Ground Floor, Building F Monash University, Caulfield Campus 900 Dandenong Road Caulfield East VIC 3145 Australia

www.monash.edu.au/muma Telephone +61 3 9905 4217 muma@monash.edu Tues – Fri 10am – 5pm; Sat 12 – 5pm

MONASH UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF ART

1Image: Open Spatial Workshop (Terri Bird, Bianca Hester, Scott Mitchell), Concrete cast of a Henbury iron meteorite, 2015. Photo: Open Spatial Workshop

www.monash.edu.au/muma Telephone +61 3 9905 4217 muma@monash.edu Tues – Fri 10am – 5pm; Sat 12 – 5pm

MONASH UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF ART

muma 2017 Artistic programpreview

Ground Floor, Building FMonash University, Caulfield Campus900 Dandenong RoadCaulfield East, VIC 3145 Australia

Ground Floor, Building F Monash University, Caulfield Campus 900 Dandenong Road Caulfield East VIC 3145 Australia

www.monash.edu.au/muma Telephone +61 3 9905 4217 muma@monash.edu Tues – Fri 10am – 5pm; Sat 12 – 5pm

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We are excited to announce our 2017 artistic program which will open in February with a major new project by Open Spatial Workshop (Terri Bird, Bianca Hester, Scott Mitchell) across all MUMA galleries. The year will continue with the first survey exhibition of Christian Thompson’s photography, video and sound works with Hetti Perkins as guest co-curator, continue with Future Eaters which presents works by a range of Australian and international artists working with sculptural practices in the technological age, and finish with The humours, an international group exhibition curated by Hannah Mathews that reflects upon how artists employ strategies of comedy and absurdity.

MUMA is committed to working with like-minded organisations around the world and we are thrilled that Francis Upritchard’s exhibition Jealous Saboteurs (co-produced with City Gallery, Wellington) will tour to Christchurch Art Gallery in March-July and Dunedin Art Gallery in August-November, and that Nicholas Mangan’s exhibition Limits to Growth (developed with our colleagues at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane and Kunst-Werke Institute of Modern Art, Berlin) will open in Berlin in June. Closer to home we are partnering with NETS on a national tour of works by Australian and international artists that explore the history of the voice and its agency in contemporary times.

2017 will be a big year for public art commissions at Monash with the unveiling of Rose Nolan’s Give or Take in the Caulfield Library in March, the Kulata Tjuta Project with Jonathan Jones in the Sir Louis Matheson Library also in March, and later in the year a series of art walls for Clayton campus’ new carpark and a commission for the Alexander Theatre.

The Monash University Collection remains at the heart of MUMA’s operations and in the new year we look forward to sharing new writing on the collection with a program of fifty newly commissioned texts on fifty artworks. In addition, we have worked with Curatorial Phd candidate Léuli Eshragi on a language program that will see texts on works from the collection authored in the first language of these artists. You will also be able to see much more of the Collection out around campus in new displays at the Caulfield Library, Sir Louis Matheson Library, Law Library, Menzies building and Monash Business School.

We are very pleased to present our first Boiler Room lecture for the year with Mami Kataoka, the acclaimed Chief Curator, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo and newly appointed Artistic Director of the next Biennale of Sydney. This Boiler Room lecture will be presented on 1 March as part of the inaugural AsiaTOPA Festival and the series will continue throughout the year with speakers including Mary Reid Kelley and Anselm Franke.

We look forward to starting 2017 with On Campus, a two-day event led by guest Lithuanian curator Raimundas MalaŠauskas that takes inspiration from the life of the University and its richness of research and researchers, sites and artworks, to encourage cross-disciplinary interaction and consideration. MalaŠauskas’ project continues MUMA’s program of inviting international curators to work with us.

We look forward to seeing you in 2017!

Charlotte DayDirector, MUMA

muma 2017 Artistic programpreview

Ground Floor, Building F Monash University, Caulfield Campus 900 Dandenong Road Caulfield East VIC 3145 Australia

www.monash.edu.au/muma Telephone +61 3 9905 4217 muma@monash.edu Tues – Fri 10am – 5pm; Sat 12 – 5pm

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Christian Thompson: Ritual Intimacy27 April – 8 July 2017

Curators: Charlotte Day and Hetti Perkins

Christian Thompson: Ritual Intimacy will be the first survey exhibition of one of Australia’s leading Indigenous artists. Thompson, of the Bidjara people, works across photography, video, sculpture, performance and sound to explore notions of identity, race and Australia’s colonial history. He made history himself as one of the first two Aboriginal Australians to be accepted into Oxford University, where he completed his Doctorate of Philosophy (Fine Art) in 2015.

The exhibition will cover the breadth of Thompson’s practice, both in the media he employs and in the works he has made for Australian and European contexts. It will include his best-known work in photography, where he has used his own image to present ideas about identity and the collision of cultures, along with his audio and video works that celebrate language and gesture through performance, sound and song.

Image: Christian Thompson, Untitled #6 (from the series King Billy) 2010. Courtesy the artist, Sarah

Scout Presents, Melbourne and Michael Reid, Sydney + Berlin

Open Spatial Workshop: Converging in Time11 February – 8 April 2017

Curator: Charlotte Day

MUMA presents Open Spatial Workshop: Converging in time, the first major museum exhibition by Open Spatial Workshop (comprising artists Terri Bird, Bianca Hester and Scott Mitchell).

The exhibition continues OSW’s exploration of the material relationships between sculpture and geology. Drawing on earth sciences research and studies of the Anthropocene, this new exhibition explores the connections between the mineral make-up of a site and the societies that are produced and sustained by it. In MUMA’s galleries OSW will bring together new sculptural, video and sound works in assemblages with extended support structures that incorporate items from Museums Victoria’s Geosciences collection.

The exhibition continues MUMA’s much anticipated annual exhibition series that presents the practices of Australia’s most exciting and innovative mid-career artists. MUMA will publish the first monograph on OSW, which will feature three newly-commissioned essays including a passage by Matt Poll, Curator of Indigenous Heritage and Repatriation Project at Macleay Museum at the University of Sydney; and selected texts authored by Open Spatial Workshop.

Image: Open Spatial Workshop (Terri Bird, Bianca Hester, Scott Mitchell), Lumpen Falls, Conical Gallery, Melbourne, 2012. Photo: Christo Crocker

Ground Floor, Building F Monash University, Caulfield Campus 900 Dandenong Road Caulfield East VIC 3145 Australia

www.monash.edu.au/muma Telephone +61 3 9905 4217 muma@monash.edu Tues – Fri 10am – 5pm; Sat 12 – 5pm

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the humours7 October – 16 December 2017

Curator: Hannah Mathews

Artists: BC Institute (AUS); Matthew Griffin (AUS); Glenn Ligon (USA); Mary Reid Kelley (USA); Mika Rottenberg (ARG); and Michael Smith (USA)

Future Eaters22 July – 23 September 2017

Curator: Charlotte Day

Artists including: Nina Canell (SWE); Aleksandra Domanovic (DEU); Alex Dordoy (GBR); Lewis Fidock and Joshua Petherick (AUS); Mira Gojak (AUS); Yngve Holen (DEU); Magali Reus (GBR); Erika Verzutti (BRA).

Future Eaters presents a range of Australian and international artists working with sculptural practices in the technological age. It begins with a series of questions: How does the sculpture made today reflect the technological age in which we live and work? How have the materials and forms of sculpture evolved and shifted? And to what ends?

Sculpture is of our time but we can also envisage sculpture out-living us and its forms becoming speculative residues of our past. This group exhibition is constructed with the future viewer in mind: the sculptures laid out like the recovery from an archaeological dig set up for close examination and analysis.

Image: Magali Reus, Leaves (Park Heights, September), 2015. Milled and sprayed model board, phosphated aluminium tube, silicone rubber, pigments, powder coated, zinc plated, anodized and blackened laser cut aluminium and steel, brass, perspex. 37.5 x 49 x 10 cm. © Magali Reus, courtesy the artist and The Approach, London. Collection of Lisa and Danny Goldberg, Sydney.

The humours is an international group exhibition that brings together new and recent works to consider how artists employ strategies of comedy and absurdity. Rather than identifying ‘what is funny’, the exhibition looks more closely at ‘what makes funny’ and how artists use various comedic personalities, strategies and tropes (including bodily movement, scripted dialogue, timing, exaggeration of scale and situation) to reveal more serious concerns about race, labor, gender and history.

With a particular focus on the delivery of comedy and absurdity through physicality and language, The humours includes moving image, photographic, installation and performance works by six artists. The exhibition continues MUMA’s desire to provide a safe space for challenging ideas – with humour allowing us to look more closely at the complexities of contemporary living.

Images: Mika Rottenberg, Squeeze, 2010, single channel video installation, digital c-print, video duration: 20 minutes, overall dimensions variable, edition of 6 with 2 Aps © Mika Rottenberg, courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York