Suspended Moment: The Katthy Cavaliere Fellowship receives $92,737 for national tour
The exhibition tour of Suspended Moment: The Katthy Cavaliere Fellowship will commence in February 2022, with significant support from the Australian Government’s Visions of Australia funding just confirmed.
Curated to tour by Daniel Mudie Cunningham (Director of Programs, Carriageworks), the exhibition will showcase formative works by Katthy Cavaliere (1972-2012) loaned from her estate, alongside newly commissioned works by three women artists Giselle Stanborough, Frances Barrett and Sally Rees, who each received $100,000 from the Fellowship. Major presentations of each artist’s new commissions were shown at Carriageworks (Giselle Stanborough, 7 August – 26 September 2020), and forthcoming at Mona (Sally Rees, 2021) and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) (Frances Barrett, 2021), before coming together for presentation in this exhibition curated especially for tour.
The exhibition tour – which is collaboratively produced by Carriageworks and Museums & Galleries of NSW (M&G NSW) – is slated to be presented at eight locations between 2022–2024: Wollongong Art Gallery (NSW); Manly Art Gallery & Museum (NSW); The Glasshouse Regional Gallery, Port Macquarie (NSW); Mildura Arts Centre (VIC); Redcliffe Art Gallery (QLD); Araluen Arts Centre, Alice Springs (NT); Maitland Regional Art Gallery (NSW); and Goulburn Regional Art Gallery (NSW).
On the announcement of the tour’s funding, curator Daniel Mudie Cunningham said: ‘Suspended Moment was the name of a seminal Katthy Cavaliere installation that won the artist a major travelling fellowship in 2000, supporting her to travel back to Italy for the first time since she had migrated to Australia from her homeland as a child. Following Cavaliere’s return to Australia, an early career survey named Suspended Moment was organised through Museums and Galleries NSW in 2004-05, seeing her work touring to Goulburn, Bathurst and Campbelltown. Naming the Katthy Cavaliere Fellowship after this exhilarating ‘moment’ in Cavaliere’s career references the life and career-defining potential that a major fellowship offers an artist. For the recipients of this Fellowship, Cavaliere’s gift has enabled significant institutional support and exposure, which through this touring exhibition will extend to the regions and beyond, thanks to the generous support of Visions of Australia.’
Rachel Arndt, Acting CEO of M&G NSW said: ‘We are delighted to receive funding through the Australian Government’s Visions of Australia program to tour this incredible exhibition regionally, in collaboration with Carriageworks, the talented artists and supporting partners the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art and Mona. As many museums and galleries around the world refocus and readdress their historical and patriarchal collecting practices, regional galleries, who are often at the forefront of engaging audiences in these discussions, are enthusiastic to continue to present the ideas, stories and voices of Australian women artists.
To the many regional communities who have faced the trauma of recent unprecedented bushfires, drought and flood events and are grappling with the ongoing destructive impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, this exhibition nurtures hope, celebrates all women, and recognises their contribution to our cultural milieu.’
About the Katthy Cavaliere Fellowship
This major new artist fellowship invited women artists or artist collectives to propose ambitious new projects that focus on the intersection of installation and performance art practice.
In April 2019, artists Frances Barrett (NSW), Giselle Stanborough (NSW) and Sally Rees (TAS) were announced as the recipients of the Fellowship. Each artist received $100,000 to realise an ambitious new work that will be presented in three individual exhibitions at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) (Frances Barrett), Carriageworks (Giselle Stanborough) and MONA (Sally Rees) in 2020-2021.
About the Artists
Frances Barrett
Frances Barrett (b 1983, Sydney) is an artist and curator who lives and works on Gadigal land. Her practice extends the paradigms of performance and conceptual art, meditating on issues of ephemerality, duration and historicity, as well as intimacy and care. Guided by a queer-feminist ethic, much of her work pivots around the modalities of listening and touch. Barrett’s recent projects include All Ears: A listening party, Campbelltown Arts Centre, 2018; Into My Arms, Ace Open, 2018; and Handle, CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, 2018. She was a studio artist at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art for the duration of 2018, and is one member of art collective Barbara Cleveland, who in 2019 presented a new project, Thinking Business, at Sullivan + Strumpf, Sydney. Barrett is currently a PhD candidate in Curatorial Practice at Monash Art Design and Architecture.
Meatus
‘A ‘meatus’ – to which the exhibition title refers – is an opening or passage leading to the interior of the body, such as the ear canal and nasal passages. The meatus is a juncture between the internal and external, where the body opens itself to the world.’ – Annika Kristensen, ACCA
At the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, in 2021, Frances Barrett will present Meatus, a sound and light installation that transforms ACCA into a space of audition. Scripted and improvised vocalisations have been composed as a looping score. Meatus foregrounds the role of the audience as critical and active listener, proposing listening as an urgent mode of political agency. This project has been led by Frances Barrett with Nina Buchanan, Hayley Forward, Brian Fuata, Del Lumanta, Sione Teumohenga and Debris Facility Pty Ltd.
Giselle Stanborough
Giselle Stanborough (b 1986, Waratah, NSW) is an intermedia artist based on Gadigal land in Sydney. Her works combine online and offline elements to address how user generated media encourage us to identify and perform notions of self, and the relationship between connectivity and isolation. Motivated by a curiosity in the increasing indeterminacy between the private and public spheres, Stanborough’s work often addresses contemporary interpersonal experiences in relation to technology, feminism and consumer capitalism. Her work has featured in the Washington Post’s Pictures of the Day and has been shown at major venues such as the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, 2018; Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, 2017; Gertrude Contemporary, 2015 and Next Wave Festival, 2014.
‘Searchlights, sculptural forms, colossal wall diagrams and mirrored digital surfaces reflect the performative experience of social media platforms. As the subject and object of her own system of visual scrutiny, Stanborough is the ghost in her own machine.’ – Daniel Mudie Cunningham, Carriageworks
Presented at Carriageworks from 7 August to 26 September 2020, Giselle Stanborough’s Cinopticon contemporises Foucault’s theory of the ‘panopticon’. Instead of the few watching the many, today we watch each other and the few. With an affinity for Katthy Cavaliere’s performance of self, Stanborough works with her own personal online archive to create an immersive performance installation where audiences see their reflection in unpredictable ways.
Sally Rees
Sally Rees (b 1970, Burnie, TAS) is an artist based in nipaluna/Hobart. Working across time-based, static and experimental forms, Rees’ work explores human frailty and revelation, looking to operate as an agent for social, cultural, political and personal change. Rees holds a PhD from the University of Tasmania, and has exhibited widely including at the Australian Centre for Photography, 2010; Artspace, Richmond, VA, USA, 2012 and Contemporary Art Tasmania, 2011, 2014, 2016, 2018.
Crone
‘With ‘Crone’, Rees embraces the folklore character of the crone as an ideal incarnation of the older woman: unruly, wise, fearsome. She’s reversing the forced retreat into invisibility and diminished social capital as women get older’ – Nicole Durling, Mona
In 2021 at the Museum of Old and New Art in Tasmania, Sally Rees will present Crone, a series of works comprising animations, prints and actions. Rees will create a crone identity as an antidote to the perceived invisibility of ageing women in contemporary society. Through the crone, the artist seeks to redefine the female elder as a powerful and transgressive figure.
About Katthy Cavaliere
Born in Sarteano, Tuscany in 1972, Katthy Cavaliere migrated from Italy to Australia with her family when she was four years old. She attended University of NSW Art & Design (then known as College of Fine Arts) in Sydney and was a recipient of the Helen Lempriere Travelling Art Scholarship in 2000, enabling her studies in Italy at the Accademia di Belle Arti, Brera, Milano. During this time in Italy she studied under Marina Abramović. Upon returning to Australia in 2004, Cavaliere staged a survey exhibition called Suspended Moment, which toured to regional galleries in NSW. The fellowship has been named to honour Cavaliere’s practice and this landmark exhibition. Created at Artspace Sydney, her video performance, Loved, was included in the 54th Venice Biennale, 2011. Presently, Cavaliere’s work has been included in the landmark exhibition Know My Name at the National Gallery of Australia.
Following her death in January 2012, Mona presented her retrospective survey Loved in 2015-16. Curated by Daniel Mudie Cunningham, the exhibition toured to Carriageworks in 2016 and was accompanied by an extensive career-spanning monograph.
It was Cavaliere’s desire to bring to light what she did not remember of her early years in Sarteano that motivated her lifelong project of packing, storing and transporting the wreckage of her personal possessions, and transforming it into performance installation works that have been exhibited in solo and group shows internationally.
Cavaliere’s work is held in the collections of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, National Gallery of Victoria, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Old and New Art, Artbank, University of Queensland Art Museum, Monash Gallery of Art and numerous regional galleries. Katthy Cavaliere’s archive is held in the National Art Archive at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
For media interviews, please contact: Vanessa Duscio, vanessa.d@carriageworks.com.au