Opening NGV Trennial 2020

This week, I thought I’d share some of the many highlights you’ll experience either as visitors to the gallery spaces or online through our virtual programs. After arriving at the water wall, visitors will be greeted by the delicately handwoven net of Glenda Nicholls, a Waddi Waddi/Ngarrindjeri/Yorta Yorta artist. In a mesh made up of many metres of cotton hang a thousand delicate feather flowers Nicholls has created with her daughter. There is a strong tradition of generational feather flower making in Aboriginal communities throughout the south-east of Australia, and through this work, Nicholls pays respect to Milloo (the Murray River) and her many ancestors who are connected to this special place.

In Federation Court, the senses will be struck by Turkish artist Refik Anadol’s Quantum memories. This ten by ten metre digital screen draws upon a dataset of more than two hundred million nature-related images from the internet, which are processed using an exceptionally fast quantum computer that has been programmed with machine-learning algorithms. The resulting real-time video can be considered both an alternate dimension of the natural world and a radical visualisation of our digitised memories of nature. Through the work, Anadol encourages us to imagine the potential of this experimental computer technology and the immense opportunities it presents for the future of art and design.

Japanese designer Tomo Koizumi has gained recent prominence via Instagram after his work was brought to the attention of influential English stylist Katie Grand who facilitated the presentation of his debut collection during New York Fashion Week 2019. The top and skirt on display is bold, colourful and sculpturally exuberant and is Koizumi’s version of a rainbow pride flag. Incorporating more than 200 metres of multi-coloured, ruffled polyester organza, the work is intended as a comment on inclusivity and the need to ‘see and touch beauty’ in difficult times.

In Alicja Kwade’s WeltenLinie nothing is quite what it seems. Evolving as an experience rather than a static installation, the work comes to life through the viewer’s movement. By using double-sided mirrors and carefully placed, paired objects, Kwade creates the illusion of sudden and surprising material transformations. As visitors move within the steel structure, the way that objects are understood within the space shifts dramatically, depending on perspective. In her practice that spans across a wide range of media, she questions the structures of reality and reflects on perceptual habits in everyday life.

Similarly manipulating the surrounding space, the form of Cerith Wyn Evans’s C=O=D=A unfolds as a drawing in light, suspended in space. The work explores the legacy of Japanese Noh Theatre, a form of traditional, highly coded theatre involving music, movement, dance and elaborate costuming, originating in Japan during the fourteenth century. C=O=D=A comprises multiple visual elements ranging from scribble-like gestures to diagrammatic symbols. The work includes references to the structural formulae for chemical compounds, along with a form of a choreographic score describing movement. Brought to life by the Wyn Evans’s signature white neon, the work punctuates the viewer’s field of vision with rapid vectors, loops, lines, curves and geometric forms, the relationships between each shifting as the viewer moves around the work.

Jeff Koons is one of the most recognised American contemporary artists working today. Venus is part of his ongoing Porcelain series, which juxtaposes classical ideals of beauty with sophisticated contemporary production technologies. Made of mirror-polished stainless steel, the sculpture is based on an eighteenth-century porcelain figurine of the same name. Mirrors and reflections have long been hallmarks of Koons’s work and he has cited his love for the intoxicating quality of the reflection and its resulting distortion, as well as its ability to implicate the viewer within the work.

Visitors will be immersed in the work of British artist and designer Faye Toogood who has reimagined the NGV’s seventeenth century Flemish, Dutch and British galleries. Using her designs and artworks in dialogue with a selection of works from the NGV Collection, Toogood has designed three spaces, each alluding to the qualities of light present in the historical artworks. Daylight creates a dialogue between landscape and still-life paintings of the Dutch Golden Age through her crystal furniture and monumental Day tapestry. Candlelight sees the Family bust sculptures and hand painted wall scenography evoke the surreal and reflect the lighting qualities seen in the surrounding portraiture works. Moonlight sees her Night tapestry act as a melancholic backdrop that dissolves the installation to a luminous and reflective close.

Hannah Brontë’s digital video EYE HEAR U MAGIK explores how ancestral intuition has been passed down through Aboriginal people in the wake of colonisation. Brontë uses music and film to unblock intuitive beliefs, and to tune into a deep sense of knowing, which she refers to by many names – such as ‘the knowing’, ‘the cunning’, ‘illpunja’ and more. EYE HEAR U MAGIK explores the ways in which Brontë’s own culture and spirituality have been and continue to be appropriated and offers insight into a foreboding future.

Ethiopian-born and Melbourne-based artist Atong Atem explores migrant stories in the African diaspora using photography and portraiture as a vehicle to express culture and identity. Atem’s Studio series draws on the history of studio photography in Africa, and in particular the work of leading photographers Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keïta who were active in Mali in the 1960s. Acknowledging this rich tradition, Atem’s photographs are always staged studio portraits. She titles her works with the names of her friends, who are also the subjects, to share a personal perspective on global movement in the contemporary world.

In the NGV’s garden, JR’s Homily to Country stands tall as an open-air chapel, housing five large-scale stained-glass windows, each featuring his photography from a 2020 research trip. The work draws attention to the ecological decline of the Darling (Baaka) River, Australia’s third longest river, caused by intensive water extraction due to irrigation, climate change and drought. Stimulated by an interest in the plight of farmers globally and the tensions that often exist between Indigenous peoples and multinational agribusinesses, JR’s work also focuses on the human impact of the river’s decline. Two window portraits depict orchardists who have been forced to remove and burn their families’ commercial orchards due to lack of irrigation flows, and the third depicts a senior Baakandji Elder and spokesperson for the Darling (Baaka) River. For the Baakandji, the health of the river is inextricably and directly related to the health of their culture, and in 2020 large sections of the river ran dry. I invite you to watch this remarkable work come to life.

Over the summer, the NGV Garden will also be a place to reconnect with family and friends with expanded seating and picnic areas to enjoy and the best of Melbourne music, food, bars and entertainment.

Free timed-entry tickets are now available to book online and we also have a number of exciting programs to support the exhibition. We are thrilled to present an opening weekend, in partnership with The New York Times, featuring a series of free panel conversations, held at the Gallery and streamed online. The panels will host local and international curators, artists, experts and academics discussing relevant themes explored throughout NGV Triennial 2020.

It’s an incredible NGV summer, and we can’t wait to welcome you back.

Best wishes,

Tony Ellwood AM
Director, National Gallery of Victoria