Hustle Harder, a new performance exhibition by acclaimed choreographer Adam Linder, commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA Australia), opened in Sydney on Saturday 22 July and continues until Sunday 20 August 2023.
Performed for the duration of the Museum’s opening hours by a rotating cast of nine dancers, Hustle Harder highlights how the format of the exhibition converges with the physical, durational and collaborative dimensions of live performance.
Adam Linder makes work for both the stage and gallery spaces, often riffing on the histories and social codes that underpin these different contexts. Hustle Harder focuses on the museum as a space where performers and public increasingly ready themselves for the camera, using art and architecture as a backdrop for their own image making. Linder’s choreography amplifies this phenomenon of incessant image reproduction into a rich and eerie movement vocabulary, which he refers to as ‘virtuosic angling’.
The scenography for the performance takes its cues directly from MCA Australia. A series of mobile partitions mimic elements of the Museum’s infrastructure, signalling how everything from lighting to signage plays a role in conditioning visitor behaviour.
Suzanne Cotter, Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, said “Adam Linder’s stylishly intelligent Hustle Harder signals a new vision for artistic programming at MCA Australia which responds to the expansive and cross-disciplinary nature of contemporary art and new approaches to exhibition making shaping the contemporary museum experience. Linder’s durational choreography as exhibition also inaugurates the Museum’s Macgregor Gallery as a site for dynamic programming of new and commissioned works by many of our most exciting and relevant artists working today.”
Linder has collaborated with renowned Australian fashion designer Dion Lee on the costumes, with architect Deniz Celtek on the exhibition design, and with Berlin-based sound designer Steffen Martin.
The cast of nine dancers has been assembled from Sydney, Melbourne and Europe, and includes Narelle Benjamin, Taos Bertrand, Juan Pablo Camara, Eugene Choi, Alice Heyward, Bec Jensen, Noha Ramadan, Brooke Stamp and Ivey Wawn.
Curated by Anneke Jaspers, MCA Senior Curator, Collection, Hustle Harder will also feature artworks from the MCA Collection by Hany Armanious, Sphinx, 2009, Agatha Gothe-Snape, FEELINGS, 2009 and Tracey Moffatt, Up in the sky #16 and #18, 1997.
Adam Linder: Hustle Harder can be seen at the Macgregor gallery, Level 1, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia until 20 August.
