Here & There: Overseas Residency & Recent Australian Artists

About the exhibition
This exhibition presented recent work by seventeen Australian artists who had participated in a range of notable international studio residencies, such as the Cité internationale des arts  in Paris, the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in West Berlin, PS1 in New York and Air & Space in London.

As part of her research for the project, curator Elaine Merkus visited many of the international residencies throughout 1986. In the exhibition catalogue, she reflected on the evolving significance of the overseas residency experience for Australian artists, focusing on its specific impacts on individual practices. For example, Annette Bezor’s 1987 painting Romance is in the Air—which explores the duality between a longing for romance and the dangers it may conceal—could not, according to the artist, have been made until she experienced the ambience of Paris, a city ‘where you can be happiest or saddest—according to your expectations.’ Merkus also suggests that the wry political commentary in Tony Coleing’s linocuts, lithographs and postcard collages—works that address the enduring effects of colonisation on the colonised—was sharpened through exposure to social injustice in a global context.

Acknowledgements
This exhibition was supported by the Visual Arts/Crafts Board of the Australia Council for the Arts.

MUMA Online Exhibition Archive
MUMA’s online archive is expanding. We welcome your feedback and input. Please contact muma.communications@monash.edu with any information that could help enrich the archive for future audiences.

^{Image: Anne Zahalka, Rearranging the Signs 1986, type C photograph, 54.6 x 43 cm. Collection of the artist}