2020 exhibition program

In 2020 ACCA continues to promote new art and bold ideas with a series of major new commissions, solo exhibitions by Australian and international artists, and curatorial projects that collectively explore contemporary art's relationship to wider social, cultural and political contexts. 
 

Autumn season: Contemporary Australian solo series 

Frances Barrett: Meatus
April 4–June 9, 2020
Led by Frances Barrett, with Nina Buchanan, Hayley Forward, Brian Fuata, Del Lumanta and Sione Teumohenga
Curator: Annika Kristensen 

Drawing on her background in performance, curating and collaborative models of making, Sydney-based artist Frances Barrett will extend the parameters of the Katthy Cavaliere Fellowship’s solo commission to present new sonic compositions and live performances by multiple artists. 

A “meatus”—to which the exhibition title refers—is an opening or passage leading to the interior of the body, such as the ear or mouth; a juncture between the internal and external, where the body opens itself to the world. For this project ACCA’s galleries are conceived as a form of meatus for the audience to enter; a passage in which to experience multiple voices, embodied knowledges, affective territories, deep listening and relational practice in an immersive and sensory exhibition of sound and light. 

Frances Barrett: Meatus is presented as part of Suspended Moment: The Katthy Cavaliere Fellowship, a suite of three new commissions in support of Australian women artists working at the nexus of performance and installation, presented in a partnership between the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, Carriageworks, Sydney, and the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona), Hobart.

Winter season: The Macfarlane Commissions #2—2020 

Overlapping Magisteria

June 20–August 30, 2020
Artists: Robert Andrew, Mimosa Echard, Anna McMahon, Sam Petersen and Isadora Vaughan
Curators: Max Delany and Miriam Kelly 

The second edition of The Macfarlane Commissions in 2020 will feature ambitious new commissions by emerging and mid-career Australian and international artists, with a focus on the role of  biology, ecology, archaeology and site, as well as ideas of material transformation and alchemy. Generously supported by The Macfarlane Fund, commissioned artists engage with organic materials, laws of nature, deep time, ideas of growth and shapeshifting, as well as formlessness, entropy and abjection. ACCA’s galleries will offer audiences intense sensory and material experiences, with works encompassing living and artificial organisms, alongside installations of narrative and material significance.
 

Spring season: The ACCA International 

Laure Prouvost
September 12–November 15, 2020
Curators: Max Delany and Annika Kristensen

Bringing the work of significant international artists to Australian audiences at critical moments in their career, the 2020 ACCA International will present the first major solo exhibition in Australia of work by French artist Laure Prouvost, following her representation of France at the 2019 Venice Biennale. Prouvost will transform ACCA’s imposing architecture into a labyrinthine and other-worldly installation, with a rich assortment of architectural interventions, found objects, furniture, sculpture, signs and drawings, and a new commission produced especially for the exhibition developed in partnership with the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery / Len Lye Centre, New Plymouth, New Zealand and Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen. 
 

Summer season 2020–21: Big picture series 

Welcome To Public Space 

December 5, 2020–March 14, 2021
Curators: Max Delany, Miriam Kelly and Annika Kristensen, in collaboration with a curatorial advisory group including Marnie Badham, Eugenia Lim, Grace McQuilten, Timothy Moore, Nikos Papastergiadis and Nur Shkembi 

Welcome to Public Space is a polyphonic exhibition, publication and research project that extends beyond the walls of ACCA’s galleries into public space itself. Engaging off-site, temporal, performative and interventionist works in public and urban realms, from the street to digital airwaves, Welcome to Public Space animates recent global discussions and debate around the contested nature of public space, the character of public culture and the composition of public life itself. 
 

Currently showing:

ACCA’s summer season 2019–20: New curatorial perspectives 

Feedback Loops 

Until March 22, 2020
Presented in association with AsiaTOPA 
Artists: Madison Bycroft, Tianzhuo Chen, Lu Yang, Sahej Rahal, Justin Shoulder, Zadie Xa 
Curator: Miriam Kelly 

Featuring new commissions and recent work by artists whose practices sample ideas and images from our past and present to speculate on the future. Feedback Loops brings together works by artists born is the 1980s, who grew up alongside the growth of the internet and who enmesh technology and popular culture with ritual, spirituality, myth and speculative fiction, with a cyclical sensibility that is at once playful, spectacular and challenging.  

Performance and public programs continue through February and March, including Justin Shoulder’s live performance Carrion: Episodes and Lu Yang’s Electromagnetic Brainology. Details at acca.melbourne.