2025 Exhibitions
Patricia Piccinini
With Open Arms
Gallery 1
Sophie Hardy
MARIBOU
Visitors to Melbourne Design Week will encounter a new vision, a surprising approach to jewellery design. Sophie says “Maribou is a culmination of my love of design, fashion, jewellery, sculpture, and a deep fascination with various bygone ‘vintage’ eras.” Maribou touches on the past, while simultaneously cultivating a modern spirit.
Gallery 2
Kieren Karritpul
YERR WURRKEME MARRGU
The black and white paintings in this exhibition represent myself and some of my totems – clouds, rain, stars. When I’m working on something and I need help, I’ll go outside and look up at the stars. They’re always watching and they give me ideas.
Kieren Karritpul, 2025
Gallery 1
Brook Andrew
transitions
Gallery 2
Anthony Gardner
Seeing Otherwise
Prints and photographs have a power that far exceeds their usually quite modest dimensions. While they can be cradled in your hands, their capacity to reach an audience of thousands, even millions – in books, as trinkets, as cartes-de-visite, produced en masse for the widest distribution – made them the mass media or social media of their day, and potentially just as dangerous as contemporary “fake news” for the deceptions they could weave. Caricatures of “lascivious” Black warriors and “dangerous” Indigenous practices, of “vulnerable” white children and the men who will “protect” them.
As Brook Andrew writes in his neat, blue handwriting beneath the print in transitions 9 (2025), old-school print media are the foundations of a formidable mythology, one of the primary technologies of settler colonialism by dint of their humble scale, their mass dissemination, and thus their persuasive authority.
Old media are also exceptionally vulnerable, though. Time has not treated them, or the myths they project, very well. Ink smudges or fades. Paper tears; it foxes and stains with mould. For an artist like Danh Vo, this vulnerability is the real power today of old things. In a suite of recent sculptures, Vo bought ancient sculptures online and through auction houses worldwide – including medieval statues of the Madonna or antique Roman busts – and then hacked into them, carving them up and bolting them together to create new hybrid monsters made all the more shocking precisely because of these materials’ age and vulnerability. Like the elderly, we treat these old things as somehow untouchable, sacrosanct more for their antiquity now than for their religious origins. To see them attacked and reworked is a powerfully affecting experience, one that brings a great sense of pity and protectiveness to these ancient forms.
Brook Andrew does something smarter when he reworks his prints, I think, because to attack and pity the prints would be the wrong way to handle their vulnerability. These prints are not defenceless. Their ideologies are still potent, still resonant as the foundations of contemporary racism in our current media culture. What their vulnerability offers instead is a way to rethink their narratives and break open their formidable mythology. The pulsating patterns and quadrangles, derived from Wiradjuri dendroglyph designs and built up in thick oil stick streaks across the glass above the prints, are both protective and repulsive.
The forms cover over and disrupt the myths the prints try to tell. They hide the Black protagonists from a viewer’s staring gaze. We might not want to get too close to the frames in case the oily pigment stains our clothes or bodies, or breaks off at our touch. But the moments of clarity that the Wiradjuri glyphs offer, of seeing gestures between lines or faces within circles, act as spotlights, provoking us to generate new kinds of connections and narratives between these figures that blaspheme the colonial myth. Isolated and decontextualised, how might we rewrite the relations between the figures in transitions 6, for instance?
What other kinds of storytelling, and what other kinds of agency, might emerge about the theatrical grouping in transitions 9 when we have to work harder to see the image between the lines and the shadows they cast on the scene? How might the oily Wiradjuri designs haunt a new way of looking at these relics from the past? How might a Wiradjuri-inspired looking transform the narratives we make today and in the future? And is this an act of haunting or repelling, of hiding or revealing? Or perhaps both at the same time, vulnerable yet powerful as these prints have always been, but now might be otherwise?
Anthony Gardner is Head of the Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford, where he teaches Contemporary Art History and Theory and is a Fellow of The Queen’s College. He publishes on subjects including postcolonialism, postsocialism and curatorial histories, and is an editor of the MIT Press journal ARTMargins. He is a member of the International Association of Art Critics.
Image: Brook Andrew, transitions 2025, mixed media, 170 x 130 cm
Benjamin Armstrong
Traverse
Our feet are the contact point, the place where we connect to the earth.
In these sculptures, there is both joy and trepidation at this contact point.
The summit of joy tends not to arrive without traversing risk.
Benjamin Armstrong, 2025
Gallery 1
Image: Benjamin Armstrong, Traverse 2025, installation view
Ben Quilty
Trinkets
In this formidable new body of work, Quilty focuses almost exclusively on the human figure – especially heads, eyes and mouths – as he wrestles into existence urgently expressive, even grotesque, embodiments of the way many of us are feeling right now, the artist included.
“The older I grow, the more awkward I feel about being part of the human condition,” Quilty says. “The world is in turmoil. Nothing seems straightforward anymore. We lead these complex lives overlaid with solastalgia, a massive and realistic fear of what’s happening to the planet. It makes for an odd existence.”
Gallery 1
