“Stranger than fiction”
Archie Barry, Teresa Busuttil, Nicholas Currie, Rosie Isaac, Basim Magdy, Rä di Martino, Sammaneh Pourshafighi and Joanna Kitto
29 June → 31 Aug 2024
Stranger than fiction brings together artists engaged in troubling the boundaries between reality and fiction.
Across moving image, performance, text, sculpture and installation, each artist employs material and narrative experiments to reckon with the impossible challenge of representing a singular way of representing the world or existing within it, and the absurdity in trying.
Featuring new work alongside existing projects, the exhibition brings together artists based locally, nationally and internationally; Archie Barry (Vic), Teresa Busuttil (SA), Nicholas Currie (Vic), Rosie Isaac (Vic), Basim Magdy (Egypt/Switzerland) and Rä di Martino (Italy), and Sammaneh Pourshafighi (Vic), curated by West Space’s Director Joanna Kitto.
Stranger than fiction is a West Space exhibition presented in partnership with Composite Moving Image and presented across West Space and Composite, Collingwood Yards.
Archie Barry is an interdisciplinary visual artist in Naarm/Melbourne. Their work is autobiographical, somatic and process-led, spanning performance, video, music composition and writing. By cultivating a genealogy of personas based on their own experiences of power and mortality, they produce self-portraiture that troubles dominant notions of personhood and representation.
Teresa Busuttil is a visual artist working between Tarntanya/Adelaide and Malta. Her practice blends personal stories, family history, and fantasy through multidisciplinary forms of art, including sculpture, installation, and moving image. Drawing on a kitsch aesthetic and religious iconography, Teresa explores culture, grief and memory influenced by her connection to Malta and her experiences within the Maltese diaspora.
Nicholas Currie is an emerging artist and curator based in Naarm/Melbourne. A descendant of the Mununjali clan of Yugambeh people of Brisbane and Beaudesert, he works predominantly in performance, installation and painting.
Rosie Isaac is a visual artist and writer in Naarm/Melbourne. Interested in art-making that imagines different material and social futures, Rosie's research-based practice focuses on language as it is experienced in the body while reading, in relationships, and via social institutions. Rosie has recently presented across the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Liquid Architecture, Next Wave, Gertrude Contemporary and Adelaide Contemporary Experimental.
Basim Magdy is an artist from Assiut, Egypt, living and working in Basel, Switzerland. His work uses fictitious pasts and dystopic futures to put forward a critical commentary on the present. Magdy has shown across M HKA Museum of Contemporary Art, Antwerp, Belgium; MAAT Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Lisbon; La Kunsthalle Mulhouse, France; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; MAXXI National Museum of the 21st Century Arts, Rome; Jeu de Paume, Paris; CAPC Museum of Contemporary Art, Bordeaux; Deutsche Bank KunstHalle, Berlin; Arnolfini, Bristol; South London Gallery, London; Mathaf, Doha; Art in General, New York; State of Concept, Athens; and University Galleries of Illinois State University, Normal, IL, USA.
Rä di Martino is an artist in Rome, Italy. Her work has been shown across the Tate Modern (London); MoMA PS1 (NY); Palazzo Grassi (Venice); GAM and Fondazione Sandretto (Turin); MACRO and MAXXI (Rome); Museion (Bolzano); MCA (Chicago); Magasin (Grenoble); PAC and HangarBicocca (Milan). Di Martino has participated in film festivals such Locarno Film Festival; VIPER Basel; Transmediale.04; New York Underground Film Festival; Kasseler Dokfest; Torino Film Festival and Venice Film Festival, where she won, in 2014, the SIAE Award and Gillo Pontecorvo Award and a Nastro d’Argento with the medium length documentary The Show MAS Go On (2014). Her first feature film Controfigura (2017) premiered at Venice Film Festival and in 2018, she developed the project AFTERALL with the MIBAC Italian Council Award, and in 2022 held a solo exhibition at Forte Belvedere (Florence).
Sammaneh Pourshafighi is a multidiscipinary artist in Naarm/Melbourne. She is a Queer genderfluid Muslim who arrived in Australia as a refugee after the Iranian Revolution and grew up on the problematic paradise of the Gold Coast. Across film, performance, poetry, collage, painting and photography, Sammaneh's practice examines identity politics, mental health, diasporic tensions, ethno-futurism, and the complex relationships between bodies and environments through an intersectional feminist lens, and often with an emphasis on the element of colour, surprising contrasts, autobiographical events, and humour.
Joanna Kitto has been Director of West Space since late 2022. Joanna has spent ten years refining her inclusive, personable and receptive approach to contemporary art presentation, with an interest in generating meaningful connections between art and audiences. She has has held curatorial and leadership positions across university art museums, contemporary art organisations, council and artist-led initiatives across Naarm/Melbourne and Tarntanya/Adelaide. Joanna frequently contributes to national arts publications and discussions, and is a founding co-facilitator of independent publishing platform fine print magazine.