Adam Linder: Hustle Harder

Hustle Harder is a new performance exhibition by acclaimed choreographer Adam Linder, commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA Australia), on view until Sunday, August 20, 2023.

Performed for the duration of the Museum’s opening hours by a rotating cast of nine dancers, Hustle Harder highlights how the format of the exhibition converges with the physical, durational and collaborative dimensions of live performance.

Adam Linder makes work for both the stage and gallery spaces, often riffing on the histories and social codes that underpin these different contexts. Hustle Harder focuses on the museum as a space where performers and public increasingly ready themselves for the camera, using art and architecture as a backdrop for their own image making. Linder’s choreography amplifies this phenomenon of incessant image reproduction into a rich and eerie movement vocabulary, which he refers to as ‘virtuosic angling’.

The scenography for the performance takes its cues directly from MCA Australia. A series of mobile partitions mimic elements of the Museum’s infrastructure, signalling how everything from lighting to signage plays a role in conditioning visitor behaviour.

Curated by Anneke Jaspers, MCA Senior Curator, Collection, Hustle Harder also features artworks from the MCA Collection by Hany Armanious, Sphinx, 2009,  Agatha Gothe-Snape, FEELINGS, 2009 and Tracey Moffatt, Up in the sky #16 and #18, 1997.

The cast of nine dancers has been assembled from Sydney, Melbourne and Europe, and includes Narelle Benjamin, Taos Bertrand, Juan Pablo Camara, Eugene Choi, Alice Heyward, Bec Jensen, Noha Ramadan, Brooke Stamp and Ivey Wawn.

Linder has collaborated with Australian fashion designer Dion Lee on costumes, with architect Deniz Celtek on exhibition design, and with Berlin-based sound designer Steffen Martin.

Suzanne Cotter, Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, said “Adam Linder’s stylishly intelligent Hustle Harder signals a new vision for artistic programming at MCA Australia which responds to the expansive and cross-disciplinary nature of contemporary art and new approaches to exhibition making shaping the contemporary museum experience.”

About Adam Linder
Adam Linder (b. 1983, Australia) is based in Berlin. Linder’s work Shelf Life was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2020 and reimagined for Le Commun, Geneva, in 2022. A survey of his Choreographic Services No. 1–5 was presented by the CCA Wattis Institute in San Francisco in 2018 and travelled to Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean in Luxembourg in 2019. Linder’s other recent solo or two-person exhibitions have been presented at South London Gallery, 2018; Kunsthalle Basel, 2017; Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin, 2016; and Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 2015. Linder participated in the 20th Biennale of Sydney, 2016; Liverpool Biennial 2016; and Made in L.A. 2016, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, for which he was awarded the Mohn Award for artistic excellence. In addition, Linder’s work has been presented in Australia at Artspace (BARRE and BRAIN, 2020), the National Gallery of Victoria (Choreographic Service No.1, Some Cleaning, 2017) and with the Sydney Dance Company (Are We That We Are, 2010).