Exhibition programme 2022

Established in 1989, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA) houses one of the largest and most striking exhibition spaces in Australia and has become known for the leading role it plays in the commissioning and presentation of significant new work.

PICA is pleased to announce its 2022 exhibition program which offers a series of intimate, immersive, and optimistic encounters that span country, community, rebellion, and celebration. 

Exhibitions

Katie West: We hold you close  
February 20–April 24 
Presented in association with Perth Festival 

Drawing together textiles, sound, and video, Yindjibarndi artist Katie West’s solo exhibition invites us to reconsider our relationship with the natural environment and each other. The core of the exhibition is its titular piece, an installation marked and held by a patchwork of baskets made using recycled and naturally dyed fabrics. Accompanying the installation is soundscape of fire, rain, making, and walking recorded by Josten Myburgh, scored by West’s long-time collaborator composer Simon Charles, and incorporating string instrumentation by musicians Djuna Lee and Jameson Feakes. We Hold You Close is curated by WA born, Rotterdam based curator Eloise Sweetman who has worked with West since 2016. More

Amrita Hepi: Monumental  
February 20–April 24  
Presented in association with Perth Festival 

Created by Bundjalung/Ngāpuhi artist and choreographer Amrita Hepi, Monumental presents a video installation that casts a central colonial figure within a continual sunrise… or is it a sunset? This central figure is serenaded by a group of dancers, Hepi among them, and then eventually toppled and replaced. In the wake of Black Lives Matter protests and renewed calls for the removal of inherited monuments that symbolise colonialism and its ongoing legacies, Monumental offers a charged meditation on the tradition of building monuments, questioning who and what gets memorialised. More

Hatched: national graduate show 2022 
May 14–July 17  

Hatched is an annual showcase of leading emerging artists recently graduated from art schools across the nation, offering a tantalising glimpse into the diverse and exciting practices of Australian arts graduates, whose unique vision of the future is both urgent and compelling. The cohort of artists selected for this, the only national graduate exhibition in the country, will join some of Australia’s leading contemporary artists as Hatched alumni. Now entering its third decade, Hatched is an exciting signifier of future arts practice. More

Out of Bounds 
August 12–October 2

Since 2020 Western Australians have largely been limited to their great state, a 2,527,013-square-kilometre playground of beauty, heat, and isolation. Out of Bounds is a dynamic group exhibition that celebrates the diversity, talent and boundary-stretching practices of artists living and working on this land. 

Artworks featured in Out of Bounds will be offered for sale at the PICA Salon Vernissage, the highlight of PICA’s annual donor program. More

Fernando do Campo: To companion a companion 
August 12–October 9

Argentinean-Australian Fernando do Campo uses humour and wit to examine historic relationships between humans and birds and how they are layered and knotted through colonial, migratory, nationalistic and anthropogenic lenses. To companion a companion is an exhibition of new work by do Campo that proposes the human as the companion species to birds. Works include the painting series 365 Daily Bird Lists (January 3rd 2019–January 2nd 2020), a year-long archive and abstract record of every bird perceived by the artist, and a video work of the artist “pishing” for house sparrows in Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn. The exhibition debuts a new chapter of his ongoing WHOSLAUGHINGJACKASS Cycle, expanded with Western Australian archives and the weaving of fiction and fact to untack the kookaburra’s role in Australian federation. More

Pilar Mata Dupont
October 28, 2022–January 8, 2023 

Rotterdam based artist Pilar Mata Dupont’s major solo exhibition will feature new and recent works that call attention to her highly theatrical and cinematic approach to re-interpreting history. With a practice that spans video, performance, and photography, Mata Dupont imaginatively brings to life alternative versions of written and oral histories, drawing attention to the fallibility and subjectivity of memory. Influenced by her background and upbringing in the settler-colonial states of Argentina and Australia, the artist often reflects on her own familial past and its complicated history of traumas, colonial anxiety and border crossings. More

Nathan Beard: A Puzzlement 
October 28, 2022–January 8, 2023 

Drawing on his Australian-Thai heritage, Nathan Beard presents personal and playful reflections on the complexities surrounding the construction of diasporic identity. In a practice that spans photography, video, sculpture and installation, Beard often incorporates selections from archives, including that of his own family, focusing on elements that may be considered “exotic” or kitsch from one perspective, and mundane and everyday from another. For this major solo exhibition Beard will undertake research into Thai artefacts, imagery and orchids from The British Museum, Victoria & Albert Museum and Kew Gardens. More

Performance, studio and public programs continue through the year: visit here.