Curator

STEVIE S. HAN

Artists

ARCHIE BARRY

LOUISA BUFARDECI

LIAM JAMES

ANNIKA KOOPS

ROEE ROSEN

ARTUR ZMIJEWSKI

Date: 19-Jan-2019 – 24-Feb-2019

Location: Contemporary Art Tasmania

ARTISTS

Archie Barry

Archie Barry is an interdisciplinary visual artist based in Melbourne, working predominantly in video and performance. Their work concerns notions of non-disclosure within a self-portraiture practice. Barry questions the stability or coherence of selfhood by creating moments of visceral and affective encounters, often multiplying their own voice and body parts. Over the past year Barry has exhibited and performed at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Artspace, The State Library of Victoria and ALASKA Projects. Barry has given performance lectures and partaken in panel discussions at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Testing Grounds and the Melbourne Art Fair. They have written print articles for Art + Australia and Archer magazine and are undertaking a three-month residency at Phasmid Studio in Berlin from October – December 2018. Barry completed a Masters of Contemporary Art at Victorian College of the Arts in 2017.

Louisa Bufardeci

Born Melbourne, Australia 1969. Lives and works in Melbourne.

Louisa Bufardeci completed undergraduate studies in drawing in 1998 at the Victorian College of the Arts and a Master of Fine Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006.

Through digital prints, charts, maps, embroidery and installation, Bufardeci uses visual coding systems to represent statistical information from the world around us. Her abstract compositions are grounded in politics fact, offering new ways to reflect upon contemporary world events. In her work, Bufardeci hopes to bring awareness to the various systems that govern society.

Bufardeci’s works can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne), Monash University of Art (Melbourne), the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (Sydney), The University of Melbourne (Melbourne), Artbank (Sydney), Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, (Virginia, USA), RMIT University (Melbourne), and prominent private and corporate collections.

Annika Koops

Annika Koops is an artist whose work explores the impact of networked technologies upon human relations and the formation of self. By exploring new representational paradigms involved in the intertwining of painting, photography and computer generated imagery, her work reflects upon the break down of barriers between physical and virtual space.

Koops has been the recipient of a number of significant grants and prizes including the Australia Council for the Arts British School, Rome Residency, The Keith and Elisabeth Murdoch Traveling Fellowship, Australia Council New Work grant and an Australian Postgraduate Award. She has been invited to participate in a number of International exhibitions such as the Inaugural Bristol Biennial and the Project(or) Exhibition Rotterdam as well as having exhibited at a range of public institutions, artist run spaces and private galleries in Australia. She has undertaken National and International residencies as well as having work in significant Australian public collections such as Art Bank and MONA Hobart. She is represented by Bett Gallery, Hobart.

Liam James

Tasmanian born artist Liam James completed his Bachelor of Contemporary Art at the University of Tasmania in 2010 with Honours from the Australian National University in Canberra in 2012. Now based in Launceston, he has shown in various galleries across Tasmania, and has exhibited nationally and internationally.

He has an accompanying curatorial practice that has seen him involved with several artist-run initiatives, and project based exhibitions, these inform and compliment his practice. James works primarily with photography, creating evocative scenes and portraits rich with references to Australian art history, his personal identity and the wider canon of art. Each image cleverly critiques its place in this dialogue, and provokes questions from the viewer about the discomfort of belonging, and our understanding of art and local history, as it is presented to us and by whom.

Roee Rosen

Roee Rosen (b. 1963) is an Israeli-American artist, filmmaker and writer. Rosen is a professor at Ha’Midrasha Art College, and at the Bezalel Art Academy, both in Israel.

Rosen’s painting and text installation, Live and Die as Eva Braun (1995-1997), stirred a scandal when first exhibited at the Israel Museum. It was later recognized as groundbreaking in its approach to the representation of the holocaust, and was exhibited in Berlin, New York, London, Warsaw, and, in 2017, in Athens as part of Documenta 14 (2017).

Rosen dedicated years to his fictive feminine persona, the Jewish-Belgian Surrealist painter and pornographer Justine Frank, a project that entailed fabricating her entire oeuvre as well as a book and a short film, Two Women and a Man (2005). The film won a special mention on its premiere at the Oberhausen short film festival. The book, Justine Frank, Sweet Sweat (Sternberg Press) was listed as one of the best books of 2009 by Artforum magazine.

In Rosen’s cinematic cycle The Confessions of Roee Rosen (2008), the artist’s supposed confessions are delivered in Hebrew by three surrogates: illegal female foreign workers who do not understand the language. Confessions premiered at the FIDMarseille festival, where it won a special mention, and was later shown worldwide, among other places at Manifesta 7, in Italy.

In 2010 Rosen created two films. Hilarious and Out, in which a BDSM session becomes a political exorcism. Out premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the Orizzonti award for best medium-length film. The film went on the win numerous awards, including a nomination for the European Academy award.

Artur Żmijewski

Visual artist, born on the 26th of May, 1966 in Warsaw. His works make reference to (displaced) individuals and societal trauma. At first glance, his images appear to be strictly documentary photographs and video, yet the artist’s analytical staging becomes clearly recognizable through the selection of images during the editing process.

Żmijewski does not shy away from putting the generally accepted rules of Political Correctness into question. His works on the mentally and physically handicapped has drawn significant public attention. He appears to be an artist always in constant search of the next modality of artistic expression, ever striving to amplify the impact of his art on its subjects, enlarging its territory beyond its conventional borders.

His solo show If It Happened Only Once It’s As If It Never Happened was at “Kunsthalle Basel” in 2005, the same year in which he represented Poland at the 51st Venice Biennale. He has shown in Documenta 14 (2017), Documenta 12 (2007), and Manifesta 4 (2002); Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco (2012, 2005); National Gallery of Art Zacheta, Warsaw (2005); Kunstwerke, Berlin (2004); CAC, Vilnius (2004); “Moderna Museet”, Stockholm (1999). Earlier this year he presented Democracies at “Foksal Gallery Foundation”, Warsaw; and is making new work for The Museum of Modern Art (Moma) in New York as part of their Projects’ Series in September 2009. “Cornerhouse”, Manchester, presented the first major UK survey of Zmijewski’s work, spanning his practice from 2003 to the present day, from November 2009 – January 2010. He was the curator of the 7th Berlin Biennale in 2012 – of which he opened the curatorial process as a collaboration.

Berek (The Game of Tag), 1999 has repeatedly brought controversy. The piece depicts nude adults playing tag in the gas chamber of the Stutthof concentration camp.