3 May–5 July 2014
Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA)
Ground Floor, Building F
900 Dandenong Road
Caulfield East, Melbourne
Australia
T +61 3 9905 4217
[email protected]
Concrete: a construction material, a solid state, something known or true.
Concrete brings together works by sixteen contemporary artists to explore the concrete, the solid, and its counter—change, the flow of time. We give memory a solid form in monuments; we acknowledge it as residing in ruins and other such traces of the past. And yet the sacred memories of one generation can never be transferred entirely intact. Monuments and ruins are sites where meaning is condensed whilst also transient, contested and re-writable. They may reflect a desire for commemoration and justice; or function to consolidate political power and national identity. Works in Concrete locate the monumental in relation to cycles of construction, displacement and erasure; archaeology, geology and palaentology; seasonal change; the shifting politics of memory and different ways to describe a history of place.
As we prepare to mark the centenary of the First World War, Concrete considers representations of loss, destruction and trauma across the globe; the overlay and interlacing of one culture with another; as well as the way specific gaps or absences may function symbolically to stand for the missing, the experience of loss, and that which is unknown or unknowable.
Artists: Laurence Aberhart (NZ), Jananne al-Ani (IRQ/UK), Kader Attia (DEU/DZA), Saskia Doherty (AUS), Fabien Giraud & Raphael Siboni (FRA), Igor Grubić (CRO), Carlos Irijalba (ESP), Nicholas Mangan (AUS), Rä di Martino (ITY), Ricky Maynard (AUS), Callum Morton (AUS), Tom Nicholson (AUS), Jamie North (AUS), Justin Trendall (AUS), James Tylor (AUS)
Curator: Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow