Cover image of the review
Agatha Gothe-Snape: The Outcome Is Certain, installation view: Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2020. Photo: Christian Capurro

Agatha Gothe-Snape, The Outcome is Certain


8 Mar 2020
9 Feb - 9 Apr 2020

“If art keeps good time”, writes Claudia La Rocco, “it keeps us in the present. It’s present”. This statement names precisely the experience of encountering Agatha Gothe-Snape’s recent survey exhibition The Outcome is Certain at Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA). The artist’s close attention to material and relational contexts, as well as the immediate context of the institution, emphasise the specificity of experience and the body as conduit. Curated by Hannah Mathews, the expansive exhibition brings together more than a decade of work, highlighting Gothe-Snape’s dizzying range of production and also her reoccurring methods of collaboration, text, improvisation, performance, duration, language and colour.

Wet Matter, a new commission by MUMA and the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane, brings together both new and familiar strategies in the artist’s practice. Experienced entirely in relation to the body, Wet Matter transformed the gallery space into a receptacle for and of sounds. The work is mediated by an assistant, similar to prior works of Gothe-Snape’s, including Lion’s Honey (2019) and Beside Remains (2014). In each of these works, the gallery invigilator is an active agent in the experience of the work, and key to the context of the encounter.

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