Lightness of Being: Contemporary Photographic Art from Australia
Dates:
27 May – 7 July 2001
Artists:
Pat Brassington, Destiny Deacon, Jane Eisemann, Anne Ferran, Fiona Foley, Bill Henson, Peter Kennedy, Rosemary Laing, Fiona MacDonald, Tracey Moffatt, John Nixon, Susan Norrie, Mike Parr, Patricia Piccinini, Robyn Stacey
Curator:
Bernice Murphy
Location:
Monash University Gallery
Monash University, Clayton Campus
About the exhibition
This international touring exhibition, originally staged by the Neue Berliner Kunstverein, premiered in Australia after travelling to venues across Germany. Featuring photographic works by fifteen leading contemporary Australian artists, the exhibition foregrounded socially and politically engaged practices, while also showcasing new conceptual and technological developments in photo media.
Highlights included a major installation by Peter Kennedy who assembled disparate imagery—portrait photographs, movie stills and forensic images of a notorious Nazi commander —to interpret the totality of loss experienced during World War II. Also featured were photo screenprints from Tracey Moffatt’s 2000 Invocations series, which employ a visual vocabulary drawn from cartoons, posters, popular film and frescoes to conjure theatrical, haunting visions of contemporary urban Indigenous experience.
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