2023
2015
February, 2023
Counterflows facilitated by Arts House, Wurundjeri Country and UTP, Dharug Country.
Arts House, Melbourne and Utp, Sydney have collaboratively designed a 10-month long spacious program for a trans-generational cohort of 5 artists from VIC and 5 artists from NSW to share ideas and work nationally and internationally, connect with artistic peers from the South West Asia and North Africa region and decentralise shared learnings with their local communities of practice.
The program begins in Bankstown with a 3-day reflective practice intensive bringing complex questions into focus through critical dialogue and practice sharing around the Sharjah Biennale 15’s curatorial theme, Thinking Historically in the Present. Embedding methods of open inquiry and peer exchange, this intensive will harness rigour in imagination, practice and relation, and also serve as a preparatory segment for the international trip. Hosted by UTP and guest artists and curators with a grounding in Western Sydney.
In March 2023, the artists spent two weeks in Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Sharjah, for Sharjah Art Foundation’s March Meeting 2023 at Sharjah Biennial 15. The visit included a semi-structured itinerary including guided walkthroughs of Art Dubai and Sharjah Biennial 15 with the curatorial team, participation in a public program with visiting artists and thinkers, studio visits with local artists in the region, walking place and critical writing workshops with Rahel Aima, practice sharing session at 421 Warehouse, networking dinners and allied site visits.
Upon return and with time for the ideas to percolate, Arts House will host a week-long lab with Australian artists who exhibited at the Sharjah Biennale to discuss their expansive bodies of work through the filter of Okwui Enwezor’s proposition of ‘postcolonial constellations’ and its pluriverse of key concepts. This will be an opportunity for the cohort to interrogate, translate and build new solidarities through artistic strategies and radical pedagogies.
Finally, Arts House and Utp will consolidate a distributed learning reader through an open access and interdisciplinary publication with Runway Journal that disseminates the knowledge constellated by the participating artists of this program. Counterflows aims to recentre the artist’s agency in planetary conversations and empower them to engage with history, alterity, geopolitics and society in their contemporary present through their practice, process, voice and tools.
May 27th - 19th August 2023
The Churchie Emerging Art Prize, Institute of Modern Art, Meanjin (Brisbane, Australia).
Since its inception at Brisbane’s Anglican Church Grammar School in 1987, The Churchie Emerging Art Prize has showcased new talent. Today, it is one of Australia’s leading prizes for emerging artists. Since 2019, the Institute of Modern Art has presented the finalists’ exhibition.
Curated by Sebastian Henry-Jones (from West Space, Melbourne), this year’s edition features thirteen finalists from across Australia and explores the theme of ‘context’. Artists for #thechurchie 2023 are Alrey Batol, Amanda Bennetts, Dylan Bolger, Luke Brennan, Matthew Brown, Raf McDonald, Corben Mudjandi, Melody Paloma, Roberta Joy Rich, Joel Spring, Jess Tan, Debbie Taylor Worley, and Ash Tower.
Our judge Tara McDowell (Associate Professor and Director of Curatorial Practice, Monash University, Melbourne) awarded the Major Prize to Joel Sherwood Spring ($15,000 from BSPN Architecture), a special commendation to Debbie Taylor Worley ($5,000 from Fardoulys Constructions), and two further commendations to Alrey Batol and Ash Tower ($1,000 each from Madison Cleaning Services).
The People’s Choice Award ($3,000, also from Madison Cleaning) went to Dylan Bolger.
July 15th - Sunday 17th September 2023
Footscray Art Prize, Footscray Community Arts, Boonwurrung and Woiwurrung Country.
The $20,000 main prize in the Footscray Art Prize been awarded to multi-disciplinary artist
Roberta Joy Rich for her powerful and multi-layered video installation entitled Though Buried, They Echo. The work places the faces of racist policy makers – whose legacies still define Australian and South African colonial law – beneath the gallery floor. Judges said the work successfully engages both the viewer and the institution.
Roberta’s work was selected from 43 finalists and more than 500 original submissions from artists across Australia as well as internationally based Australian creatives. All the works will be exhibited at Footscray Community Arts from 15 July to 17 September in a site wide takeover of the venue.
Peer winners included Ammar Yonis (runner-up Local Acquisition Prize), Grace Nguyen (Young Artists Prize Primary), Jessie Deane (Local Acquisition Prize winner), Abbra Kotlarczyk (Residency Artist Prize). Winners were selected by a judging panel comprising University of Melbourne Art Museum Associate Director Charlotte Day, Artist and Curator Phuong Ngo and National Gallery of Victoria’s First Nations Art Curator, Shonae Hobson.
Photos by Gianna Rizzo.
August 26th 2023 - 10th February 2024
A Whisper Echoes Loudest, Fairfield City Museum and Gallery, Cabrogal Country, Darug Nation.
'A Whisper Echoes Loudest' curated by Nikita Holcombe, reflects on individual and collective experiences of colonialism by those who have always and those that now call Australia home. Through gentle and resilient artistic practices, the artists involved in the exhibition explore difficult and often violent narratives that are otherwise concealed from public view and concern. In sharing these difficult narratives, the exhibition seeks to foster a sense of empathy, understanding and community.
Artists include Rosell Flatley, Carmen Glynn-Braun, Dennis Golding, Mehwish Iqbal, Shivanjani Lal
Nadia Refaei, Roberta Joy Rich and Sha Sarwari.
Photo by Document Photography.
November 3rd 2023 - December 31st 2023
The Purple Shall Govern, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Whadjuk Boodjar, Noongar Nation.
Naarm (Melbourne) based artist Roberta Joy Rich takes the transformative Purple Rain Protest as the basis for her solo exhibition, The Purple Shall Govern at PICA. Juxtaposing the harsh histories of segregation in settler nation South Africa and Australia, Rich interrogates who has access to public space – then and now.
From 1948 to 1994 in South Africa, Apartheid defined the lives and determined the active institutionalised segregation of Black peoples who were forced to live separately from the White minority, while restricting their political rights and freedom. In her exhibition, Rich notes the historic connections between colonial Australia and South Africa, with the concept of Apartheid being birthed in Australia well before South African government legislation was developed.
Pairing her family’s archival objects from the Apartheid era with Australian and South African archival broadcast media and recent sound and video works, Rich prompts us to question how power plays out in public spaces. Who can move freely without fear or hindrance and whose experiences are mitigated?
The exhibition borrows its title from a slogan that was graffitied across Cape Town following the Purple Rain Protest. On this day, police arrived with heavy artillery and water cannons filled with purple dye, intended to mark protesters they planned to arrest. Instead, a protester commandeered one of these canons and unleashed the purple liquid onto buildings and crowds, showering them in purple and momentarily dissolving racial segregation. ‘The Purple Shall Govern’ began appearing on buildings around the city in a sly reference to the protest and the words of the 1955 Freedom Charter that declared, ‘The People Shall Govern’.
Rich recreates this day, transforming PICA’s gallery into a space swathed in purple light. The Purple Shall Govern encourages us to consider our relationship to colonial occupation and celebrates the immense resilience, strength and ongoing survival of Bla(c)k people.
© Copyright Roberta Joy Rich 2024. All images by and courtesy of the artist unless otherwise credited.