July 9, 2014 – Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive

Exhibition dates: 14th July – 25th July 214

Curators: Michael Graf and Russell Walsh

Artists include: Marcus Bunyan, Juan Davila, Andrew Foster, Brent Harris, Mathew Jones, Peter Lyssiotis, Lex Middleton, Andi Nellssun, Marcus O’Donnell, Scott Redford, and Ross T Smith.

Opening: Wednesday 16 July 5.30 pm – 7.30 pm

Unknown photographer
ACT UP D-Day on the steps of Flinders St. Station, 6 June 1991
1991
Image courtesy of the Australian Queer Archives

Another important exhibition to coincide with the 20th International AIDS Conference to be held in Melbourne this July. The exhibition – which focuses on the seminal exhibition Don’t Leave Me This Way: Art In The Age Of AIDS, curated by Ted Gott at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra in 1994 – is supported by an extensive program of public events (see below) some of which I hope to get to. The community lost so many good people.

I just want to say ‘good on ya, Andi’, hope your smiling up there somewhere!

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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Many thankx to Michael Graf and The George Paton Gallery for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. The exhibition will be open until 9pm on Wednesday 23 July as part of the Nite Art Walk.

Andi Nellsün
Matr’x
1993

To coincide with the 20th International AIDS Conference to be held in Melbourne in July, TRANSMISSIONS | Archiving HIV/AIDS | Melbourne 1979-2014 is an exhibition of artworks, manuscripts, and other material from private collections and public archives. It will focus on the partnership between government, health professionals, and Melbourne’s gay community, and on relations between activism, art and design.

Australia is recognised for having implemented one the world’s most successful HIV/AIDS prevention campaigns. The exhibition and conference, however, coincide with a twenty-year high in infection rates. To be able to reach a younger generation,current health promotion campaigns have become increasingly sophisticated. TRANSMISSIONS will investigate several of these campaigns in relation to others from the past thirty years.

TRANSMISSIONS will feature artworks by Marcus Bunyan, Juan Davila, Andrew Foster, Brent Harris, Mathew Jones, Peter Lyssiotis, Lex Middleton, Andi Nellsün, Marcus O’Donnell, Scott Redford, and Ross T Smith.

A publication and a comprehensive public program will accompany this two-week exhibition.

Exhibition curated by Michael Graf and Russell Walsh.

Andi Nellsün
Synergy
1993

Free Public program

Wednesday 16 July 5.30 pm – 7.30 pm – Exhibition Launch

Thursday 17 July, 5.30 pm – 6.30 pm – Introduction to the archives
Nick Henderson (Australian Queer Archives) and Katie Wood (University of Melbourne Archives) in conversation with Russell Walsh.

Friday 18 July, 5.30 pm – 6.30 pm – Activism, archives and history
Graham Willett (Australian Lesbian & Gay Archives) in conversation with Russell Walsh.

Saturday 19 July, 3 pm – 4 pm – Curator floor-talk with Michael Graf and Russell Walsh

Wednesday 23 July – exhibition open till 9pm for Nite Art Walk

Wednesday 23 July 7.00 pm – 8.00 pm – Hares and Hyenas Word is Out presents: Charles Roberts, Infected Queer – 20 years on
Melbourne writer Javant Biarujia will read from the polemical AIDS diary that he helped edit and publish in 1994.

Thursday 24 July, 5.30 pm – 6.30 pm – Don’t Leave Me This Way: Art In The Age Of AIDS: 20 years on
Ted Gott, Curator of the seminal exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia in 1994, in conversation with Michael Graf, with several of the exhibition’s artists present for comment.

Friday 25 July, 5.30 pm – 6.30 pm – The Face of HIV/AIDS: Photographic Portraiture and HIV/AIDS 1984-1994
Susannah Seaholm-Rolan reflecting on why many of the artists featured in Don’t Leave Me This Way: Art In The Age Of AIDS worked in the medium of photographic portraiture and self-portraiture (includes exhibition closing drinks).

Please note: all events will commence sharply at advertised times owing to the early closure of the Student Union Building

Lex Middleton
Gay Beauty Myth
1992
Gelatin silver photographs

Juan Davila (Chilean-Australian, b. 1946)
LOVE
1988
Oil on canvas
© Juan Davila, Courtesy Kalli Rolfe Contemporary Art

The central theme of the exhibition is the response from Melbourne’s LGBT community to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. It will contain artworks from this period as well as activist, government and other cultural responses – some of the works have never been exhibited before.

Michael Graf is co-curator of Transmissions, along with Russell Walsh. Both Graf and Walsh have spent the past seven months trawling through the Australian Queer Archives (AQuA) and the University of Melbourne Archives, where they have discovered some of the most moving and unique stories in Melbourne’s LGBT history.

“We wanted to focus on some of the cultural responses to the crisis,” Graf says. “The main part of that has been Ted Gott’s exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia in 1994: Don’t leave me this way: art in the age of AIDS. That exhibition became an incredibly important event for a lot of people. The NGA actually thought they would get 10,000 people through the space in four or five months – they got 140,000 people.

“It became a kind of pilgrimage for people from Melbourne and Sydney and other places around Australia. They went to Canberra specifically to see that exhibition. It was the first time a national gallery anywhere in the world put on an exhibition about HIV/AIDS.”

Transmissions includes copies of the visitors books from Don’t leave me this way: art in the age of AIDS. As the exhibition became a place where people remembered those they had lost, they poured their emotions and their experiences of the exhibition into the visitors books.

“There are some extraordinary accounts,” Graf says. “They had this experience in a national gallery to actually grieve.”

Graf and Walsh also tracked down artists from this exhibition. While many concede that Don’t leave me this way has been long forgotten, the milieu surrounding Transmissions is that it is time for this work to be considered again.

“They [the artists] have also said this is the perfect time to remember it,” Graf says. “Sometimes these things have to wait until they have receded enough back into history before they can be looked at again.” …

Graf hopes people visiting Transmissions will take away the richness of these collections. He also hopes they attract a younger audience as well as those who will remember what life was like in the gay community at the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

“We’re hoping people might be inspired to access places such as the Australia Lesbian and Gay Archives and for a younger generation of people in Melbourne to be exposed to this incredible important history.”

Rachel Cook. “Transmissions: Archiving HIV/AIDS – Melbourne 1979 – 2014,” on the Gay News Network website, 2nd July 2014 [Online] Cited 06/07/2014. No longer available online