Occupied territory
Highlights from the Melbourne Festival's visual arts program.
Artistic director Brett Sheehy says the theme of the Melbourne International Arts Festival’s visual arts program celebrates one of the things he loves most about Melbourne: the built environment.
“I settled on the spaces we occupy,” he says. “Interiors, dwellings, shelters and homes.”
Here are five highlights of the line-up co-curated by Sheehy and Simon Maidment.
Callum Morton, 'Valhalla'
Valhalla
Originally presented at the Venice Biennale, Callum Morton’s Valhalla is being seen for the first time in Australia, and in the city where its story began. A three-quarter scale reproduction of the Modernist concrete-slab home built by Morton’s architect father 35 years ago, the work seems like an anti-monument: gutted, torched, vandalised, smoking and pitted with holes. Inside, however, is a disjointed, almost magical reality, a pristine marble corporate lobby where the sound of lifts can be heard whirring away into oblivion and a single attendant, mop at the ready, to clean away any traces of the vision of hell just outside the door.
9–24 October, 11am–8pm, the Arts Centre forecourt. Free.
Simryn Gill, from 'Power station'
Inland
A complete survey of Simryn Gill’s photographs of interiors, inside both natural and built environments, from Forest (1996-98) to new work produced as an artist’s book, Train to the West (2009), about travelling to Sydney’s Western suburbs. The core of the exhibition is new work commissioned by the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Inland. Gill visited remote communities across Australia, from mining towns to tourist centres, photographing interiors of the homes of the people she met. Video works Vessel (2004) and From A Lecture by Simryn Gill will also be on show.
9 October–13 December, Centre for Contemporary Photography, 404 George St, Fitzroy. Free.
David Haines & Joyce Hinterding, 'House 2: The Great Artesian Basin, Pennsylvania, USA'
The Dwelling
“Haunted houses” is the easiest way to sum up this group show, with the works exploring surreal happenings, apparent hauntings and other spookiness. Artists included in the survey include filmmaker Chantal Akerman, Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s evocation of women with psychosis, two sound installations by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, the surreal videos of David Haines and Joyce Hinterding, and Sofia Hultén’s family, cooking up ways to frighten each other. Callum Morton is also here with his reconstruction of Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House and a soundtrack that begins with a tinkling cocktail party and ends with gunshots and screams.
9 October–29 November, Australian Centre for Contemporary Arts, 111 Sturt Street, Southbank. Free.
Designed and built by Kichizou Kawasaki with Takaya Fujii
Shelter: On Kindness
The writings of psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and historian Barbara Taylor in On Kindness (Penguin, 2009) are at the heart of this exhibition, which brings together artists, architects, writers and thinkers to reflect on the nature of physical and metaphorical shelter. How does a roof over our head, however simple, affect us? Australian participants include Charles Anderson, Nigel Bertram, Robert Bridgewater, Gregory Burgess, Rodney Eggleston, Pip Stokes, Dr Stephen Haley, Prof Peter Corrigan and Prof Paul Memmott. International guests include Prof Terunobu Fujimori, Prof Murdo MacDonald and Anne-Laure Cavigneaux.
25 September–25 October, RMIT Gallery, 344 Swanston Street, Melbourne. Free.
Gordon Matta-Clark, from 'Program Two' 1971–72, and from 'Program Six' 1974–76
Open House
Gordon Matta-Clark is today considered an artist ahead of his time. He became well known in the early 1970s for his work that combines a kind of performative architecture, removing entire sections of abandoned buildings or altering them in striking ways, with what we recognise today as installation art and concepts of sustainability and social engagement. He died in 1978, aged 35. Open House is an exhibition of his film work.
9 October–25 October, 9am–late, Gallery 1, The Arts Centre, 100 St Kilda Road, Melbourne.
Image details, from top:
Callum Morton, Valhalla, 2007, exterior and interior installation views. Steel, polystyrene, epoxy resin, silicon, marble, glass, wood, acrylic paint, lights, sound, motor. 465 x 1475 x 850cm. Images courtesy Anna Schwartz Gallery and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.
Simryn Gill, from Power station, 2004. Type C photograph and gelatin silver photograph, one in a series of 13 pairs. 19 x 42cm.
David Haines and Joyce Hinterding, from House II: The Great Artesian Basin, Pennsylvania, USA, 2003. Video still.
Designed and built by Kichizou Kawasaki with Takaya Fujii, 2004.
Gordon Matta-Clark, from Program Two, 1971-72 and Program Six, 1974-76. Film stills. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.
Paul Hayes 2009.