ACCA Podcast

Creative practice researchers: Prof Carol Brown, Dr Troy Innocent, and A/Prof Linda Knight, chaired by Rachel Iampolski addresses how artistic practices offer insurgent modes for developing reconnection with urban spaces after a prolonged lockdown, and sustained anxiety around public spaces. The panel shares their practical and creative approaches for being in the world and the key role that insurgent artistic modes will play in redeveloping our confidence in public space. The experimental visual art practices, digital and gestural drawing, sound art and sonic practices, walking, creative movement, performance and installations explore emotion and affect, aesthetics, the sensorial as well as conflict, tension and congestion, and activism and play in the post-pandemic urban space. Collectively the panel advocates for the generative potential of insurgent modes for urban reconnection.

Urbanists and planners need to engage in broader and messier practices if they are to design inclusive and accessible public spaces. The production of space is as much a social and political process, as a physical one, and identities of places are often latent, contested and invisible. A new genre of artists and creative practitioners are engaging in public space, using site-based practices that catalyse new uses, build new constituencies, and amplify marginalised voices. Moderated by Mel Dodd, this roundtable event brings together five leading creative practitioners from Monash Art, Design and Architecture (MADA) – Gene Bawden, N’arweet Carolyn Briggs, Emily Floyd, Timothy Moore and Sarah Lynn Rees – all working in the public realm, to reveal a more representative city and explore the ways we can make spaces truly public.

Listen to ACCA’s Artist Educator and Curator of the Education Space Andrew Atchison with artists Ross Coulter, Eugenia Lim and James Nguyen for a discussion about art and working in public space. This program is associated with the Education Space: Creating Art in Public, a hybrid studio, classroom and gallery designed to promote active participation with, and careful consideration of, public art practices and the diverse and inventive approaches artists adopt when creating artwork for public space.

Listen to Melbourne Art Library for the first in their series of discussions about experimental modes of sharing information. Reflecting on the library of written materials on public art, public culture and public space in the Reading Space: The Common Room, Melbourne Art Library unpack the role of the contemporary art librarian. Forum Series: Distribution What power dynamics are at play in the distribution of information? How democratic is ‘collective’ knowledge? And how are individuals and collectives disrupting the flow of information? The Distribution forum series prods, unravels, makes-visible, and excites non-mainstream ways of information sharing. Engaging publishers, editors, and alternative institutions, the series explores active projects in Naarm/Melbourne that question the traditional flow of information. Presented by Melbourne Art Library, a not-for-profit lending library exploring art librarianship as a philosophy and mode of practice; a practice guided by collaboration, criticism, and exchange.

Join artists Jon Campbell, Guled Abdulwasi, and Laresa Kosloff at ACCA as they discuss their commissioned works as part of Who’s Afraid of Public Space? offsite projects.

Join Melbourne Art Library for the second in their series of discussions about experimental modes of sharing information as part of Who's Afraid of Public Space?. The forum panel includes: Nell Fraser (Melbourne Art Library), Caroline Phillips (Womens Art Register), and Nick Henderson (Australian Queer Archives).

Join artists Sean Lynch and Mikala Dwyer, and writer Alicia Sometimes for a panel discussion about public art, presented in association with the recent launch of two major City of Melbourne temporary public art commissions in University Square, Carlton.

Join artists Simona Castricum, Michael Candy, Hoang Tran Nguyen, and Callum Morton at ACCA as they discuss their commissioned works as part of Who’s Afraid of Public Space? offsite projects.

Listen to a panel discussion on Melbourne-based collective APHIDS’ new moving-image work 'DESTINY' with artist Eugenia Lim, and worker-performers Cher Tan and Wasay, moderated by Amelia Wallin. 'DESTINY' 2021 is a moving-image work made in collaboration with on-demand or ‘gig economy’ workers – rideshare drivers, food delivery riders and cleaners – exploring personal and global experiences of the platform economy.

Listen to N’arweet Carolyn Briggs AM, Sarah Lynn Rees, Andrew Atchison, Stephanie Pahnis, Lauren Crockett, Nicola Cortese, Timothy Moore, and John Tanner as they share their approaches to transforming ACCA’s four galleries to become civic spaces: Gathering Space: Nargee Djeembana, Education Space: Creating Art in Public, Reading Space: The Common Room, and Project Space: The Hoarding.