Carriageworks announces winter exhibitions by Dennis Golding and Kuba Dorabialski | Media Release 17 May 2021
Carriageworks today announced two exhibitions by award-winning Sydney-based artists and Clothing Store artists in residence. Kamilaroi/Gamilaraay artist Dennis Golding’s exhibition The Future is Here features over 100 superhero capes created in collaboration with the students of Alexandria Park Community School. Polish Australian artist and filmmaker Kuba Dorabialski presents his Invocation Trilogy of video works. Presented concurrently from 1 July – 8 August 2021 the exhibitions explore issues relating to language, politics and cultural identity.
Carriageworks CEO Blair French said: ‘Carriageworks is delighted to present the work of two key emerging voices in Australian contemporary art exploring approaches to cultural identity, both past and present. We are especially proud to showcase work developed in collaboration with our local community through the Solid Ground program and we look forward to inviting the students and families of Alexandria Park Community School to see their work as part of Dennis Golding’s exhibition at Carriageworks.’
The Future is Here is the result of a collaboration between Kamilaroi/Gamilaraay artist Dennis Golding and Aboriginal students from Alexandria Park Community School. Presented in the Carriageworks public space, the exhibition features over 100 colourful capes that were created during a Solid Ground workshop in 2020. Students from Kindergarten to Year 12 designed their capes with iconography informed by their lived experiences and cultural identity.
The project continues Golding’s exploration of using superhero symbolism to empower contemporary Aboriginal culture and free it from colonial narratives. As superheroes, Golding and his young collaborators are empowered and reminded of the strength of their culture in forming their identity and connection to Country. Individually and together, the capes critique social, political and cultural representations of contemporary Aboriginal experience.
As a major initiative of Carriageworks and Blacktown Arts Centre, Solid Ground provides education, training and employment pathways for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander youth. The initiative is supported by The Australian Government, The Crown Resorts Foundation and The Packer Family Foundation. In 2021, Golding continues his work with Solid Ground as an artist in residence at Alexandria Park Community School.
Conceived through the lens of his biographical ties to Eastern Europe, Kuba Dorabialski’s Invocation Trilogy is a series of videos that reflects on language, politics, and cultural memory. Presented as a three-channel video installation at Carriageworks, the exhibition marks the completion of a series developed over the past four years including two short film works and the world premiere of the third and final feature film length work, Connection of the Sticks.
Beginning in 2017 with the award-winning short video, Floor Dance of Lenin’s Resurrection, Dorabialski sets the tone with a narrative blending history with fiction and the absurd. Leaning heavily on cinematic tradition, the trilogy pulls focus on the turbulent history and fraught boundaries of Eastern Europe from the perspective of a deeply invested onlooker, while embracing and challenging its clichés and stereotypes. The three parts of the trilogy, each grander in scope than the last, considers the making of meaning, spirituality, superstition, and radical politics.
Filmed and performed in Dorabialski’s own fictional Slavic language—designed to be partly intelligible to most Slavic language speakers—Invocation Trilogy investigates what it means to explore memories, real and distorted, as a migrant who now lives in Australia. Through its uneasy mix of brooding earnestness and absurdist comedy, Dorabialski poses the grand and preposterous question: What is this thing we call Eastern Europe?
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