ACCA presents its 40th year anniversary exhibition program.
The ACCA 2023 program comprises the following main exhibitions, as well as a series of activities and programs to commemorate this landmark year and the institution’s rich history as a platform for artists and a center for the exchange of ideas.
Data Relations
Until March 19
Artists: Zach Blas, Tega Brain & Sam Lavigne, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Machine Listening, Mimi Onuoha, Winne Soon, and the Digital Relations Summer School
Curator: Miriam Kelly; Coordinating Curator: Shelley McSpedden
Data Relations brings together artist-led initiatives that lyrically address some of our modern data-driven society’s most pressing issues and challenges. Major new commissions and site-specific installations by Australian and international artists and collectives critically and speculatively interact with the manner in which the data economy and related technical advances emerge in inter-personal and larger societal relationships.
Lucy Guerin: NEWRETRO
March 25–April 2
Curator: Elyse Goldfinch; Artistic Director: Lucy Guerin
Frame component: This major new durational performance by famous contemporary choreographer Lucy Guerin reconstructs twenty-one existing dance works from the last twenty-one years, relearned by an ensemble of twenty-one dancers as part of a biannual of dance.
NEWRETRO is a site-responsive choreographic production and installation that occupies the galleries at ACCA. The soundscape for the work is simultaneously retroactive and prospective, condensing dance from several historical periods into the same temporal space, creating a living archive of fresh, bodily gestures.
Mithu Sen: mOTHERTONGUE
April 22–June 18, 2023
Curator: Max Delany
ACCA presents a major solo show featuring new commissions and previous work by New Delhi-based artist Mithu Sen, as part of the ACCA International series of solo exhibitions by influential artists on the international stage.
mOTHERTONGUE is a cartographic installation that charts the paradoxical and contradictory impulses and trajectories in Mithu Sen’s work. It investigates how the artist uses language, drawing, media, and performance to create complex artworks that resist definitional categories and elide institutional power structures related to patriarchy, nationalism, caste and class, race and gender, and geo-political location.
Between Waves: 2023 Yalingwa Exhibition
July 1–September 3
Artists: Maree Clarke, Dean Cross, Brad Darkson, Matthew Harris, James Howard, Hayley Millar Baker, Jazz Money, Cassie Sullivan, this mob, and Mandy Quadrio
Curator: Jessica Clark
Between Waves is the third installment of the Yalingwa exhibition series, which promotes the growth of excellent contemporary First Nations art and curatorial practice in Southeast Australia.
Beyond Waves investigates and experiments with visible and invisible energy fields and material memory flows to reveal an interconnected web of shapeshifting ecologies within, beyond, and between what can be seen. Ten ambitious new commissions by emerging and established artists working at the crossroads of material and immaterial realms of knowledge and knowing are presented in this exhibition.
James Nguyen: Open Glossary
September 16–November 19, 2023
In collaboration with Tamsen Hopkinson, Budi Sudarto, Kate ten Buuren and Chris Xu
2023 Copyright Agency Partnership Commission
Curator: Shelley McSpedden
The second edition of the Copyright Agency Partnerships Commission, which assists mid-career and established visual artists in creating a major new commission, is now available in Open Glossary. James Nguyen is working on a new multi-lingual installation alongside Tamsen Hopkinson, Budi Sudarto, Kate ten Buuren, and Chris Xu.
Nguyen’s interdisciplinary, collaborative practice, located in Narrm/Melbourne, investigates decolonisation tactics while examining the politics of family history, language, displacement, and diaspora. The Open Glossary examines the terminology and terminologies that pervade contemporary art and society in general. It contains a number of multilingual glossaries and linguistic toolkits aimed at bringing non-English and plain-English speaking people into the artworld conversation via socially involved installations, videos, performances, and events.
From the other side
December 9, 2023–March 31, 2024
Curators: Elyse Goldfinch and Jessica Clark
A group exhibition bringing together Australian and international artists to question horror themes and their relationship to vulnerability, anxiety, fury, and revenge. The monstrous-feminine, her hunger for consumption, and her dual position as temptress and castrator are central to the show.
From the other side draws on horror’s shared cultural imaginary and its propensity to transgress and destabilize structures of power, conjuring counternarratives and alternative myths that challenge the supposed bounds of the body, gender, self, and the ‘other’.
ACCA’s Digital Wing is now live
A flexible, iterative constellation of digital initiatives, ACCA’s Digital Wing features artistic commissions, creative development, knowledge-sharing and publishing.
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA)
111 Sturt Street, Southbank
Melbourne VIC 3006
Australia