Memo Review

Spencer Lai, A smile forms into a grimace mid-slumber as the earth spins—it's funny, such is the sound of laughter—it is like god's hands on the shoulders of a troubled world

Matilda Davis, Too Many Dinner Parties

Bus Projects
31 October – 24 November 2018

By Francis Plagne

The fascination of bad taste continues to exert its somewhat mysterious pull on certain sub-scenes in the Melbourne artworld. Spencer Lai's current show in the front room at Bus Projects—part of the gallery's 'Wi...

Lili Reynaud-Dewar, TEETH, GUMS, MACHINES, FUTURE, SOCIETY

Alicia Frankovich, Exoplanets

Monash University Art Museum
6 October – 15 December 2018

By Anna Parlane

The paired exhibitions currently on show at the Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) are linked by the figure of the prosthetically enhanced, composite or permeable body. Alicia Frankovich's Exoplanets, 2018, and Lili Reynaud-Dewar's Teeth Gums Machines Future Society, 2016-18, both explore territory that can be desc...

Hito Steyerl: Factory of the Sun

National Gallery of Victoria

28 September 2018 – 24 March 2019

By Amelia Winata

Hito Steyerl is arguably the most important "post-internet" artist alive today. Though the history of post-internet art is a nascent one insofar as wide-spread use of the technology is quite a recent phenomenon, the art that responds to it also reflects this ascendency. Ironically, the post-internet 'condition' seems to have had a limited lifespan, the work seeming to confirm...

Biennale of Australian Art

Ballarat, 21 September - 6 November

By David Wlazlo

Lately I have been thinking about the growth and sizes of urban environments, the infrastructure required to sustain them as well as the potential limits on their growth. Can a city keep growing indefinitely and remain 'liveable,' whatever that means? Or is there some kind of limit—environmental, infrastructural, political—to the amount of people a city can sustain? What is the size of a city best suited to fulf...

Anne Ferran, White Against Red

Sutton Gallery 13 October – 10 November 2018

By Giles Fielke

Six large photographs of the dancer and choreographer Ervi Sirén hang from metal brackets near the ceiling of Sutton gallery. Like banners they are suspended in the bright space of the old C.V. Fashions building in Brunswick Street, Fitzroy. They are all the same size and weighted by heavy dowels sewn into the ends of the canvas bolts onto which the images have been printed. Sirén wraps herself in...

Double Issue

This week Memo Review publishes two reviews of two major exhibitions currently open at the Ian Potter Museum of Art: State of the Union and Eavesdropping.

Below Sophie Knezic considers the social and political stakes of the question of sound, surveillance and listening in Eavesdropping.

Benison Kilby, whose review is available by clicking here, focuses on the problematics of artistic labour and trade unions in State of the Union...

Double Issue

This week Memo Review publishes two reviews of two major exhibitions currently open at the Ian Potter Museum of Art: State of the Union and Eavesdropping.

Below Benison Kilby focuses on the problematics of artistic labour and trade unions in State of the Union.

Sophie Knezic, whose review is available by clicking here, considers the social and political stakes of the question of sound, surveillance and listening in Eavesdropping....

John Stezaker: Lost World

Centre for Contemporary Photography, 21 September – 11 November 2018

By Tim Alves

John Stezaker's collage entitled Mask (Film Portrait Collage) CLXXIII, 2014, comprises only two elements, a pair of found photographs: a smiling 1940s Hollywood publicity portrait and a picture postcard depicting a stone bridge at Killarney, Ireland, from perhaps sometime between the wars. The postcard is simply pasted over the Hollywood actor's visage, but it's deceptively simple....