State of the arts
A ROUND-UP OF THE YEAR’S MOST ANTICIPATED EXHIBITIONS ACROSS THE COUNTRY. ADD TO CALENDAR
NAN GOLDIN: THE BALLAD OF SEXUAL DEPENDENCY AT ART GALLERY OF BALLARAT, UNTIL JUNE 2
“The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is the diary I let people read,” the photographer Nan Goldin once wrote of this body of work. It began as a slideshow of photographs of her friends in various states of pain and ecstasy, love and heartbreak, happiness and loss against the backdrop of 1980s New York and the beginning of the AIDS/HIV crisis, which eventually took many of their lives. Others, she lost to opioid use.
Goldin, who is from Washington DC, moved to New York City in 1978 and began documenting the post-punk new-wave scene as well as the queer communities that had been liberated by the Stonewall riots little more than a decade earlier.
The subjects of her photos were never posed: she captured whatever moment was playing out before her. “For me, it is not a detachment to take a picture,” she said. “It’s a way of touching somebody — it’s a caress, I think that you can actually give people access to their own soul.”
Goldin published the collection as a book in 1986. “The diary is my form of control over my life. It allows me to obsessively record every detail,” the artist wrote. “It enables me to remember.”
The full collection comprises about 700 photographs, 126 of which are in the National Gallery’s permanent collection (the rest live at MOMA in New York).
BRENT HARRIS: SURRENDER & CATCH AT THE ART GALLERY OF SOUTH AUSTRALIA, JULY 6–OCTOBER 20
Four decades of work are shown in Brent Harris’ Surrender & Catch. The exhibition takes its title from sociologist Kurt H. Wolff’s ‘surrender and catch’ process of selfanalysis and complicated methodology of understanding ‘otherness’. Through his signature ambiguous two-dimensional figures, derived from the surrealists’ automatic drawing technique that attempts to tap into the subconscious, Harris explores mortality and connection, the body and desire, faith and after-death, and childhood memories. The exhibition is on display at Tarrawarra Museum of Art in Victoria until March 11, and will then be installed at the Art Gallery of South Australia.
ANGELA TIATIA: THE DARK CURRENT AT SULLIVAN+STRUMPF SYDNEY, UNTIL APRIL 27
Auckland-born, Sydney-based multidisciplinary artist Angela Tiatia is well and truly on the rise. After being awarded the Ian Potter Moving Image Commission in 2022, she created the most ambitious moment of her career (so far), The Dark Current. Utilising film and AI, the work is a visual poem that conjures the siren call of big cities that lures people from small islands (Tiatia is of Sãmoan heritage). Her work is both personal and global in sentiment, expressing her hope for the future, especially with her family lineage to the part of the world most impacted by climate change.
NAMEDROPPING AT MONA, HOBART, JUNE 15, 2024–APRIL 21, 2025
Status. That elusive quality so many of us want, yet paradoxically, the more you strive for it, the less it’s given to you. Who decides who has status, how do we signal that we have it, and what does having it even mean? The curators at the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) were pondering exactly this as they compiled 200 works by ‘highstatus’ artists for this exhibition fittingly titled Namedropping. It features works by David Bowie, Picasso, Ai Weiwei, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger and Vincent Namatjira (to boast just a few), and the opening aligns with the MONA Gala, whose guests will be the first to see the exhibition, with all proceeds from the event going towards Material Institute, the charity founded by MONA’S Kirsha Kaechele that runs community events, social enterprises and food education programs at community hubs and schools across Tasmania.