GROUP EXHIBITION

Today, rising authoritarian populism, extremist movements and declining trust in government have thrown twentieth-century knowledge systems into question. Artists and communities disillusioned by the promises of liberal democracy—and by the assumption that modernity would inevitably deliver freedom and progress—are turning to heterodox forms of sense-making long excluded from institutional narratives.

The exhibition includes new commissions, artworks from the Monash University Collection and significant loans by local and international artists. Among them are the late mid-twentieth-century Australian artists Vali Myers and Rosaleen Norton, framed here as visionary ‘foremothers’ whose defiantly independent practices offer vital historical precedents for many of the contemporary works on display. Both cultivated an intensely personal spiritual world and lived beyond artistic and social conventions, dismissed by the art establishment even as they were embraced by underground, occult and countercultural communities. Explicitly or latently, many artists in the exhibition continue and expand these legacies.