Centre for
Contemporary
Photography
404 GEORGE ST,
FITZROY VIC 3065
AUSTRALIA
OPENING HOURS
WEDNESDAY—SUNDAY
11AM—5PM
April 23 – 27 June, 2021
To resound, unbound
- Hannah Brontë,
- Hootan Heydari,
- Callum McGrath,
- Anne Moffat,
- Sara Oscar,
- Sanja Pahoki,
- Jessica Schwientek,
- and Emmaline Zanelli
Jack Willet
Consider the artist as a surface, possibly solid and flat like marble, or soft and rippled like foam, even a combination of the two. All surfaces resound or echo in some way, perhaps softening or distorting, directly reiterating or if the surface allows there is the potential for total absorption. To resound, unbound explores the possibilities of this resounding, seeing the artist adapt or unbind that which comes to them, moulding it to their artistic will, to then resound it back through artistic expression.
Echoing throughout all four exhibition spaces, To resound, unbound presents a series of new commissions and significant works from emerging and established lens-based practitioners from across Australia. This group of eight artists explore themes concerning knowledge, memory, identity, trauma, representation and time, typically found in both societal and cultural structures and narratives.
Installation view: Hootan Heydari
The ways in which the artists engage with these rich themes sees a range of diverse material outcomes, such as Hootan Heydari’s tome of 1,979 plaster-dipped photographs, presenting shrouded fragments of traumatic (and joyfully familial) memory whose number reflect the revolution the artist and his family fled. Sanja Pahoki’s installation of wallpaper, neon, photography, video and security mirrors continues this discussion of memory, explicitly explored through the idea of a “transitional object”, while also talking to larger ideas surrounding transitions and separations, and the parental gaze.
Installation view: Callum McGrath
These highly conceptual concerns are explored throughout the exhibition, seeing Callum McGrath working with museological presentation to display pages from his anonymous family photo-album composed of public memorials dedicated to queer subjects and communities, questioning how queer history and collective memory requires unconventional archival approaches. Sara Oscar continues this discussion of the photographic archive, using the metaphor of ‘ruins’ to look to her colonial past — tracing it through her late grandfather’s involvement in Hollywood cinema in India, Oscar considers its bearing on the male bodies within the artists family, and finds the trauma of British colonialism in fragments.
Installation view: Sara Oscar
Traditional modes of photography have significant representation within To resound, unbound. In a gridding of photographs across one of the gallery’s largest walls, Anne Moffat explores her maternal grandmother’s suffering of late-stage Alzheimer’s, a work of duality that portrays Moffat’s experience of watching her grandmother lose her independence and sense of self while the artist attempted to understand her own. A vast array of images spanning over 10 years of artist Jessica Schwientek’s life further the exhibition’s diverse display of the photographic image. Schwientek presents both silver gelatin hand prints and colour giclee prints that combine intimate portraiture, empty spaces and abandoned objects, a collection of mirrors and shadows that are all representational of the self.
Video work by Hannah Brontë heightens the “moving” of the moving image, a work that ebbs and flows — or swells — with the water that bulges across all corners of the planet, talking of time and the absorption of one energy transmuted into a multitude of new energies. Here Brontë specifically draws on the gestations of us — human beings, while also looking at the spherical nature of the world and the way in which we come through and leave it. While Emmaline Zanelli uses video to house the making of an image, enlisting her grandmother alongside her comrades to depict a key moment in Futurist history: Marinetti’s car crash, here rendered through a domestic conveyor belt on egg pasta with the assistance of cuttlefish ink.
Detail: courtesy Emmaline Zanelli
The remarkable diversity of all artistic elements — medium, concept, experimentation, research, fabrication — reveals a group of artists that are truly immersed in their subject matter and the optimal ways in which a myriad of themes can unbind themselves. To then resound anew, each echoes across CCP’s spiraling chain of galleries as though through a Medieval circular trumpet; each work produces a “buzzing” that triggers a standing wave vibration within the space, extending outwards as a holistic representation of new creative structures and narratives.
Curated by Jack Willet
Hannah Brontë
Hannah Brontë (Wakka Wakka/Yaegl) is a practising visual artist whose video artworks, banners and large-scale installations explore the role of women within this ever shifting world. Recurring themes in her are resilience, matriarchy, and power. Influenced by her work as a DJ and her fascination with all forms of language, she is conscious of intertwining the knowledge of all her ancestors in each work she creates. Brontë has recently drawn on holistic, spiritual and physical healers as consultants for her work, which led her to becoming a doula. She has also been unpacking intergenerational spiritual knowledge, which she feels is the beginning of a new direction within her practice.
Bronte holds a Bachelor of Fine Art, Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, Brisbane (2013). Recent exhibitions include: NGV Triennial, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2020); All About Women, Sydney Opera House, Sydney (2020); Transits and Returns, VAG, Vancouver, CA (2019); The Commute, IMA, Brisbane (2019); The National, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2019); Perilous Bodies, Ford Foundation, New York, US (2019); Pataka- revolutionary women, Porirua, NZ (2018); Blak-Blak Art Form, Cairns Regional Gallery (2018); Unfinished Business: New Perspectives in Art and Feminism, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (2018); Next Matriarch, Ace Open, Adelaide (2017); and Red Green Blue: A History of Australian Video Art, Griffith University, Brisbane (2017).
Hootan Heydari
Hootan Heydari is a multidisciplinary artist, working in photography, performance, installation, sound and video. His practice incorporates family photographs, furniture and other personally significant and culturally symbolic objects to explore themes of migration, trauma, identity, compulsive acts of repetition and memory.
Heydari holds a Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) RMIT University, Melbourne (2019) and is undertaking a Master of Fine Art at the Victorian College of Arts, the University of Melbourne. Recent exhibitions include: The Gap, The Interval And The In-Between, Rubicon Ari, Melbourne (2020); Collapse and Collapse Again, Blindside Gallery, Melbourne (2020); Your Afterprint Still Lingers, Alternating Current Art Space, Melbourne (2019); Unresolved Spaces Pt1, Broadcast Microsite, Melbourne (2018); Written Under Erasure, Dirty Dozen Art Space, Melbourne (2018); Quarantine the Past, Mailbox Art Space, Melbourne (2018); Connection Project, RMIT University Student Gallery, Melbourne (2015).
Callum McGrath
Callum McGrath produces research-driven video, sculpture, text, installation, sound and images that reimagine institutionalised aesthetics of remembrance, memorials and historiography. McGrath’s practice layers queer art and historical references to break with conventions of linear archives. Working against the grain of hetero-centric notions of time, McGrath’s work negotiates a complex net of queer history.
McGrath holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Visual Art) with Honours from the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane (2016), and is currently undertaking a Master of Fine Art at Monash University, Melbourne. Additionally, McGrath is a member of Kink; a research group investigating and bringing together the diverse and disparate histories of LGBTQIA+ Australian art. Recent exhibitions include: Full Face, Queensland Art Gallery/ Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2020-21); Thoughts and Prayers, Outer Space, Brisbane (2020); Queer Economies, Bus Projects and Centre of Contemporary Photography, Melbourne (2019); POOFTA, Metro Arts, Brisbane (2018); Cross-mending, Outer Space, Brisbane (2018); River Torrens, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (2018); Passing, West Space, Melbourne (2017); HATCHED, Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Perth (2017); and Site (re) Constructed, Bus Projects, Melbourne (2016).
Anne Moffat
Anne Moffat works across an array of editorial, commercial and personal photographic-based projects. She draws on close familial ties to Malaysia, China, and New Zealand, as well as family migration to Australia, to inform her social documentation and portraiture.
Moffat’s work was recently awarded Jury’s Choice in the Prix Virginia (2020), as well as being shortlisted in the British Journal of Photography’s Portrait of Humanity (2020), the Singapore International Photography Festival Portfolio Open Call (2020), and the William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize (2019).
Her images have been featured online and in publications including the British Journal of Photography, Booooooom, Sky Italia, and PH Museum. Recent exhibitions include: Open Call Showcase, Singapore International Photography Festival, Singapore (2020); Lockdown Journal: the pandemic through the eyes of the Women Photograph collective, The Foreign Correspondents’ Club, Hong Kong (2020); Bowness Photography Prize, Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne (2019); CLIP Award, Perth Centre for Photography, Perth (2019); Then There Was Us, Temporary Spaces, Manchester, UK (2019); and Wish You Were Here, Goodspace, Sydney (2019).
Sara Oscar
Sara Oscar is an artist and academic who has been working with photography for at least a decade. She works with sequences of photographs from historical archives, starting with images that are difficult to classify or speak about: ghosts, trauma, ruins, or the implied nature of desire. Using patterns and recurrent motifs, she plays on the photographs capacity to oscillate between visual sequence and series. Oscar was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy (Visual Arts) from the University of Sydney in 2008, she also holds a Bachelor of Visual Art (Honours) Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, 2002.
In 2004 she was nominated for the Helen Lempriere Travelling Exhibition, presented at Artspace, Sydney and was recently commissioned to create new work in the outdoor program for Photo2021, Melbourne. She lectures in visual communication at The University of Technology, Sydney. Recent exhibitions include: Photo2021, Melbourne (2021); Staged, Photofairs Shanghai, Shanghai, CN (2017); Reality is a hard word, Kensington Contemporary, Sydney; Under the sun, Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne (2017); An elegy to apertures, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne (2017); What it is, BUS Projects, Melbourne (2016); From here to eternity, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne (2015); The mobility of happiness, MOP Projects, Sydney (2015); and Photographs arranged in series, Sutton Projects, Melbourne (2012)
Sanja Pahoki
Sanja Pahoki uses photography, video, neon and text to explore observations from everyday life. Existential issues such as the nature of self, identity and the role of anxiety are recurring themes in her work. As the autobiographical is the initial inspiration for much of Sanja’s work, humour is often employed as a strategy to direct attention away from the personal to shared universal concerns.
Pahoki was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy from Monash University in 2018, she also holds a Bachelor of Arts (Psychology and Philosophy), University of Melbourne (1987), a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) (2000) and an MFA (2006) from the Victorian College of the Arts, the University of Melbourne. Pahoki is currently the Head of Photography at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Recent exhibitions include: Hope Dies Last: Art At The End Of Optimism, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne (2019); Manifesto, Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Melbourne (2019); Being Kazimir Malevich, Monash Art and Design Gallery, Melbourne (2018); The end of time, the beginning of time, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne (2017); Neon Piss, Superdeals, Brussels, BE; Pissing, TCB Art Inc., Melbourne (2017); Is/Is Not, West Space, Melbourne (2016); Being Kazimir Malevich, Sarah Scout Presents 92016); Written in Light, Geelong Gallery, Geelong (2015); and To The Centre of the Earth and Back (Iceland), Sarah Scout Gallery, Melbourne (2012).
Pahoki is represented by Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne.
Jessica Schwientek
Jessica Schwientek is a fine artist working within the expansive realm of photography. Focussed primarily on process and the cathartic act of image making Schwientek’s work always has the human condition at its core. Expressing sadness, grief, love, exhaustion and anger she attempts to make sense of her place within existence.
Schwientek holds a Bachelor of Media and Communications Majoring in Photography (Honours) from Deakin University, Melbourne (2016), and is the owner and director of NOIR Darkroom in Coburg. She was the recipient of the 2019 Moreland Award for her ‘Contribution to Art and Culture’. Recent exhibitions include: Sadness is Sexy , NOIR Darkroom, Melbourne (2019); Diaries (Loosen Art) , Millepiani Gallery, Rome, IT (2020); 12 x 12, The Stockroom Gallery, Melbourne (2018); Obscuring the Camera, NOIR Darkroom, Melbourne (2018); All the Feels, Loop Project Space, Melbourne (2018); Dichotomy of Memories (with Neta-Marie Mabo), Deakin Project Space, Geelong (2015); and 100 years, The SUBSTATION, Melbourne (2016).
