Defining Moments: Australian Exhibition Histories 1968-1999

Defining Moments: Australian Exhibition Histories 1968-1999 is the focus of ACCA’s 2019-2020 lecture series, with eight lectures per annum shedding light onto markers of change in Australian art, addressing key contemporary art exhibitions and projects staged over the last three decades of the 20th century.

Ambitious, contested, polemical, genre-defining and genre-defying, contemporary art exhibitions have shaped and transformed the cultural landscape, along with our understanding of what constitutes art itself. This program traces the legacies of artists and curators, addresses the critical reception of selected significant projects, and reflects on a wide range of exhibitions and formats; from artist run initiatives to institutions, as well as interventions in public space and remote communities.

Presented in association with Abercrombie & Kent and Research Partner, Centre of Visual Art (CoVA) at The University of Melbourne, the two-year series brings together a diversity of voices in hour-long lectures and conversations involving exhibiting artists, curators, critics and historians, with the first set of lectures scheduled from April to November 2019.

In 2019, the series will focus on the period 1968 to 1981, which saw a range of exceptional projects that transformed the production and reception of contemporary art in Australia. These include Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Wrapped Coast – One Million Square Feet, at Little Bay, Sydney, in 1968-69; the Honey Ant Dreaming and other mural paintings at the school at Papunya in 1971; Sculpturescape ’75 – the Mildura Sculpture Triennial; and other experimental contexts engaging with sound, video, performance, conceptual and feminist art practices. In 2019, the lecture series will take us to a series of sites beyond the museum, with a focus on exhibitions and projects that took place outside of conventional institutional frameworks.

In 2020, the lecture series will explore new institutional models that emerged in the 1980s and ‘90s, with the development of periodic exhibitions such as the Biennale of Sydney, Perspecta and the Asia Pacific Triennial; the development of contemporary art spaces, Aboriginal art centres and artist-run initiatives; among other contemporary contexts and modes of exhibition-making.

The lecture series includes:

Monday, April 15: Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Wrapped Coast 1968-69
Lecture by John Kaldor, with respondent Rebecca Coates

Monday, April 29: Digging for Honey Ants: the Papunya mural project
Lecture by John Kean, with respondent Hannah Presley

Monday, June 3: Object and Idea
Lecture by Ian Milliss

Monday, July 8: Inhibodress, multimedia interference 
Lecture by Peter Kennedy, with respondent Sue Cramer

Monday, August 5: Clifton Hill Community Music Centre 1976-83
Lecture by David Chesworth

Monday, September 3: Almost Anything Goes: Sculpturescape 1975 at Mildura 
Lecture by Julie Ewington

Monday, October 7: A Room of their own: creating a space for the feminist collective 
Lecture by Janine Burke, with respondent Helen Hughes

Monday, November 4: Post Object Art in Australia and New Zealand
Lecture by Anne Marsh