ACCA Podcast

Digging for Honey Ants: The Papunya mural project Lecture by John Kean. Respondent: Hannah Presley The creation of murals at the Papunya School in 1971 is cited as the singular catalyst that set off the Western Desert Painting movement. The truth of this claim is in fact more complex, confounding and consequential. In this lecture, John Kean examines the subject of the murals and the broader socia...

Lecture by John Kaldor AO; Respondent: Rebecca Coates Described as ‘somewhere between a monument and an event’, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 'Wrapped Coast – One Million Square Feet', at Little Bay, Sydney, in 1968–69, was an extraordinary project that had an indelible impact on public art and inspired an enduring legacy for Australian culture. 'Wrapped Coast' was the first major environmental proj...

This panel discussion, hosted during ACCA's exhibition 'The Theatre is Lying: The inaugural Macfarlane Commissions' asked what is so intimidating about reality in a post-truth world? The panel, featuring Justin Clemens, Maddison Connaughton and André Dao, considered how our understandings of trust, truth, fiction and reality have changed in the age of fake-news, Trumpism and social media, from the...

Sydney-based collaborators Anna Breckon and Nat Randall explore the intersection of live performance, video and film in a gallery context as they deep dive into the construction and development of their major new work 'Rear view' 2018 commissioned by ACCA and The Macfarlane Fund for ACCA's exhibition 'The Theatre is Lying' (15 December 2018–24 March 2019). Recorded at ACCA on Saturday 23 March 201...

How does being a teacher affect your art practice? How can an artist successfully engage with an institution’s collection? How do we create our own opportunities and categories? What does it mean to trust your gut? For this final episode of the second series, Tai Snaith and Meredith Turnbull discuss a broad range of topics around what it means to have a multifaceted, self-driven and supported prac...

What roles can social politics and social media play in driving an art practice? What role do beauty and aesthetic boundaries play in art today? How can these things interrelate? Tai Snaith and Rowan Oliver delve down the rabbit hole of creating fictions around ideas and images of self and others, creating characters and narratives to open up ideas of social inclusiveness and empathy. Rowan outlin...

How important is it to connect with a place that is part of your history? What are your responsibilities to make work for ‘your people’ as well as an art audience? Tai Snaith and Megan Cope discuss what it means to move back to work ‘on country’ as a contemporary Indigenous artist. They unpack the complexities of relating to a place and its people, and how that might inform your work in a number o...

What does it mean to make artwork with a social consciousness? How do we represent our politics through what we wear? Tai Snaith and Kate Just discuss the way that clothes, like skin, can carry a multitude of meanings, stories and histories to make up who we are. Kate talks about using other artists’ clothes as the palette or starting point for constructing her current portraits. Our conversation...

This event formed the public outcome of ACCA’s new writing program, Writing in the Expanded Field, alongside ACCA's exhibition Eva Rothschild: Kosmos (2018). In this public forum, writers, artists and performers who took part in the writing program, share results of the writing workshops and reflect on the future of art writing, criticism and publishing. Presented in partnership with RMIT Universi...

In a few years time, there will be more dead people than living people on Facebook. This lecture by Professor Larissa Hjorth explores how social media affects how we think about life, death, afterlife and the everyday. Hjorth considers the role of social media in art practice to consider how emotional and social playbour is presenting new forms of digital intimate publics. Drawing on her research...

How can we make traces of suffering into visual poetry? How do we map emotional data? Tai Snaith and Stanislava Pinchuk talk about the different ways we can make our art practice meaningful to our lives, and the lives of others. They discuss how Stan has managed to include travel, meeting people, tattooing and even beekeeping as integral parts of her practice. She explains her deeply thoughtful pr...

How might an artwork be part of the language of interiors or functional design? How important is understanding scale and process? Tai Snaith and Esther Stewart go deep into process during this conversation. They discuss Esther’s studio process and what it means to adopt a more design-based practice and apply it to painting. Esther outlines the different stages of making a body of work from the ‘su...

This discussion focuses on the intersection of form, space and movement in contemporary practice, alongside ACCA’s exhibition 'Eva Rothschild: Kosmos' (2018). Speakers include multidisciplinary practitioners working across art, architecture, design, choreography and theory. Together they will consider the social potential of sculpture, the idea of deceptive materiality, as well as the negotiation...

How does architecture shape identity? How do artists, architects, power-brokers, nation-states, immigrants and insurgents make and mark territory? In this lecture, artist Eugenia Lim explores the space between the personal and the geopolitical, selfhood and sovereignty. Lim draws from her research, archives and experiences to navigate a subjective journey through architecture, earthworks and islan...

Gabrielle de Vietri is an Australian-based artist with a concept-driven, socially-engaged collaborative practice. Her work has taken the form of pedagogical systems, community events, interactive public performances, documents, invented languages, fictional historical insertions, lectures and gardens. In this lecture, Gabrielle de Vietri disobedience as a creative act through the theft of Picasso’...

How important is it to make yourself and others visible? What can a photograph achieve, and what is the power of the photographer? Tai Snaith and Atong Atem discuss all the different aspects of Atong’s identity and how making sense of them informs her artwork. Atong explains what it is like to grow up ‘between cultures’ as a South Sudanese person in Australia and the liminality that exists as part...

Can we maintain a lightness of being using heavy materials? What is the role of a public artist and how is this changing? In this spirited conversation, Tai Snaith and Sanné Mestrom discuss what it means to be a self-made woman interested in the relationship between the lived world and the perceived world. They talk about depicting women with ‘gravity’ and a new way of how the female form might fi...

What is Conceptual Art? How can we do away with Visual Litter? Tai Snaith and Agatha Gothe-Snape talk about the practice of deep thinking and the process of taking ideas apart. They discuss the fine balance of keeping all the parts of the ‘plait’ of one’s life even and neatly braided, and what it means to follow a series of decisions to consciously take away anything extraneous to create strong, c...

How can mockery and humour be used as a tool for survival? How do you write yourself into a history that has always favoured men? In this conversation Tai Snaith and Paola Balla go on a raucous storytelling romp through Paola’s vibrant past, recounting her ‘triple-whammy of Otherness’ as a young Wemba Wemba/Gunditjmara woman, with an Italian dad and a Chinese surname in Echuca/Moama in the '80s. P...

Is a painting like a poem? How do we make our own rules when we are painting? In this conversation Tai Snaith and Laura Skerlj discuss their migrant roots in Australia and how this affects the ethics of how they live and work. Laura shares her secret practice of writing ‘tragic poems’ and how these are slowly creeping into her paintings. They share their love of double meanings and layering of pos...

How can we share an experience without using words? What is it like to feel the push and pull of presence and hiding? Tai Snaith and Archie Barry chat honestly about what role identity plays in Archie’s practice and how they are interested in expressing that identity in a non-visual way. They discuss the beautiful and sometimes frustrating ‘slipperiness’ of language and how cultivating the agency...

How can we make Culture rather than Art? Is the sky a black velvet blanket? Tai Snaith's podcast series returns with 13 more conversations with mid-career and emerging women and non-binary artists whom she admires. In episode one, Tai and Lucreccia Quintanilla discuss how having a punk attitude and how not necessarily wanting to fit in can be a good thing. Lucreccia talks about a process of findin...

Internationally acclaimed Irish-born, London-based artist Eva Rothschild discusses her new and recent sculptural works with Max Delany Artistic Director and CEO, ACCA in the lead up the first survey exhibition of her work in Australia at ACCA. This conversation is presented in partnership with the National Gallery of Victoria. This event was recorded on Saturday 22 September 2018, hosted at the Na...

This forum considers the role of the curator in relation to Indigenous artists and communities, and address some of the challenges and recent trends in curating Indigenous art today, as well as what the future might look like for Indigenous art and curatorial practice in Australia and internationally. Convened by Hannah Presley, Curator, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne Guest spea...

Diversity has become an increasingly popular concept, but what if we thought about diversity as more than the inclusion of difference? In this lecture, writer, arts worker and community organiser, Eugenia Flynn explores alternative narratives, ideas of re-centring and notions of multiplicity in order to challenge and provoke. This lecture is presented by WRITING & CONCEPTS alongside ACCA’s exhibit...