Children of the Revolution at Noosa Regional Gallery
A touring exhibition invites us to experience the art of interpretation and disruption through the eyes of the next generation, as Michael Brennan discovers.
Every generation pushes back against what came before them – at least to some extent. It’s probably one of the key conditions that propels social change and growth. Fresh eyes see new things and imagine different possibilities. I guess it’s easier to see what could be done better if you weren’t part of the people who put the scenario in place.
Primavera is the Museum of Contemporary Art’s annual exhibition of work by early-career artists living and working in Australia. Its 32nd incarnation considers what artists are creating to challenge society’s prescribed structures, and it’s touring to Noosa Regional Gallery this Spring.
Protest. Reimagining. Perseverance. These are the actions around which curator Talia Smith has gathered the work of the six young Australian artists she has chosen for inclusion in this iteration of Primavera. Tiyan Baker, Christopher Bassi, Moorina Bonini, Nikki Lam, Sarah Poulgrain and Truc Truong each make quite distinct work, although with themes such as surveillance, protest, cultural knowledge and preservation coursing through their collective creative output, an undercurrent becomes apparent.
As Suzanne Cotter, Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art puts it, “they assert that there is more than one way of living and offer impressions of how it might look.”
At the heart of this sentiment is the idea that the structures in society that are meant to serve and protect us, don’t do that for everyone – and perhaps increasingly, are doing that for very few. If, like these artists, you have lived experience of a different cultural background to the dominant Eurocentric story that underpins so much of the way we are expected to live, your identity and your place are constantly challenged and displaced.
This exhibition makes a space for a small selection of those identities and offers an opportunity to reflect on the way the things many of us take for granted as ‘normal’, impact on those for whom they are not. This task is unlikely to ever be resolved. Each emerging generation will come with its own sense of difference and disaffection. But it’s also worth thinking about what we wouldn’t have today if our own generations didn’t disrupt the things that were in place that didn’t serve the things they believed to be important and true.
Exhibition runs from now until 3 November.
