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20.01.2022 1 August - 1 September 2016 Andrew Christie (Guest Curator): 'Forgetting Babylon'...Continue reading

16.01.2022 7 March 2016 - 7 April 2016 Artist: Brad Buckley Artist's Statement:... My works operate within an overarching schema entitled ‘The Slaughterhouse Project’, which is an aesthetic armature, a strategy used for aesthetic infiltration, or infection. As the name implies, the Project is a conceptual device of cauterization, a way of exploring taboos, for investigating political anomalies, for venting dissatisfaction with social or political injustice. Artists, irrespective of their art form, are in the main communicating vessels that can intuit the shape of things to come; things that often become established in our mainstream culture. This is not a radical proposition. Artists, thanks to their professional skills, poetic instincts and experimental, intuitive drive to locate an ‘elsewhere’, often function like buffalo scouts, with their ears to the ground so that they can hear which way the herd is heading. In other words, artists are, as the poet Ezra Pound has argued, the antennae of the human race. In keeping with this view of the artist’s role in society, the philosopher Marshall McLuhan also believed that art was an early warning system of sorts to old culture. Perhaps this is also true of today and is one of the key drivers of this project. The Black Books (Are we not all the children of Abraham?) is the latest incarnation of my multi-dimensional and multi-sited ‘Slaughterhouse Project’, which incorporates twenty individual projects from 1990. Using the current date from the Gregorian calendar of 2016; now widely used for secular purposes across most societies regardless of political or religious persuasions. The date 2016 is then translated into 5776 the year in the Jewish calendar and into 1437, which is the year in the Islamic calendar. Each one of these different dates in these three calendars, signalling a moment of either transition or great change in that religion or belief system. Each ‘date’ occupies one of the display cases in Fisher Library, standing as an abstract object and simultaneously, as a system that allows us to measure, categorise and identify the world in which we live. Born in Sydney, Brad Buckley is an artist, activist, urbanist and Professor of Contemporary Art and Culture at Sydney College of the Arts, the University of Sydney. He was educated at St Martin’s School of Art, London, and the Rhode Island School of Design (USA). His work, which operates at the intersection of installation, theatre and performance, investigates questions of cultural control, democracy, freedom and social responsibility. His work has been exhibited internationally for over three decades. He is also the editor, with John Conomos, of Republics of Ideas: Republicanism, Culture, Visual Arts (Pluto, 2001), Rethinking the Contemporary Art School: The Artist, the PhD, and the Academy (NSCADU, 2009) and with Andy Dong and Conomos, Ecologies of Invention (SUP, 2013) and with Conomos, Erasure: The Spectre of Cultural Memory (Libri, 2015).

15.01.2022 20 June - 20 July 2016 Alex GAWRONSKI Jelena TELECKI... This exhibition consists of a series of 10 book titles removed from their original contexts. Each title was chosen for its uncanny or humorous connotations once removed from its wider context. Considered collectively, these titles suggest a type of quasi-Dadaist poetry whose combined effect hints at alternative critical, playful and/or possibly even pataphysical, readings. Graphically the original layout of each book title has been retained although now each has been rendered in watercolour as a ‘painting’. These works further reference the importance of text in contemporary art and artists as diverse as Ed Ruscha and Marcel Broodthaers. Accompanying these text works are figurative paintings by Jelena Telecki. These all respond to the book titles. Together the appropriated titles and their figurative interpretations, establish an open dialogue of fairly infinite suggestability. ‘Objects in the Mirror’ (may be closer than they appear as the warning goes) speaks of how texts and images continually interpolate one another while remaining fundamentally differentiated. The juxtaposition of text and image in this instance may be considered a type of improvisation that draws out the latent possibilities concealed behind the most ordinary words and the words that underlie the most stubbornly elusive representations.

11.01.2022 Guest curator/artist: David Corbet Featured Artists: Shay Mazloom, Dadang Christanto, Clinton Nain, Jumaadi. 12 September - 16 December 2016.... 'The Museum of Dissensus' is an itinerant curatorial platform which explores themes of trauma, loss, genocide and cultural erasure, as well as broader notions of protest and dissent, and the affective power of art and literature to challenge societal conventions of the unthinkable and unspeakable. The original impetus for this approach arose from thinking about the ways in which literature and academic discourse, in tandem with the display conventions of the museum, can be a vehicle of epistemicide the effacement of cultural knowledge and memory. As an extension of this Fisher Library iteration, 'The Museum of Dissensus' will also manifest as an artist/curator book, published in November/December 2016. This will feature some 40 artists worldwide, whose work engages with these themes in diverse ways. Among these artists are Shay Mazloom, Dadang Christanto, Clinton Nain and Jumaadi, some of whose works, drawn from the curator's personal collection, are contained in the vitrine on library entrance level 3. The 'Ex Libris Fisherarium' project has been generously funded by The University of Sydney, Chancellor's Committee.