Do you keep thinking there must be another way is a group exhibition that addresses strategies of representation, resistance and withdrawal. Including installation, painting, performance, text and video, the exhibition considers behaviours towards, and opposition of, presiding power structures.
Spanning across two floors of Mimosa House, Do you keep thinking there must be another way presents historic and contemporary works that generate discussions on identity and labour. Within the works strategies for collaborative exchange are mapped out and tactics that include honesty, parody and poetry are employed.
Do you keep thinking there must be another way’s title is taken from Emma Talbot’s work 21st Century Sleepwalk (2018). In the exhibition, the title acts as a proposition to consider the ways that artists question and dismantle imposed hierarchies within professional and personal spheres. The intergenerational grouping of artists in the exhibition point to the continuing work that empowers multiple ways of living and working.
The exhibition includes a series of talks, screenings, workshops and readings, with contributions by: Rose English, Karen Di Franco, Caspar Heinemann, Georgia Horgan and Jennifer Kabat. Emma Talbot’s 10 metre-long silk painting, 21st Century Sleepwalk (2018) embeds the personal in the political, exploring the experience of a citizen in a contemporary city undergoing massive regeneration. The boxes of text, which are suspended from cranes, or floating in the sky, ask questions about the status of the individual in relation to bigger political forces that determine the world we occupy.
The piece reflects on contemporary angst, in relation to personal fulfilment, achievement and failure, set within a snakes-and-ladders world of flux and uncertainty. Sequences of figures, climbing and falling, which evoke archetypal dream imagery, are set against such questions as ‘what are you reaching for something that sits just beyond - that moves as you move - unattainable’. As the sulphuric skyline turns from night to dawn, the city gives way to an imaginary floating world, where the text asks ‘do you keep thinking there must be another way?’
With: Georgia Horgan, Lee Lozano, Howardena Pindell, Polvo de Gallina Negra, Raju Rage, Georgia Sagri and Emma Talbot
