MONASH UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF ART
CONCRETE: MEDIA RELEASE
Concrete
presented as a key project of 'Australia
in Turkey 2015: Celebrating Contemporary
Australian Culture'
Exhibition dates
29 August – 26 September 2015
Reception: Friday 4 September 2015
Venue
Tophane-i Amire Culture and Arts Center /
Mimar Sinan Fine Art University
Istanbul, Turkey
ARTISTS
Laurence Aberhart (NZ), Jananne al-Ani (IRQ/UK), Kader Attia (DEU/
DZA), Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley (AUS), Aslı Çavuşoğlu (TUR),
Saskia Doherty (AUS), Cevdet Erek (TUR), Mekhitar Garabedian
(BE/SYR), Fabien Giraud & Raphaël Siboni (FRA), Igor Grubic (CRO),
Carlos Irijalba (ESP), Nicholas Mangan (AUS), Rä di Martino (ITY),
Ricky Maynard (AUS), Callum Morton (AUS), Tom Nicholson (AUS),
Jamie North (AUS), Şener Özmen (TUR), Justin Trendall (AUS) and
JamesTylor (AUS)
Curator
Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow
MEDIA
For all media enquiries please contact Kelly Fliedner
kelly.fliedner@monash.edu +61 418 308 059
Ground Floor, Building F
Monash University, Caulfield Campus
900 Dandenong Road
Caulfield East VIC 3145 Australia
Concrete brings together 22 Australian, Turkish and International artists to
explore the concrete, or the solid and its counter: change, and the malleable
flow of time.
Initially developed to coincide with the centenary of the First World War,
the presentation of Concrete in Istanbul comes one hundred years after
the first battles at Gallipoli. Concrete considers cycles of construction and
destruction, the way civilisations borrow from and build upon each other
over time. Monuments and ruins are studied as sites where meaning is
condensed whilst also transient, contested and re-writable. Concrete makes
a special place for the gaps or absences which stand in for the missing, the
experience of loss, and that which is unknown or unknowable.
Artworks in the exhibition excavate the complex histories relating to events
such as the 1914 destruction of a Russian monument in Istanbul, the deep
past of the site of a former weapons manufacturing plant in Guernica, Spain
and the demolition of a Sydney incinerator built to echo an ancient Maya
temple. Against these solid forms, the passage of time is accentuated­­by the
patterns, rhythms and return of changing seasons, the growth rings of an
ancient tree, and the fossilised footstep of a dinosaur.
Exhibition curator Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow explains, 'Concrete looks to
one particular cycle of time, the measure of one hundred years, and sets
this against other timespans: the deep time of geology; time as measured
by history, literature, monuments and other forms of cultural inheritance; and
finally, seasonal time – against which our own lives move so quickly.’
MUMA Director, Charlotte Day comments, 'Concrete considers the function
of monuments and ruins from poetic, material and geopolitical perspectives.
Also representing MUMA's continued desire to present Australian art and
artists within an international context, Concrete builds bridges with university
colleagues in Turkey and furthers opportunities for international dialogue. We
are thrilled to be able to present Concrete within the historically significant
Mimar Sinan designed Tophane-i Amire Culture and Arts Center.'
This exhibition has been assisted by the Australian Government through the
Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body; and the
Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade; the Victorian Government through
Creative Victoria; the Spanish Government through Spain Arts and Culture;
and AsialinkArts.
www.monash.edu.au/muma
Telephone +61 3 9905 4217
muma@monash.edu
Tues – Fri 10am – 5pm; Sat 12 – 5pm
Şener Özmen
Shut Up! 2014 (detail)
c-print
courtesy of the artist and Pilot Gallery, Istanbul
MONASH UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF ART
CONCRETE: SELECTED ARTWORKS
SENER ÖZMEN
Şener Özmen draws from the history of the city of Diyarbakır, in southeastern Turkey, where he lives and works. Diyarbakir is a key Kurdish centre,
where the recent struggle for a degree of Kurdish autonomy is underpinned
by the massive displacement of the Armenian and Kurdish populations
in the early twentieth century. Human history in this landscape stretches
back to the Neolithic period, and through an extraordinary sequence of
civilisations. In Özmen’s work Shut up! a figure lying astride of a concrete
edged pit or grave gestures for quiet, as if to silence voices emanating from
within the earth. Özmen’s practice is marked by poetry and irony – humour
and emotion in the bleakest landscapes.
SASKIA DOHERTY
Saskia Doherty draws the title of her work Footfalls from Samuel Beckett’s
play of the same name, a play in which the central protagonist walks nine
steps – a measure of a life – before turning back, and repeating an endless
figure eight. From above, her path marks out the mathematical symbol
for infinity. Doherty’s Footfalls offers a measured sequence of nine cast
concrete steps, like flagstones on a garden path they guide our itinerary
through space. Doherty asks us to walk, read and reflect; the rough
cement and aggregate of each concrete rectangle bears a cream set of
paper, fragments from Beckett’s Footfalls as well as Doherty’s own writing.
Doherty also presents an image of Paleontologist Barnum Brown examining
the footprints of a Late Cretaceous dinosaur, found as positive counterimpressions in the stone ceiling of a former coal mine – like a distant echo,
an imprint of a footprint, embodying the long ago footfalls of an extinct
species. Footfalls contrasts transience with permanence, creating a path
between brief everyday gestures and longer measures of time.
JAMES TYLOR
Australian cities and communities feature a wide array of memorials,
however the long history of Indigenous Australian occupation is almost
entirely absent from such solid forms of public acknowledgement. In
Un-resettling James Tylor presents the beginnings of a formal typology of
Indigenous dwellings, a number of which relate to his own personal heritage.
Tylor states, ‘Un-resettling seeks to place traditional Indigenous dwellings
back into the landscape as a public reminder that they once appeared
throughout the area.’ Tylor’s photographs remind us of the invisible histories
of this land, for instance the fertile volcanic plains west of Melbourne with
remnants of stone dwellings and larger ceremonial sites of which there is
little public knowledge.
LAURENCE ABERHART
Photographer Laurence Aberhart is drawn to the edge of dominant historical
narratives, creating archives of built and monumental forms particular to
certain places and periods of time. He returns to these chosen subjects
repeatedly. His photographs of the ANZAC memorials of Australia and
New Zealand have been taken over the past thirty years. Familiar across
both countries, the memorials were built after the First World War to
commemorate those who served with the Australia and New Zealand
Army Corps. Very few families were able to visit the graves of those who
died, and so these monuments served the bereaved as well as larger
national concerns. As we have approached the centenary of the war, these
memorials have become the focus of greater attention, yet what they mean
is difficult to lock down. In these images the single figure on each column is
a fixed point against landscapes in states of constant change.
from top:
Şener Özmen Shut Up! 2014
c-print, courtesy of the artist and
Pilot Gallery, Istanbul
Saskia Doherty
Footfalls 2013-14
cast concrete, printed paper
courtesy of the artist
James Tylor Un-resettling (stone
footing for dome hut) 2013
hand coloured archival inkjet prints
Monash University Collection
Laurence Aberhart War memorial,
Kaiapoi, Canterbury, 8 December
2010, gelatin photograph, courtesy
of the artist and Darren Knight
MONASH UNIVERSITY MUSEUM OF ART
CONCRETE: SELECTED ARTWORKS
JANANNE AL-ANI
Jananne al-Ani’s film offers a sequence of aerial views in sepia tones;
second by second our perspective nears the ground. Our appreciation
of the formal beauty of these images co-exists with our unease as we try
to determine what it is we are looking at. Are these archaeological sites,
or housing compounds damaged by missile or drone strikes? Iraqi-born
al-Ani notes as inspiration the ‘strange beauty’ of Edward Steichen’s 1918
photographs of the Western Front taken whilst he was a member of the US
Aerial Expeditionary Force.
CARLOS IRIJALBA
High Tides (drilling) by Carlos Irijalba presents a 17 metre drilling core from
the site of a former weapons factory in the Urdaibai or Guernica Estuary,
Basque Country. Beneath an asphalt ‘cap’, layers of soil, clay, limestone
and the sedimentary rock Marga are evident. The bombing of Guernica is
remembered for its devastating impact upon the civilian population and was
the subject of an iconic painting by Pablo Picasso. Irijalba offers a window
into the history of this place, as well as longer geological measures of time
and materiality.
KADER ATTIA
In Kader Attia’s photographic series Rochers Carrés we see a series of
figures seated on enormous concrete blocks, gazing out across the water
to a distant horizon. These are images of possibility as well as constraint.
The massive cast concrete forms are like the playthings of giants; their scale
suggests they might be the remnants of a vast ancient temple, but the edge
of each block is sharp and unweathered by the elements. In fact, these
forms are relatively new; they have been placed onto the beaches of Algiers
as deterrents to those who might use these sites as disembarkation points
for African émigrés.
IGOR GRUBIC
In the film Monument Zagreb-based artist Igor Grubic offers a series of
meditative ‘portraits’ of the massive concrete memorials built by the former
Yugoslav state. With the rise of neo-fascism these mysterious sentinel
forms, originally intended to honour World War II victims of fascism, are
increasingly subject to neglect, even attack. Emphasising the unexpected
fragility of these monumental structures, Grubic sets human attempts to fix
meaning, against a backdrop of seasonal change. In a landscape which has
witnessed so many cycles of trauma and upheaval, this work mirrors the rise
and fall of many monuments built to preserve the memory of events which
might otherwise be forgotten. Can such forms ever communicate a stable
message through time?
from top:
Jananne al-Ani Excavators 2010
16mm film transfered to video
courtesy of the artist
Carlos Irijalba
High Tides (drilling) 2012
installation view
courtesy of the artist
Kader Atia Rochers Carrés 2008
five Lambda prints, courtesy of the
artist and Galerie Nagel Draxler,
Berlin and Cologne
Igor Grubic
Monument 2014
video projection
courtesy of the artist