'The Interior' and 'Absolutely Everybody Judges'
Double Exhibition Opening
29 July 2022
6.00PM
You are invited to join us for the opening celebrations of two new exhibitions at the IMA; Absolutely Everybody Judges by Aha Ensemble recipients of the 2022 Jeremy Hynes Award, and The Interior by Natalya Hughes.
Absolutely Everybody Judges
Artist collective Aha Ensemble present a newly commissioned participatory installation Absolutely Everybody Judges, developed with the 2022 Jeremy Hynes Award. Having worked primarily in performative practices Absolutely Everybody Judges represents the collective’s first installation work. Underpinned by the principles of the social model of disability; where inclusion and participation is determined by how well particular environments accommodate individual needs, the collective will construct their own dynamic world.
An improvised interaction between Aha Ensemble and audience members has resulted in an installation centred around a documented dialogue where hierarchies are upended, limits are undermined, power dynamics reversed, and assumptions are playfully undone.
The Interior
Can we use the talking cure to solve society’s ‘problem’ with women? Natalya Hughes’s The Interior invites audiences into an exaggerated consultation room playfully furnished for psychoanalysis. This immersive installation combines sculptural seating, richly patterned soft furnishings, and uncanny object d’art, nestled around a hand-painted mural to generate a stimulating space to unpack our collective and unconscious biases.
COVID-19 Advice
The IMA strongly encourages mask-wearing onsite in the galleries and for events to keep our community safe. If you are displaying symptoms of COVID-19 or are feeling unwell, please stay home.
Accessibility
We are committed to making the IMA accessible to people of all abilities, their families, and carers, as well as visitors of different ages and different backgrounds.
The gallery entrance is on the ground floor of the Judith Wright Arts Centre, on Berwick Street. There is wheelchair access and an accessible toilet with baby changing facilities also located on the ground floor, and we welcome guide and support dogs.
To find out more, contact us at ima@ima.org.au, call (07) 3252 5750, or ask our friendly staff on-site. You can also read our access information for visitors here: Word Doc or PDF.
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Aha Ensemble is a disability-led, Queensland based collective of diverse performance artists who value authentic, immersive, participatory and contemporary art practices. The Ensemble was initiated in 2015 by Daniele Constance with support from Access Arts, to aid in developing artists who identify with disability. Aha performers’ individual practices include training and creating work across South East Queensland, nationally; and internationally, including New York, Portugal, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Korea. Ensemble members include: Kayah Guenther, Allycia Staples, Mitchell Runcie, Megan Louise West, Tara Heard, Rebecca Dostal, and Ruby Donohoe, Director Daniele Constance, and Creative Producer Emma-June Curik.
Natalya Hughes’s multidisciplinary practice is concerned with decorative and ornamental traditions and their associations with the feminine, the body and excess. Through painting, textiles, sculpture and installation, her recent bodies of work investigate the relationship between modernist painters and their anonymous women subjects. Using the life and work of major twentieth-century male artists Willem de Kooning and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, as well archival case studies of Sigmund Freud, Hughes seeks to examine society’s ‘problems’ with women and the fraught associations that have ultimately determined them.
Hughes was awarded the 2022 Michaela and Adrian Fini Fellowship by the Sheila Foundation, which has supported her in creating a body of new work for her forthcoming solo exhibition The Interior at the Institute of Modern Art (IMA), Brisbane. In 2019, she completed the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) Open Studio residency. Hughes is the second of five contemporary Australian artists to feature at Open Studio. Following these respective experiences, Hughes will present her second solo show These Girls of the Studio with Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney, in September 2022.
Natalya Hughes, 'The Interior', work in progress, 2022. Courtesy of the artist, Sullivan+Strumpf, and Milani Gallery
