Sam Watson-Wood, Performance Contemporary program curator and Director of Friends with Strangers, shares the artworks she’s most looking forward to seeing at Sydney Contemporary 2024.
1 – Tennant Creek Brio – Eleanor Jawurlngali Dixon & Rupert Berthas, Black Cross, 2024, Cassandra Bird
“The collective’s work addresses the ongoing tensions between Indigenous and settler cultures, revitalises traditional practices, and celebrates community resilience, all while drawing from deeply personal, multigenerational experiences. I find the graphic nature of their work engaging, urgent, playful and genius.”
2 – Adele Warner, What you see in others (exists in you), 2024, Minerva
“Warner’s work holds alienation, nostalgia, and intimacy, presenting an uncomfortable synthesis of a hybrid online/offline world. It explores both disconnection and connection. It is personal and visceral.”
3 – Suzann Victor, Prismatic River 2022, Gajah Gallery
“Victor’s ‘Lens-Painting Series’ reimagines early colonial postcards of Southeast Asia. The works are intricate hand-painted compositions placed beneath lenses. It is like peering into a river, the view obscured; providing a kaleidoscope of scenes that breaks up the invasive gaze.”
4 – Shan Turner Carroll, Bodies on a Rock, 2022, COMA
“Turner-Carroll, explores the hidden realms of knowledge and exchange, queering and questioning the intricate relationships between humans, nature, and art itself. I have read his work can sing to snakes, serenade and signal with aliens, and barter with islands, rivers, and oceans and I believe it.”
5 – Stanislava Pinchuk, The Wine Dark Sea, 2021, Ames Yavuz
“This work is from a series called “the Wine Dark Sea” Pinchuk intertwines language from Australian offshore detention center reports with Homer’s Odyssey, using marble sculptures to highlight shared themes of exile and displacement. I love how she creates these elegant monoliths to stand as monuments of truth.”
6 – Darrell Sibosado, Galalan at Gumiri, 2023-24, N.Smith Gallery
Sibosado is a Bard man from Lombadina situated on the Dampier Peninsula of the Kimberley coast. He makes Riji, or ancient pearl shell designs into modern light sculptures and installations that echo the glistening scales of the Rainbow Serpent on the Ocean. A few years ago I stayed in Lombadina and when I see these works I remember that place and imagine a serpent on the intense turquoise water.
