The National 2021 New Australian Art

The National 2021 New Australian Art

The National 2021 New Australian Art

Staged concurrently at three of Sydney’s premiere cultural institutions – Carriageworks, the Art Gallery of NSW and the Museum of Contemporary Art – The National 2021: New Australian Art presents 39 emerging, mid-career and established Australian artists, collectives and collaboratives working in a diverse range of media across the country and overseas.

The exhibition at Carriageworks, curated by Abigail Moncrieff, presents 13 artist projects that place an emphasis on collaboration, kinship and sociality, with artists navigating the measure and texture of our actions and engagement with the world around us.

Carriageworks

A Constructed World, Vernon Ah Kee and Dalisa Pigram with Marrugeku, Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley,  Mitch Cairns, Lorraine Connelly-Northey, Agatha Gothe-Snape with Andrew Burrell, Alana Hunt, Karrabing Film Collective, Michelle Nikou, Sarah Rodigari, Darren Sylvester, Brendan Van Hek, Isadora Vaughan.

Curated by Abigail Moncrieff.

Art Gallery of NSW

Agatha Gothe-Snape with Andrew Burrell, Fiona Hall, Gabriella Hirst, Wona Bae and Charlie Lawler, Betty Muffler and Maringka Burton, Lisa Sammut, Benjamin Sexton, Justin Shoulder, Leyla Stevens, Phaptawan Suwannakudt, Abdullah M.I. Syed, Alick Tipoti, James Tylor, Judy Watson.

Curated by Matt Cox and Erin Vink.

Museum of Contemporary Art Australia

Lauren Berkowitz, Maree Clarke, Mehwish Iqbal, Kate Just, Deborah Kelly, Betty Kuntiwa Pumani, Sancintya Mohini Simpson, Cameron Robbins, Caroline Rothwell, Sally Smart, Mulkun Wirrpanda, John Wolseley, Judith Wright.

Curated by Rachel Kent.

the-national.com.au

Image 1: Installation view ‘The National 2021: New Australian Art’, Carriageworks. Photo credit Zan Wimberley. Image courtesy and © the artists.
Image 2: Lorraine Connelly-Northey, ‘Narrbong Galang’ 2021. Installation view ‘The National 2021: New Australian Art’ Carriageworks. Photo credit Zan Wimberley. Image courtesy and © the artist.
Image 3: Karrabing Film Collective, ‘A Day in the Life’ 2020. Installation view ‘The National 2021: New Australian Art’, Carriageworks. Photo credit Zan Wimberley. Image courtesy and © the artists.

Art Gallery of New South Wales
26 March – 5 September 2021

Carriageworks
26 March – 20 June 2021

Museum of Contemporary Art Australia
26 March – 22 August 2021

Entry to the exhibition is free at the three institutions.

Apparitional Surge 2021 performance
Agatha Gothe-Snape
Every Thursday and Saturday at 11am
Public Space

On Time performance
Sarah Rodigari
Sat 19 Jun, 12.30pm
Bay 21
Registration essential

A Constructed World performance
Performances take place throughout the exhibition at random times (focused on Saturdays), prompted by the participation and willingness of the audience.

As part of The National 2021: New Australian Art exhibiting artist Alana Hunt will be Carriagework’s inaugural Writer in Residence. Over the course of the exhibition she will publish Conversations and Correspondence—six texts that take as their starting point the bodies of work All the violence within this and In the national interest both exhibited as part of the exhibition. Read the texts below:

Trespassing

Relations

Carriageworks is a registered COVID-Safe business. To ensure the wellbeing of our visitors, we are following strict guidelines set by NSW State Government and Live Performance Australia. Help us keep everyone safe by reading our COVID-Safe Plan before your next visit.

Please note: masks are strongly recommended indoors at Carriageworks.

Presented by Carriageworks, Art Gallery of NSW and Museum of Contemporary Art.

Supported by Major Partner Bloomberg Philanthropies and Philanthropic Partner Neilson Foundation.

The National, 2021, Carriageworks, Visual Art, MCA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of NSW, Contemporary Art, Visual Art, Exhibition
A Constructed World  This installation Partition #13, Ass Assembly / Assemblée des culs is both an archive and an evolving performance work. Its presentation as an archive allows for the re-activation of the work in another context, where it might be read, rehearsed, performed or re-interpreted by the artists or the audience, as it is here for The National 2021.
The National, 2021, Carriageworks, Visual Art, MCA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of NSW, Contemporary Art, Visual Art, Exhibition
Vernon Ah Kee and Dalisa Pigram  In Gudirr Gudirr the call urges us to listen to the rhythms embedded in nature and to the knowledge passed on by elders. In this work, Pigram’s dynamic movement and spoken word in Yawuru, English and the local vernacular of Broome Aboriginal/English represents an embodiment of the past, encounter with the present and redetermining of the future. Content warning: stong language.
The National, 2021, Carriageworks, Visual Art, MCA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of NSW, Contemporary Art, Visual Art, Exhibition
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley  The Definition of Now uses a conceptual and abstracted rendering of a climate change graph that Janet Burchill and Jennifer McCamley have been working with since 2015. Here at Carriageworks a T-shirt clad mannequin leads the viewer into the pictorial space of the scaled-up graph.
Installing, Installation, Carriageworks, Mitch Cairns, Art, Gallery, Exhibition
Mitch Cairns  Made from February 2020 until March 2021, these three paintings and text works reflect uncertainty and anxiety in in the face of a changing world. Domestic in setting and psychological and intuitive in context, the paintings utilise his now familiar layered and refracted style of painting.
The National, Contemporary Art, 2021, Carriageworks, Museum of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of NSW, New South Wales, Sydney, Visual art
Lorraine Connelly-Northey  Narrbong Galang (string bags) subverts both an iconic item and a technique most often associated with natural fibres and organic textures. The artist selects discarded scrap metal for her bags, producing dissident objects that are rigid and often precarious to hold or touch.
The National, Contemporary Art, 2021, Carriageworks, Museum of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of NSW, New South Wales, Sydney, Visual art
Agatha Gothe-Snape with Andrew Burrell  Agatha Gothe-Snape has created an immersive virtual environment of textual fragments, designed and engineered with Andrew Burrell. A performed monologue by the artist will be streamed live directly from this virtual space to audiences at Carriageworks - existing in and between the archive, the virtual, live and mediated realms, this spoken word performance closes this three-act work  with resolute openness.
The National, 2021, Carriageworks, Visual Art, MCA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of NSW, Contemporary Art, Visual Art, Exhibition
Alana Hunt  Turning the lens on the casual forms of colonial violence still perpetrated in Australia today, Alana Hunt’s work critically examines the impact of non-Indigenous culture on Aboriginal country. Reflecting colonial aspirations of leisure, tourism and development that underpin contemporary life, these interventions are at once violent, absurd, obtrusive and fragile.
The National, Contemporary Art, 2021, Carriageworks, Museum of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of NSW, New South Wales, Sydney, Visual art
Karrabing Film Collective  A Day in the Life traces the quotidian experience of life in Belyuen in the Northern Territory. The work plays out over a 24 hour time period, structured around five time chapters. Karrabing creates films using an ‘improvisational realism’ that opens a space beyond binaries of the fictional and the documentary, the past and the present. View Artist Statement.
The National, Contemporary Art, 2021, Carriageworks, Museum of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of NSW, New South Wales, Sydney, Visual art
Michelle Nikou  In no sound of water. Behind him the hot dogs, split and drizzled Nikou has created a surreal dreamscape imbued with symbolism and metaphors of precarity and dystopia. These sculptural works are the outcome of experimentation with form, in which the artist finds the materiality of the work through labour, chance and research.
The National, Contemporary Art, 2021, Carriageworks, Museum of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of NSW, New South Wales, Sydney, Visual art
Sarah Rodigari  On Time was developed through interaction with casual workers at Carriageworks. Within the gallery, twelve clock hands forged from steel are placed in abstracted clock face formation – each representing an hour of time. Rodigari has formed these multiple conversations into a poetic monologue, recalibrating them through language, gesture and installation, forming a new reading of the site of Carriageworks.
The National, Contemporary Art, 2021, Carriageworks, Museum of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of NSW, New South Wales, Sydney, Visual art
Darren Sylvester  Sylvester has made three sculptural interventions into the gallery. Recessed into the walls are windows with text and symbols advertising psychic services – stars, moon, crystal ball and candle burn bright like neon emojis. Sylvester sees the gallery as an oversized street, like a film set that a viewer will stroll.
The National, Contemporary Art, 2021, Carriageworks, Museum of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of NSW, New South Wales, Sydney, Visual art
Brendan Van Hek  Something to hold onto brings together Brendan Van Hek’s recent ideas on space, light and audience interaction. The focus of this work is on transition and impermanence. The work will change, and will be both made and undone throughout the exhibition period, reflecting the artist’s interest in ideas of cultural and social erasure.
The National, Contemporary Art, 2021, Carriageworks, Museum of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of NSW, New South Wales, Sydney, Visual art
Isadora Vaughan  Referencing anthroposophy (the belief in an objective, humanly comprehensible and accessible spiritual wold), permaculture and industrial design histories, ‘Organs of Cognition’ probes at the interdependence of human/non-human life – proposing knowledge as an active process of interaction with the phenomenal world.