Of stadiums and construction sites (Ne change rien pour que tout soit différent),1 a project by Lisa Radford, is a response to the socio-political events that precede and unfold during the decade from 2005 to 2015. Artists working in and around Gertrude formed new critical vocabularies amongst the shifting cultural landscape, while the institution itself was shaped by those same forces.

Traversing writing, performance, sculpture, and installation, the project is framed by an assembly of re-staged exhibitions—Pat Foster and Jen Berean, Low expectations, Murray White Room, 2008; Ardi Gunawan, luckily there’s no inside, Open Archive, 2011; and Another yummy fantasy II, TCB art inc., 2011. The project is bookended by a collapsing pinboard wall containing a Warburgian arrangement of iconographically collected images acting as a subjective index to an incomplete archive.

Interspersed with a cacophony of objects and artworks, this temporary stadium attempts to reconstruct discourses and legacies specific to Naarm Melbourne at this time and lays bare the entanglements between artistic practice, polis and politics as a kind of resistance to the neo-liberalisation of art.

Watch the re-broadcast of Channel g throughout the exhibition period.

(Exhibition texts by Rosemary Forde and Patrice Sharkey)

Notes

1 The project’s title reprises Alicia Frankovich’s 2006 exhibition at Gertrude, with bracketed words borrowed from Jean-Luc Godard via Slavoj Žižek and a commentary on Blair Trethowan’s Change (2005).