The 2022 programme at Perth Institute Of Contemporary Arts (PICA) charts connection, activism, memory, migration, systems of communication and ways of sharing lived/new knowledge.
The year will bring audiences a series of intimate, immersive, and optimistic encounters spanning country, community rebellion and celebration.
In the exhibitions programme, drawing together textiles, sound, video and social practice, York-based Yindjibarndi artist Katie West teams up with Perth-born, Rotterdam-based curator Eloise Sweetman for We hold you close, an exhibition inviting visitors to consider the relationships we have with each other and the planet. You can get comfortable as you sit on hand-dyed soft furnishings and join others in making twisted string from repurposed fabric. The threads will, over time, become an ever-expanding supportive structure.
PICA’s annual Hatched National Graduate Show makes its return in 2022 – a showcase of leading, emerging artists recently graduated from art schools across the nation. The exhibition offers a tantalising glimpse into the diverse and exciting practices of those coming up in the arts world. Those selected will join some of Australia’s leading contemporary artists, as Hatched alumni.
Pilar Mata Dupont’s solo exhibition features new and recent works, calling attention to her highly theatrical and cinematic approach to re-interpreting history. Across video, performance and photography, Pilar brings to life alternative versions of written and oral histories. She draws attention to the fallibility and subjectivity of memory.
'Dead-ends & Detours'
Drawing on his Australian-Thai heritage, Nathan Beard presents personal, playful reflections on the complexities surrounding the construction of diasporic identity in A Puzzlement. The exhibition spans photography, video, sculpture and installation, as Nathan incorporates selections from archives – including that of his own family – focusing on elements which may be considered as ‘exotic’ or ‘kitsch’ from one perspective, and mundane/everyday from another.
PICA’s performance programme comprises of seven works. First up, ‘Body Of Knowledge’ is performed by teenagers who call into the theatre on mobile phones, and is a powerful meditation on age and change. There are questions of boundaries, sexuality, pleasure, shame, pain, consent, ageing, grief and death.
‘Dead-ends & Detours’ puts the audience in a wheelchair, showing that disability is not a dirty word. It’s an interactive, outdoor installation inviting people on the street to compete in an obstacle course using a wheelchair – as well as in insight into the lived experience of physical disability.
An aural and visual excursion into the musical fugue and the psychological ‘fugue state’, ‘While You Sleep’ brings together string quartet, piano, electronics, video and animation, in a counterpoint of music, movement and image . . . Nothing is quite what it seems. Hand-drawn animation, live action, video and stop-motion are choreographed alongside the musicians on stage.
Check out the full programme here.
PICA’s 2022 programme begins with We hold you close and Monumental (Exhibition) and ‘Body Of Knowledge’ (Performance).
