Making Art Work x Brisbane Festival
4 September–26 September 20204 Sep–26 Sep 2020
#MakingArtWorkIMA
Responding to the global pandemic Making Art Work is a commissioning program by the Institute of Modern Art. It proposes an experimental role for the art organisation as administrators of economic stimulus for artists in these unprecedented times where cultural and economic precedents are being continuously challenged.
Brisbane Festival and the IMA have co-commissioned three Queensland artists to create new works of scale in the public realm as part of Making Art Work. Hannah Brontë, Julian Day, and Kinly Grey each use text in their work to explore our relationship with shared spaces and modes of creating connections at a distance in our new reality of transformed social relations.
Hannah Brontë
AFFIRMATIONS DURING THE Apocalypse
7–21 September
Story Bridge, Kangaroo Point
Presented across Streettalk advertising from 31 August–28 September at:
230 Brunswick St, Fortitude Valley
39 James St, Fortitude Valley
660 Main St, Kangaroo Point
280 Adelaide St, Brisbane CBD
Through a newly commissioned large-scale public banner, acclaimed artist Hannah Brontë offers daily commuters a literal sign from above. Viewable by motorists and pedestrians passing over the Story Bridge, AFFIRMATIONS DURING THE Apocalypse implores us to pause, take heart, and dream of new possibilities, while the whole world cracks wide open around us. As COVID-19, Black Lives Matter, and discussions around police abolition sweep the world, Brontë’s timely affirmation is an invitation to step into the unknown, reminding us that ‘the world is shifting and so can you.’
Julian Day
Please scream inside your heart
4–26 September
IMA Belltower at the Judith Wright Arts Centre
420 Brunswick St, Fortitude Valley
Thursday–Friday 10am–5pm, Saturday 10am–3pm
Created across distance between Brisbane and New York where the artist currently lives, Julian Day’s installation at IMA Belltower examines the power of instruction as a medium, and the embedded tensions between personal liberty and social duty.
Please scream inside your heart utilises commercial signage and exploits its quotidian relationship to the abundance of both information and caution that now rules our lives in these unprecedented times.
The hyperbolic and sometimes fanciful texts displayed on these LED surfaces are drawn from Day’s decade-long interest in instructional scores—melding seminal works of performance art, with snippets of the news cycle, and (as the title of the work suggests) the new vocabulary of the global pandemic. These contradictory, even impossible statutes cast a caustic eye on our current circumstances, questioning the ethics of delegation and command, and whether we have the right to resist, negotiate, or talk back to power.
Kinly Grey
endless
12 September, from dusk until late
Projected on the Greek Orthodox Church of St George
33 Edmondstone St, South Brisbane
Best viewed from Highgate Hill Park
Dornoch Tce, Highgate Hill
Like many others, Kinly Grey’s experience of mass global uncertainty is one of both possibility and sufferance. Embodied in a single word, endless will reflect on a single afternoon the artist spent in a park overlooking the city of Brisbane during stage 4 lockdown restrictions. This new work, presented as a site specific and sensory experience, explores the complex intersection between optimism and pessimism at a time when change is the only constant.
This project was co-commissioned by Brisbane Festival. Brisbane Festival is an initiative of the Queensland Government and Brisbane City Council. Making Art Work is supported by the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland.
Artists
Hannah Brontë’s practice draws on the natural environment, the empowerment of Indigenous, Black and Brown women projected into her dreamscape works of imagined futures. Her practice spans video, photography, weaving and textiles. She has participated in exhibitions both locally and internationally, including 2019 Transits and Returns, Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada, 2019 The National , MCA, Sydney, 2019 Perilous Bodies, ford Foundation, New York, 2018 Pataka- revolutionary women, Porirua, NZ, 2018 Blak- Blak Art Form, Cairns Regional Gallery, 2017 Next Matriarch, Ace Open, Adelaide. 2017 Red Green Blue : A History of Australian Video Art, Griffith University, Brisbane.
Julian Day uses sound to understand the complexities of how we form, maintain and relinquish social bonds. He typically facilitates ‘temporary communities’ of participants from contrasting backgrounds—students, workers, seniors—who collectively develop non-verbal vocabularies to articulate and enliven civic spaces. He works across performance, sculpture, installation, video, and text. Day has exhibited in the California Pacific Triennial, Asia Pacific Triennial, NEW16 (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art), and Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art. His work has been collected by Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. He has been undertaking an MFA at Columbia University in New York through the Samstag Scholarship.
Julian Day uses sound to understand the complexities of how we form, maintain and relinquish social bonds. He typically facilitates ‘temporary communities’ of participants from contrasting backgrounds—students, workers, seniors—who collectively develop non-verbal vocabularies to articulate and enliven civic spaces. He works across performance, sculpture, installation, video, and text. Day has exhibited in the California Pacific Triennial, Asia Pacific Triennial, NEW16 (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art), and Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art. His work has been collected by Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. He has been undertaking an MFA at Columbia University in New York through the Samstag Scholarship.
Kinly Grey works with light, smoke, metaphysics, and feeling. Their site-specific installations reimagine ways to understand the world through sensory experience and poetics. Based in Brisbane/Meanjin, Kinly has produced work for galleries and public spaces, including Metro Arts, Home of the Arts, Queen St Mall, and Enoggera Reservoir.
