2022 artistic program

As a platform for artists and a centre for the exchange of ideas, ACCA promotes new artistic and curatorial practices, encouraging diverse voices and cultural perspectives, and reflexive, experimental working methods. ACCA’s artistic program comprises quarterly, seasonally-based exhibitions, alongside offsite, online, touring and special projects, supported by a dynamic series of education and public programs. Our 2022 program includes the following keynote projects:

Who’s Afraid of Public Space?
December 4, 2021–March 20, 2022
Curators: Max Delany, Miriam Kelly and Annika Kristensen

Who’s Afraid of Public Space? is a multifaceted project exploring the role of public culture, the contested nature of public space, and the character and composition of public life. The exhibition continues ACCA’s Big Picture series, which explores contemporary art’s relation to wider social, cultural and political contexts. 

Developed in dialogue with a curatorial advisory group, Who’s Afraid of Public Space? takes place at ACCA and extends across Melbourne at satellite exhibitions presented in collaboration with cultural partners, as well as with installations, events and projects in the public realm. For further information and a full list of contributors, visit here.

Frances Barrett: Meatus
Presented as part of Suspended Moment: The Katthy Cavaliere Fellowship
April 2–June 19, 2022
Frances Barrett with Nina Buchanan, Debris Facility Pty Ltd., Hayley Forward, Brian Fuata, Del Lumanta and Sione Teumohenga
Commissioning Curator: Annika Kristensen

Drawing on her background in performance, curating and collaborative models of making, Frances Barrett has expanded the solo commissioning focus of the Katthy Cavaliere Fellowship to present new sonic compositions and live performances by multiple artists. Conceiving of ACCA’s four galleries as an immersive environment of sound and light, Frances Barrett: Meatus is a performative staging of the body, which bleeds and leaks, into which the audience may enter to consider the physical, sensual and critical experience of listening.
 

The 2022 Macfarlane Commissions
Supported by The Macfarlane Fund
July 2–September 4, 2022 
Artists: Nadia Hernández, Lucina Lane, Gian Manik, Betty Muffler, Jahnne Pasco-White, Jason Phu, JD Reforma, Esther Stewart
Curators: Max Delany and Annika Kristensen 

The 2022 edition of The Macfarlane Commissions, a multi-year partnership and biennial series of ambitious new projects by significant emerging and mid-career artists, will focus upon recent developments in expanded painting practices. The exhibition brings together new works by eight Australian artists whose work collectively derives from a studio-based practice informed by the language of painting, with shared interests in the intersection and circulation between painting and other materials, forms and disciplines, including architecture, literature, performance, ecology and other relational activities.

Paul Yore: Word Made Flesh
September 17–November 20, 2022 
Curator: Max Delany 

A prominent queer artist whose iconoclastic works engage with the histories of ritual, queer identity, popular culture, nationalism and neo-liberalism, Paul Yore’s garish yet playful works recast a vast array of found materials, images and texts into sexually and politically loaded tableaux, suggesting hybridity, contradictory meanings, or an overturning of stable categories altogether.  

Paul Yore: Word Made Flesh will encompass the full scope of Yore’s work—appliquéd quilts and needlework, banners, painting, collage and assemblage—drawing on the vernacular of visionary and psychedelic art, Greco-Roman forms, medieval tapestries, the decorative excesses of rococo style and trash culture. The exhibition will be constructed as a gesamtkunstwerk, with an ambitious new immersive installation presented alongside selected works from the past fifteen years, accompanied by a major new monographic publication. 

Big Data
December 10, 2022–March 19, 2023
Curator: Miriam Kelly

Continuing ACCA’s ongoing Big Picture and ACCA Beyond Walls initiatives Big Data brings together artist-led projects that tackle key issues and challenges of our contemporary data-driven society. In Big Data, new commissions, existing works, performances and workshops address forms of activism against algorithmic violence, machine learning bias, and surveillance capitalism, as well as the role of data and technology in the climate crisis.