3.05.2014 – 31.05.2014 /
Gertrude Contemporary. 200 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy Vic 3065. Australia
Exhibition
Curated by Brooke Babington and Liang Luscombe. This exhibition is part of the 2014 EMERGING CURATORS PROGRAM, a partnership between Gertrude Contemporary and Next Wave and is supported by City of Yarra.
WHY NOT WALK BACKWARD?
Why not walk backward? considers the implications of reiteration. To repeat, when contemporary time threatens to subsume our sense of history and narrative, is to propose a different type of relationship to time. The group of five Australian and international artists in Why not walk backward?, Fiona Abicare, Nina Beier, Tania Bruguera, Catherine or Kate and Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, retrace old steps – their own and others – using appropriation to deal with the ghosts of the past in new and imaginative ways.
Each of these artists utilise performance or strategies associated with performance to appropriate existing, historically significant works of art through homage, reinterpretation or re-enactment. Working at the intersection of performance and appropriation they address issues of temporality and historiography.
Tania Bruguera engenders a profoundly different tenor through her decade-long project of re-enactment in an attempt to effect a reclamation of her Cuban-born compatriot Ana Mendieta’s work within Cuban cultural identity.