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Mona welcomes back winter with three new exhibitions from Jeremy Shaw, Fiona Hall and AJ King, and Robert Andrew, opening 10 June 2022—during this year’s Dark Mofo.
Jarrod Rawlins, Director of Curatorial Affairs at Mona, says: ‘After last year’s museum-wide rehang we agreed we couldn’t fit any more art into the building. Turns out that was us lying to ourselves, again. Now the largest private museum in the Southern Hemisphere gives you the largest number of new exhibitions we’ve ever opened at once. How’s that for tooting our own horn?’
Phase Shifting Index, by Berlin-based Canadian artist Jeremy Shaw, finally arrives at Mona two years later than scheduled, for obvious, pandemic-themed reasons. Part science-fiction documentary, part psychedelic meltdown, this multi-channel video work depicts humans engaged in various forms of group movement, ranging from tai chi to a hardcore rave—which, in Shaw’s vision, form the basis for a new system of belief, one governed by gesture and body. Mona and Dark Mofo have presented Shaw’s art on two previous occasions, and are excited to share this new work with audiences in Tasmania. It’s been seen at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, Tallin’s Kumu Art Museum, Estonia, and ARoS in Aarhus, Denmark, with the Swiss Institute, New York, still to come. Jarrod Rawlins, who curated the presentation at Mona, adds: ‘We like science and we like art, especially when science-y art is not lifeless or didactic, and instead leaves the viewer with room to speculate. In creating this work of parafiction, Shaw allows us to embrace uncertainty, imagination and wonder.’
Exodust—Crying Country is a collaborative exhibition project from the celebrated Sydney-born and Hobart-based artist, Fiona Hall, and AJ King, a bigambul / wakka wakka cultural practitioner. A large timber hut—scorched inside and out—will appear amid a scene of environmental devastation, reminiscent of a fire-bombed logging coupe. Hall and King have much to say about the world we all share and about what has been done to it. Jane Clark, Senior Research Curator at Mona, says: ‘Only Fiona Hall’s endless inventiveness could keep pace with her insatiable curiosity and, increasingly, her urgent sense of nature—and thus humanity—in peril. Ideas are layered like collage in work that’s at once seductively beautiful and gut-wrenching. Exodust—Crying Country is an impassioned call to action, combining Hall’s trademark manipulation of idiosyncratic and unexpected materials, and her fascination with the nuances of language, with AJ King’s understanding of cultural knowledge that Aboriginal people have lived by for thousands of years.’
Finally, Brisbane-based artist Robert Andrew works on uncovering the language, culture and history buried beneath our feet. He builds machines that excavate language and ancient knowledge systems recorded in the earth. Within an utterance digs deep into lutruwita / Tasmania’s own buried history, based on conversations with local speakers of palawa kani (a complex ongoing project of reviving Tasmanian Aboriginal language). After Robert, at thirteen, discovered he was Aboriginal, a descendent of the Yawuru people from the Broome area in the Kimberley, much of what he learnt about this part of himself came first from historical documents, mostly settler accounts. The colonial script, in short—but also a pathway to ancestry and knowledge.
This exhibition in Tasmania, Within an utterance, sees Andrew collaborate with pakana community members, pakana curator Zoe Rimmer and Aboriginal linguistic consultant Theresa Sainty. The exhibition also responds to the physical site of Mona, which is dotted with twelve shell middens. Emma Pike, Senior Curator at Mona, says: ‘The language we use to describe ourselves is fundamental to our personal and cultural identities. Robert is an astute listener not only to the nuances of language, but also to those who take on the painstaking task of recovering language lost through the brutal force of colonisation. The museum’s location has always been ingrained in Mona’s identity and by listening to Robert and his collaborators we are able to connect more deeply to the truth of who we are now, and where it is that we live, work, or are visiting.’
Exodust—Crying Country is curated by Jane Clark and Jarrod Rawlins, and Within an utterance is curated by Emma Pike. Phase Shifting Index is presented in Hobart with Dark Mofo, and is a co-commission by Mona and Dark Mofo, Hobart; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Swiss Institute, New York; and the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt. The Australian leg is curated by Jarrod Rawlins.
All three exhibitions open during Dark Mofo and complement the festival’s visual art program. The triple exhibition opening weekend will include a great big winter celebration at the museum—’Mona Up Late’—featuring music, fire and fun.
The exhibitions run from 10 June 2022 until 17 October 2022.