From the other side

Horror often speaks to the collective anxieties and fears of our times, from sexual liberation to new technologies, racial tension to gender subversion. This latent fear proliferates across shared cultural imaginaries to lay bare our innermost desires, tendencies for self-destruction and the conflicting impulses to confront and exorcise our darkest fantasies. Horror provides a language with which to be scared by confronting us with feelings of fear, foreboding, and unease to help us cope with, and heal from, the uncomfortable and uncontrollable realities of the everyday. 

From the other side brings together nineteen Australian and international artists, integrating historical and contemporary works, alongside key new commissions that draw upon horror’s capacity to transgress and destabilise forms of power and subjugation, as well as social stereotypes and conventional narratives of the body, race, gender, sexuality, and desire. Centring the fear of the monstrous-feminine, the exhibition considers the pleasure and liberation of horror from feminist, queer and non-binary subjectivities, and diverse cultural perspectives, as makers, masters, and consumers of the genre. 

Raising questions about the often-harmful representation of female monsters—the witch, the hag, the monstrous mother, the shapeshifter, the possessed woman— the monstrous-feminine resists these prototypical roles, as either villains or victims,  temptresses and castrators; alluring yet repulsive, contaminating yet pure. Rather, the exhibition celebrates how artists and storytellers are redefining and reclaiming these characters, not as objects of fear but as symbols of strength and potentiality. 

The exhibition summons the impulse for rage and revenge, while embracing vulnerability and protection. It speaks to horror’s slipperiness and refusal to be neatly categorised. Culminating in a potent synthesis of dread, camp, dark humour and catharsis, From the other side demonstrates the productive powers of horror to challenge the assumed boundaries of the body, gender, the self and the ‘other’.

Naomi Blacklock, Mia Boe, Louise Bourgeois, Cybele Cox, Theron Debris, Karla Dickens, Lonnie Hutchinson, Naomi Kantjuriny, Minyoung Kim, Maria Kozic, Jemima Lucas, Clare Milledge, Tracey Moffatt, Suzan Pitt, Julia Robinson, Marianna Simnett, Heather B Swann, Kellie Wells, Zamara Zamara

Curators: Elyse Goldfinch and Jessica Clark