Subtext
The Wheeler Centre
176 Little Lonsdale Street
Melbourne
Sat 5 June 2010
Subtext is a new initiative of un Projects, focusing on artists’ writing. The one day symposium will feature a keynote lecture by U.S. artist Martha Rosler, a panel discussion chaired by Jeff Khan, and workshops and performances from Australian artists including Anastasia Klose, Liv Barrett, Danielle Freakley, Masato Takasaka, Lily Hibberd and Agents of Proximity. Subtext will critically investigate the manifold approaches artists take to writing, and the many purposes it serves in the broader context of their practice, both in process and presentation.
PANEL DISCUSSION: 9.30 am
KEYNOTE LECTURE: 11:30 am
PERFORMANCES/WORKSHOPS: From 2pm.
Gold coin donation for each session.
Martha Rosler: SubText Keynote Lecture
Brooklyn-based artist Martha Rosler has worked in the mediums of video, photo-text, installation, performance, and critical writing since the 1970s. Recurrent themes in her practice are the media, war, and shared spaces and issues, from housing and homelessness to systems of transport. Feminism has been and remains central to her practice. Her work was transformed by the Vietnam war and the movement against it. These concerns have returned to her practice since September 2001.
In 1989, in lieu of a solo exhibition at the Dia Art Foundation in New York City, Rosler organized the project If You Lived Here…, in which over 50 artists, film- and video producers, photographers, architects, planners, homeless people, squatters, activist groups and schoolchildren addressed contested living situations, architecture, planning, and utopian visions. In 2009, an archive exhibition based on this project, If You Lived Here Still, opened at e-flux’s gallery in New York and then travelled (2010) to Casco Office for Art Design and Theory, in Utrecht, Netherlands.
About eight thousand books from her personal library have become a public resource through their circulation as the Martha Rosler Library in the United States and Europe, and a selection will be brought to Melbourne for the Subtext Symposium.
Her work has been seen in the Venice Biennale of 2003, the Liverpool Biennial and the Taipei Biennial in 2004, Documenta 7 and 12, and several Whitney Biennials. Her essays have been published in Artforum, Afterimage, Quaderns and Grey Room. She has published fifteen books of photography, art, and writing.
This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
