapshot to the status of the fine art print, calling into question conventions of authorship, quality, the public and private, the nature of the archive and monumentality. Artists included Susan Fereday, Marco Fusinato, Donna Ong, Fiona Pardington, Patrick Pound, Jacky Redgate, Elvis Richardson and Fiona Tan.
Siri Hayes: Landscapes, Switchback Gallery, Gippsland Centre for Art and Design, Monash Gippsland, 2008 and touring to University of Sydney Art Gallery, Sydney, 2008
Siri Hayes: Landscapes featured a new body of work developed during a week-long residency at Monash University’s Gippsland Centre for Art and Design in April 2008, as well as a selection of existing photographs taken at Merri Creek in inner-suburban Melbourne, Wilson’s Promontory and Phillip Island on the Victorian coast. Moving from the city to the rural hinterland and the coast, Hayes reflected on contemporary and historical engagements with the land and its representations, observing our insignificance within its expanse as keenly as our urge to manipulate, inhabit and delight in it.
The Ecologies Project, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2008
The Ecologies Project included work by forty artists exploring issues of sustainability, climate change and the idea of ecology as both form and metaphor. Co-curated with Senior Curator Geraldine Barlow.
Best-known for her colourful abstractions, as well as her irreverent humour, Brennan’s practice encompasses portraiture, text paintings and landscapes. Her beguiling paintings and drawings draw inspiration from diverse realms including formalist abstraction, linguistic philosophy, art history and the unpredictable experience of everyday life. Featuring works from 1975-2006, Angela Brennan: Every morning I wake up on the wrong side of capitalism brought together selected paintings covering the full scope of Angela Brennan’s intriguing oeuvre in its wild abundance and diversity.
A group exhibition featuring work on this theme by Australian photographic artists Donna Bailey, Pat Brassington, Anne Ferran, Anne Noble and Polixeni Papapetrou.
Kyla McFarlane 