July 30–31, 2022
In collaboration with Monash University, Open House Melbourne (OHM) is excited to host an exhibition this year titled Take Hold of the Clouds. Take Hold of the Clouds brings together cross-disciplinary creative practitioners from the visual arts, architecture, design, sound, and film to create an installation or creative work in response to sites they have selected, ranging from buildings to urban landscapes to community spaces, as part of the flagship OHM 2022 July Weekend.
The show, which is spread out across seven different locations in Naarm Melbourne, stages a number of meaningful interactions between site-specific and temporal creative works and architecture. Each practitioner’s response to form and context adds a new dimension to our understanding of how these structures and spaces relate to the world outside.
To this end, the creative practitioners bring to our attention connections, stories, and issues that were previously hidden within these urban spaces: the built and unbuilt; architecture as porous and leaky; bodies and histories made invisible or obsolete by buildings; progressive forms of architecture to build community; the natural world in relation to the built environment; and the atmospheric effects of human-made processes.
Importantly, Take Hold of the Clouds demonstrates high-impact yet sustainable and resource-sensitive exhibition-making and enables the production of curated projects that have minimal environmental impact by employing the city as an exhibition location rather than a traditional gallery.
Take Hold of the Clouds is an exhibition co-curated by Fleur Watson, executive director of Open House Melbourne, and Tara McDowell, director of curatorial practice at Monash Art, Design, and Architecture.
Forensic Architecture’s Cloud Studies (2021) examines various chemical compounds discharged into the air by man-made events and will be shown throughout the course of the weekend in The Capitol, RMIT University, a visually stunning, art deco theater created to mimic a multicolored crystalline cave.
Circular Temporalities (2022), an installation by Ying-Lan Dann that was recently commissioned by Mission to Seafarers, is housed inside the historic Norla Dome and explores the site’s connection to both global sailing and the seamen who were stranded at sea during the epidemic.
The Eye (2022), a live performance by Alicia Frankovich in the Brunswick Baths, acknowledges the climate catastrophe, especially rising sea levels, as a given condition of modern life. Reservations are required.