Monash University Museum of Art, 10 February - 14 April 2018
By Nicholas Tammens
The exhibition Mutlu Çerkez: 1988 – 2065 and its accompanying monograph form a long awaited eulogy to an artist whose influence has remained largely unacknowledged since his unforeseen passing in 2005. It would not be conceited to say that the format of the exhibition was fated by the artist, but there is a general feeling that it comes as a late arrival. As Justin Clemens once poin...
The SUBSTATION, 1 Market St, Newport VIC 3015, 2 February–10 March 2018
By Tiarney Miekus
Over the last five decades English artist, musician and poet Genesis Breyer P-Orridge has become the kind of person that others seek out. For some it might have been during the early 1970s when P-Orridge, and h/er involvement with performance art collective COUM Transmissions, was gathering attention for making use of soiled tampons, blood and...
Centre for Contemporary Photography, 2 February – 11 March 2018
By Anna Parlane
Kirsten Lyttle (Waikato, Ngāti Tāhinga, Tainui a Whiro) is a New Zealand-born, Australia-based artist who has built a practice on the intersection of photography and weaving: two art-making traditions that initially seem to have little in common. However, Lyttle’s signature combination asserts that the distinction between customary Māori weaving prac...
Murray White Room, Melbournee, 16 February – 29 March 2018
By Francis Plagne
Paul Taylor’s famous ‘Popism’ manifesto of 1982 included an exhortation to Australian artists to embrace the gulf separating them from the traditional centres of Western art history, to craft an art ‘born in mediation, gestated within the camera, where things are naturally upside-down, and expressed in a carnivalesque array of copies, inversions and negatives’. The sa...
Gertrude Contemporary, 2 February – 10 March 2018
By Rex Butler
In the recent rehang of the Australian collection at the Queensland Art Gallery, visitors before entering the gallery have to walk under Richard Bell’s Judgement Day (2008), which hangs on a wall above a doorway. “Australian Art Does Not Exist”, Bell’s painting declares in a nice self-contradiction because both Bell and his art are just about as Australian as you...
Blindside, 24 Jan – 10 Feb 2018
By Amelia Winata
A few years ago there was a quasi-theoretical attempt at naming a new cultural epoch to be called “metamodernism.” The term was coined by Dutch philosophers Robin van den Akker and Timotheus Vermeulen who, in a video produced by Frieze, oozed effortless Scandinavian cool (search YouTube: “what is metamodernism”). Metamodernism, they explained, is a way of labelling a cultural m...
Dear readers,
Thank you for your support in 2017. We're taking a short break over January and will return in February for another year of weekly reviews.
Best wishes,
The Memo Review team
NGV International, 17 December 2017 – 15 April 2018
By Giles Fielke
Buried within the question recently explored by Felicity D. Scott, ‘Who is the festival for?’, is the rapidly fading possibility of a public. It is a discourse that seems to slip too easily into arguments about the centrist compromise of regulated-, or neo-liberal, architectures of the state. The elaborate zones of exclusion raised for the National Gallery of Victoria’s inaugural Triennial, which follows its fi...
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