Must-See Exhibitions During Sydney Contemporary and Beyond
Hoda Afshar, Untitled #88, from the series 'Speak the wind' (2015–2022). Pigment photographic print. 80 x 100 cm. Courtesy © Hoda Afshar.
Australasia's largest contemporary art fair, Sydney Contemporary, returns for its seventh edition from 7 to 10 September. Hosted at Carriageworks, Redfern, on Gadigal land, this year's fair spotlights over 90 galleries from the Asia-Pacific region.
Explore our selection of must-see exhibitions at Sydney's museums, institutions, and non-profit spaces during the fair, in particular a strong suite of mid-career surveys including Melbourne-based Iranian photographer Hoda Afshar at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, London-based ceramic and textile artist Renee So at UNSW Galleries, and U.S. photographer Zoe Leonard at Museum of Contemporary Art Australia.
Hoda Afshar: A Curve is a Broken Line
Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), Art Gallery Road
2 September 2023–21 January 2024
Expect: a challenging collection of photography and film that builds up and pulls apart the documentary genre.
AGNSW brings together the first major institutional survey of Melbourne-based Iranian artist Hoda Afshar, with photographs and film from the past decade of the artist's practice as well as a newly commissioned series of works.
Works on view include Afshar's series 'Remain' (2018), which comprises portraits of stateless people held in an Australian-run detention centre on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, and 'Speak the wind' (2015–2022), a photographic series shot on islands in the Strait of Hormuz, Iran, documenting surreal landscapes shaped by wind and the inhabitants' belief in the power of the wind to malevolently possess a person.
Seen collectively, Afshar's works relay a sensitivity to the politics of image-making, truth, and subjecthood. As the artist said to Ocula Magazine: 'The documentary genre has been used by systems of power to manipulate reality towards a desired direction or belief. ... I would argue that documentary photography also involves artistic intervention, and at its best, can give us a fraction of a much bigger reality.'
Zoe Leonard: Al río / To the River
Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), Circular Quay West 140 George Street
11 August–5 November 2023
Expect: documentary photography on an epic scale that challenges preconceived ideas of national borders, migration, and our relationship with natural and built environments.
MCA presents the first major exhibition of esteemed U.S. photographer Zoe Leonard in the southern hemisphere with Al río / To the River, a project that casts the artist's lens on the U.S.-named Rio Grande—or Río Bravo, as it is known in Mexico.
Over five years from 2016, Leonard photographed the 2,000-kilometre stretch of river that demarcates the boundary between the U.S. and Mexico, tracing its course from the border cities of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and El Paso, Texas, to the Gulf of Mexico. Leonard observed, 'The shifting nature of a river—which floods periodically, changes course and carves new channels—is at odds with the political task it is asked to perform.'
In three parts, the exhibition includes over 400 black-and-white silver gelatin prints that engage genres of documentary photography, abstraction, and landscape photography, as well the format of surveillance imagery. Mirroring the pathways and scale of its titular subject, Leonard's presentation is a pertinent examination of the evolving environment along the riverbank and enmeshed geopolitical conversations.
Primavera 2023: Young Australian Artists
Museum of Contemporary Art Australia
8 September 2023–4 February 2024
Expect: six exciting young artists offer optimism and imagination in the face of ongoing societal challenges.
Since 1992 the MCA has presented early-career Australian artists and curators through their annual exhibition Primavera, providing a critical opportunity for artists and a glimpse into next-generation directions in contemporary art for audiences.
This year's edition includes Tiyan Baker, Christopher Bassi, Moorina Bonini, Nikki Lam, Sarah Poulgrain, and Truc Truong, whose practices span installation, video, painting, sculpture, and text.
New Zealand-born, Sydney-based curator Talia Smith centres the exhibition on the concept of the 'collective body', as the artists explore themes of protest, perseverance, and new modes of navigation. Despite their stylistic differences, Smith notes: 'What brings them together is the way they reckon with the perils of history, education, culture, and language to question authoritative structures and systems. They assert that there is more than one way of living and offer impressions of how it might look.'
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Atmospheric Memory
Powerhouse Museum, 500 Harris Street
12 August–5 November 2023
Expect: an interactive, multisensory experience of 3D-printed text bubbles, clouds of text written mid-air, 3,000 speakers with field recordings, and a 360-degree projection room.
What lies within the atmosphere? Rafael Lozano-Hemmer probes the question with 18 works staged in an immersive environment of light, sound, and smoke that surrounds viewers as they walk through chambers filled with monumental projections.
Lozano-Hemmer's science-meets-art project was inspired by the inventor of the first computer blueprint Charles Babbage and his suggestion that air is a library recording every word that has been written or spoken—utterances that could be recovered with the right kind of machinery and calculations.
Lozano-Hemmer comments, 'I hope the project makes the atmosphere tangible, so it's no longer seen as something neutral or invisible we take for granted. It is something complex, beautiful and irreversible.'
Yuki Kihara: Paradise Camp
Powerhouse Museum
24 March–31 December 2023
Expect: theatrical images that complicate Paul Gauguin's interpretations of the Pacific and its peoples with a contemporary imaging of cultural awareness and inclusive difference.
First shown at the New Zealand Pavilion of the 2022 Venice Biennale, Yuki Kihara's critically acclaimed exhibition continues its Australian presentation with a suite of 12 photographs that interrogate gender roles in their re-working of French Post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin's depictions of Pacific Islanders.
Kihara told curator Natalie King for Ocula Magazine in 2022, 'Just as Gauguin used Sāmoa as source material, disguised with Māohi titles, I did the reverse by repurposing his paintings created during his time in French Polynesia between 1891 and 1903.'
Shot across rural villages, plantations, churches, and heritage sites on the Sāmoa archipelago, Kihara's images share her vision of paradise, conceived with members from the local Fa'afafine and Fa'afatama communities, also known as Sāmoa's third gender.
Paradise Camp includes BERTHA (2023), a new body of work made in a collaboration between Kihara and activist and drag artist Harold Samu. Vintage 'Pacific' dolls collected from second-hand shops are upcycled and dressed to commemorate moments in Samu's life, who performed as Bertha in New Zealand during the 1990s.
Renee So: Provenance
UNSW Galleries, Oxford Street/Greens Road
18 August–19 November 2023
Expect: a contemporary, questioning filter over museum-like objects that spotlight the ethics of collecting and display.
Arriving in Sydney after its Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, showing, Provenance is the London-based Australian Renee So's first major solo institutional exhibition in Australia, collecting nearly 70 works that span the artist's practice from 2007 to today.
Informed by contentious, evolving issues including the provenance of museum collections and the symbolic value of colonial objects, So renders divergent subjects in unexpected material forms that range from ceramic to textile and tile.
Examples include the recent 'Snuff Bottle' series, in which So reimagines cult perfume bottles such as Yves Saint Laurent's Opium or Jean Patou's Colony in hand-built clay. So says of the series: 'These works speak of trade histories, status and our desire for collecting, and the power of objects through ownership and objectification.'
David Sequeira: History and Infinity
UNSW Galleries
18 August–19 November 2023
Expect: works on paper that explore the relationship between colour, geometry, and music, and an installation that takes on history and definitions of high and low art.
Melbourne-based curator and artist Sequeira employs the whole of the colour spectrum to create visually rich works that question our usual modes of looking and seeing.
Symphonic Poem (2014) presents 48 pieces of sheet music, each bearing a central geometric pattern in overlapping colours that seem to hum and vibrate in their tonal blendings, offering viewers a multisensory, even synaesthesia-like, experience.
History and Infinity (2022) takes the colour off the page with the installation of hundreds of coloured, shade-coordinated glass vases placed on a shelf that runs around the room, among which unexpectedly nestle paintings by other artists, forging a relationship between the 'low' art of the domestic and the 'high' art of painting, but also questioning our construction of history.
Cosmic Beings
Cement Fondu, 36 Gosbell Street
5 August–24 September 2023
Expect: a cosmic departure from the archetypal science-fiction trope of alien invasion leading to the unification of humanity.
In Paddington, Cement Fondu's Cosmic Beings group exhibition asks: 'Might we envision unity, empathy and equity on Earth by contemplating ourselves as cosmic beings?' Responding to this proposition in various ways are eight Australian and international artists: Hannah Brontë, Kalanjay Dhir, Mathew Calandra, Black Quantum Futurism, Chitra Ganesh, Tony Oursler, Ahilapalapa Rands, and Saya Woolfalk.
Deploying speculative fictions as starting points for reimagining normative societal beliefs, Cosmic Beings envisages alternative ways of being with refreshing playfulness, staging a new world with animation, puppetry, video, and textile banners.
Complementing the show is a presentation by Yogyakarta-based artist Natasha Tontey in Cement Fondu's project space. Tontey's film Of Other Tomorrows Never Known (2023) questions our relationship with technology, drawing from evolving Indigenous perspectives on machines and their intersection with ritual.
Tarek Atoui: Waters' Witness
Museum of Contemporary Art Australia
15 September 2023–4 February 2024
Expect: a feast for the senses in a series of works that bring layers of sounds from working ports around the globe into the gallery.
Beirut-born artist and composer Tarek Atoui uses custom-built musical instruments to investigate the medium of sound and how it is experienced across multiple spaces and senses.
For Waters' Witness Atoui has recorded the industrial and human sounds of port cities including Athens, Abu Dhabi, Singapore, Beirut, Porto, Istanbul, and now Sydney, in a work that continually evolves as each new harbour is added. Across installation, performances, publications, and an archive of sounds, the work invites viewers to explore layers of sound in visual and tactile ways.
The MCA presentation will also include three newly commissioned sound sculptures inspired by Sydney Harbour and Port Botany, where Atoui has recorded sounds with his collaborator Éric La Casa, producing what Atoui describes as a 'sound cloud' within the gallery.
In Brief
Round off several full days with a visit to White Rabbit Gallery, Chippendale, where the artists of I am the People (28 June–12 November 2023) offer their perspectives on the complicated issue of class in contemporary China, where wealth and social mobility for some and poverty and lack of access for others are creating social division.
Two shows by emerging artists at inner-city non-profit spaces are also worth a visit. At Firstdraft, Woolloomooloo, Teresa Busuttil's solo exhibition Asleep with the Fishes (18 August–1 October 2023) examines the life and legacy of the artist's late father, who was born in Malta and migrated to South Australia by boat. At 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art in Haymarket, an exhibition by Perth-based Australian-Thai artist Nathan Beard, A Puzzlement (2 September–15 October 2023), features new sculptures, video, and Swarovski-bedazzled prints where memory and biography collide.
Further afield, the touring group exhibition curated by the team at Artspace Sydney, 52 ACTIONS (22 June–2 October 2023), is currently on show at the Jervis Bay Maritime Museum in Huskisson, a few hours south of Sydney. Featuring works from 52 artists and collectives from all over Australia, the exhibition considers art-as-action, indexing a moment in national contemporary practice. —[O]
