Primavera 2022: Young Australian Artists
⬤ Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) 4 Nov - 12 Feb 2023
As you enter Primavera 2022, you may catch a work by the Wiradjuri poet and artist, Jazz Money. It’s a short sound piece that emanates from a speaker lodged in the ceiling near the entrance to the gallery. In it, Money recites a short poem that addresses the site of the exhibition, the meeting place of two bodies of water: Warang, the saltwater bay on whose shore the Museum of Contemporary Art stands, and the Tank Stream, the freshwater tributary that runs in a concrete pipe beneath the museum’s floors. It’s a typically spare and beautiful piece.
However, you might just as easily miss it. Money’s recital of the poem is bookended by a long phrase of silence, meaning that many visitors walk (as I did on my first visit) into the show without stopping. If you know it’s there (because you notice the wall label), you’ll need to linger in the doorway, awkwardly, not quite inside or outside the exhibition and unsure when or if the piece will play.
Nick Croggon is an art historian, writer and editor based on Gadigal and Wangal land. He is Events and Programs Officer at the Power Institute, and is completing a PhD at Columbia University, New York.
