Between Waves

ACCA is proud to present Between Waves, which continues the Yalingwa exhibition series devoted to highlighting the significance of First Nations contemporary art practice of the Southeast within a national context.

Curated by Jessica Clark, and featuring new works by Maree Clarke, Dean Cross, Brad Darkson, Matthew Harris, James Howard, Hayley Millar Baker, Jazz Money, Mandy Quadrio, Cassie Sullivan, and this mob, the exhibition navigates the intersections and collisions between art, culture, materiality and technologies.

Between Waves amplifies concepts related to light, time and vision—and the idea of shining a light on our times—expressed by the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung word “Yalingwa.” The exhibition presents the work of ten artists and collectives who variously explore the visible and invisible energy fields set in motion by these ideas, to illuminate interconnected shapeshifting ecologies within, beyond and between what can be seen.

Through a range of contemporary artforms including video, installation, poetry, projection, photography, painting, sculpture, sound, printmaking, and a digital commission, the invited artists have developed reflective and site-responsive projects which explore and experiment with the intersection of material and immaterial realms of knowledge and knowing. Ten ambitious new commissions traverse internal and external worlds, embracing the sensory and cyclical rhythms of light and sound, thinking and feeling, listening and seeing, interwoven with ideas of material memory.

Participating artists embrace the push and pull dynamics that flow beneath the surface, navigating ideas of presence and absence, the known and unknown, transgenerational and collective consciousness. Together the artists prompt reflection on life shifts and cycles and centre notions of remembering, rehabilitation, regeneration and reclamation. 

Between Waves stages a call for relational accountability and ethical responsibility, locating individual experience not at the centre of the world, but as an inherent part of its fabric. In doing so, the exhibition reflects on the interrelationship between life, materiality, people and place, and a need to find balance.

While light can stimulate sight and is said to reveal truth, it can also be blinding and obscuring. Equally, while darkness is seemingly used to conceal, it is within the darkness, the in-between places and spaces that no one wants to venture, that truth seemingly lingers; rippling inward and outward, above, below and between the surface.

Yalingwa is a Victorian Government Visual Arts Initiative developed in partnership between ACCA, Creative Victoria, and TarraWarra Museum of Art. The program is overseen by the Yalingwa Directions Circle, chaired by Aunty Joy Murphy Wandin AO, and includes First Peoples Elders and cultural, curatorial, and community leaders.

Announced in 2017, the initiative comprises new curatorial positions and major exhibitions alternating between ACCA and TarraWarra, and three one-year Artist Fellowships of 60,000 AUD for senior South East Australian First Nations artists. The first exhibition in the series was A Lightness of Spirit is the Measure of Happiness curated by Hannah Presley at ACCA in 2018, and was followed by WILAM BIIK at TarraWarra Museum of Art in 2021, curated by Stacie Piper.