spaced 2

future recall

Western Australian Museum

Perth

19 February – 29 March 2015

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It is difficult to examine the exhibition component of ‘spaced 2: future recall’, presented in the temporary exhibition galleries at the Western Australian Museum, in isolation from the greater project. In fact, ‘spaced 2: future recall’ illustrates both the challenges of locating ‘socially engaged’ art, which by its nature creates multiple and rarely intersecting audiences, in a fixed context, and two distinct approaches to those challenges.

The exhibition is frequently described as the culmination of twelve residencies that place international contemporary artists in various regional, mostly Western Australian contexts, a sequel to 2012’s ‘spaced: art out of place’ at Fremantle Arts Centre. However, it is perhaps better understood as a node in a network of activities, encompassing the residency program, the presentation of works in the communities themselves, and a national tour that will follow the closure of Perth’s exhibition component.

Variety and reach are the source of this project’s power, offering a number of practical and philosophical approaches to regionality and local, collective memory in an increasingly global world, but it is also the cause of some mental heartburn. In addition to the projects produced from the residencies, the Western Australian Museum exhibition includes examples of the artists’ previous work. While this connects the projects with a discourse beyond the specificities of their regional engagement, it also complicates an already complex spectrum of experience and pushes required viewing time upwards into the impossible; Lily Hibberd’s photographs and many hours of video, which span a wealth of lived and historical Indigenous memory, could support an exhibition alone.

In including these older works, ‘spaced’ may be attempting to find a broad definition for what ‘socially engaged practice’ might look

It Goes Both Ways: Moving Images in Different Times and Places, 2015.

Lily Hibberd in collaboration with Tyson Mowarin, Glen Stasiuk, Curtis Taylor and Fiona Walsh, It Goes Both Ways: Moving Images in Different Times and Places, 2015. Installation including: 20 colour HD videos with audio, 7 archival inkjet prints mounted on acrylic, dimensions variable. Image courtesy and © the artists. Photograph Robert Frith - Acorn Photo.

Daniel Peltz, Tom Price: the Opera, 2014. Tom Price screening view. Image courtesy and © the artist and the Hsinchu City Opera Research Association.