2016
Museums and Galleries
A partnership between Das KloHäuschen and Villa Walberta, Munich, Germany:
Two Exhibitions, Four Video Nights on site, Artist Talk off site + Residency
Das KloHäuschen is the site of a former urinal adjacent to the main fruit and vegetable markets in the city of Munich in Germany. The wholesale food market in Munich is a site of economic activity where people are buying and selling, making deals and negotiating. So I found with KloHäuschen which is situated directly beside the Wholesale Market, a perfect place to speculate about a possible future process of selling blood, the auction. An economic process clearly showing the interaction between the buyers and the sellers.
Prescriptions at the Beaney House of Art and Knowledge, Canterbury, UK
My artist book/instructional manual, Blood on Silk : Bleeding Out (Internally) The Book was selected for the group exhibition Prescriptions at The Beaney House of Art and Knowledge, Canterbury, UK. It was jointly selected by Egidija Čiricaitė and Dr. Stella Bolaki/University of Kent.
The exhibition consisted of over seventy artists’ book on wellbeing and medicine with the featured artist being Martha A. Hall from the USA. Stella Bolaki wrote in the catalogue essay ‘ A physician often interacts with the patient’s chart as a textual object (for example before in initial encounter with the patient) but this is to gain clinical knowledge. The demands made by the books of this catalogue on health professionals are of a different nature. Touch constitutes a central element when reading these books. Physical intimacy can be threatening when the object one comes into contact with explores trauma or serious illness. …. Touch not only challenges biomedical clinical gaze but also becomes associated with an exposure to the other’s alterity or difference.’
Airspace Marrickville, Sydney Australia
Her Moving Presence was curated by Yvette Hamilton and Danica Knezevic. They selected the work Blood on Silk/Bleeding Out metal, glass, paint, ink, projection and found objects, 135 x 78 x 96(h)cm. for the exhibition of female artists working with moving image.
The curators focused on the ideas of implied and actual presence. Art Academic Jacqueline Millner questions in the catalogue essay - ‘ What happens when the moving image renders the the invisible visible, and the significance of this to scientific scopic regimes informs the work of Ella Condon and Fiona Davies ….Davies Blood on Silk Bleeding Out scrutinises the medical gaze - from the microscope to the total surveillance of intensive care - and its infiltration of our embodied experience.”
The other artists in this group exhibition were Ella Condon, Kath Fries, Sylvia Griffin, Melissa Howe, Yvette Hamilton, Danica Knezevic, Vivienne Linsley, Sarah Breen Lovett, Sara Morawetz, Katy B Plummer, Tamara Voninski
Site Specific Works
SLSA-Eu conference Control University of Stockholm, Sweden June 14-17 2016
The curator, Dehlia Hannah selected the work Blood on Silk: Price Taker/Price Maker for the series of site specific installations
Hannah described this exhibition on her website as ‘The concept of experiment is governed by competing ideals of control and playful freedom. While the controlled experiment is widely regarded as the gold standard of the natural sciences, the aspiration to control, direct, test and constrain novel operations is also prominent in artistic, social and political practices of experimentation. The experimentalism of the arts, where to experiment connotes defiance of rigid norms and expectations and an openness to indeterminacy and even failure, likewise finds its counterpart in the exploratory dimension of scientific research. The dark legacies of authoritarian political experiments likewise stand in tension with the emancipatory promises of liberal ‘experiments in living.’
Control-Experiment is an experiment with the aesthetic forms and media through which to think through Control—the theme of this year’s meeting of the European Society for Science, Literature and the Arts. In order that we might deal playfully with Control—test and display its logics—the exhibition mobilizes the dialectic of control at the core of the concept of experiment by embedding installations, films and performances within the physical and temporal bounds of the conference. In doing so, it also functions as a demonstration experiment and an argument for the importance of engaging a multiplicity of material practices in thinking through Control in the domains of Aesthetics, Animal, Bacteria, Borders, Climate, Desire, Life, Security and War. The exhibition includes works by Nils Agdler and Timo Menke, Naja Ankarfeldt, Yusef Audeh, Max Colson, Fiona Davies, Enrique Enriquez, Hanna Husberg, Ryan Jeffery and Boaz Levin, Anna Kedziora, Fröydi Laszlo, Fay Stevens and Robert Good, Steve Rowell and Josh Wodak.
Sculpture in the Vineyards, Wollombi, Australia
Blood on Silk: Price Taker/Price Maker was reconfigured for this exhibition of site specific installations by the curator Lizzy Marshall.
Sited in a heritage building, the Forge in the middle of the town of Wollombi, the country origins of the auctioneer were reinforced., the floor was rough and unlevel, the walls were partially complete and it looked like a fly by night operation. That this operation was auctioning blood and blood products with an expectation of hygiene and professionalism was neither here no there but it was not what we were getting.
Peacock Gallery and Auburn Arts Studio and Auburn Botanic Gardens, Sydney, Australia.
The Exhibition Open Field was curated by Kon Gouriotis. he selected a small work from my Buttoned Up series to be the starting point for the creation of a black perspex replica
Kon Gouriotis write in his catalogue essay that ‘ Open Field is project in two parts, to be shown simultaneously as an exhibition and a site specific installation. One component is presented in the Peacock Galleries adjacent to the entrance of the Auburn Botanic Gardens, the other within the gardens. The galleries were formerly a kiosk and the Gardens rescued the Duck River so the exhibition is a mediation on, and a metaphor for, change and transformation. The intention is to expand Black’s Utopian vision by placing works by 15 artists from Western Sydney in the Galleries and an enlarged three dimensional geometric replica of each work, made from black transparent acrylic (perspex) in 10 different locations within the gardens.
The artist involved are Eric Aarons, Idil Abdullah, Khadim Ali, Ray Beattie, Michael Butler, Elisabeth Cummings, Fiona Davies, Contessa El Kazzi, Philips George, Stephen Little, Siobhan O’Gorman, David Sudmalis, Khaled Sabsabi, Paul Saint and Guan Wei.’
Community
1st Worldwide Apartment and Studio Biennale
In 2016 artist Anna Khodorkovskaya and curator and art critic Anna Buyvid founded Worldwide Apartment and Studio Biennale – the project developing a distinct approach to alternative exhibition solutions and independent artistic initiatives on exposing current art. Though there are more than 150 art biennials in the world, we thought we needed another one. During the 1st WAS Biennale, more than 70 art shows and events took place in artist studios, apartment galleries and private residences all over the world at the same time. The programme showed artistic and curatorial practice with somewhat different backgrounds, approaches and goals. But what united all those projects was the search for distinct forms of representation.
I was involved in two exhibitions as part of this Biennale - The Slab Club Edition and Colour Run.