Exhibition opening Thursday 18 September, 6-8pm

‘I wish that there was a way that I could completely prevent my body’s need to defecate’, writes Darwin-based artist Catherine McAvoy whose latest documentary project takes not only self-portraiture as its subject but self-portraiture through the lens of a public toilet, or more directly, the toilet bowl. ‘For a long time I was never able to crap in public toilets or other peoples’ toilets’, McAvoy writes, introducing her Parcopresis project ('parcopresis' being the term used when a person is unable to defecate unless they have a certain level of privacy) through which she has confronted her public toilet phobia through a series of photographs documenting her presence in, and use of public toilets in a wide range of locations – around Darwin, on planes, and elsewhere. Though she regards this documentation as ‘a futile attempt to be more comfortable with this bodily function’, it constitutes a confronting portrait nonetheless, with her series presented in the context of NCCA’s own public toilet and thus blurring the lines (or muddying the waters) between public toilet and contemporary art space.

Hidden/Pulse disturbance takes the mangrove boardwalk at Fannie Bay and mines the site for environmental, sociological and material information. Starting with the somewhat vertiginous architecture of the boardwalk, this work plays with the ways in which 'Nature' is variously framed and disturbed by both human desire and activity – and in turn how nature itself assimilates and acculturates the effects of this human activity. Stray, the collaborative team of Natasha Anderson and Sarah Pirrie, seek to create strange parallel environments – third ecologies – somewhere between the framed cultural site of the gallery and the demarcated 'natural' environment. These third spaces mirror our contingent framing of the 'natural'.

The Territory was born soaked in grog. Alcohol has been a part of ourculture for so long, like the Banned Drinkers, it just doesn't register. If the Northern Territory were a country it would be the second biggest drinking country in the world. Yet, out of a population of 233,000 the focus seems to be on the 64,000 Aboriginal people, out of which only 20% (a total of 12,800) demonstrate hazardous drinking. The numbers don't add up.'Groggy' gets behind the bar and takes a look at our biggest drug problem, how it is marketed and who really benefits.

Beastliness witnesses horizonless, post-species-specific possibilities, as we tango into the far-fetched future, propelled by unchecked hungers. Human physicality is entirely transformed by the technologies of everyday life. Miraculous conceptions are ordinary, death is deferred, biology is no longer destiny. Gender imperatives mate, proliferate and mutate. Beastliness invokes prancing, preening, coupling metaphor, sutured with history, folklore, mythos, queered archetype. Insult tangled with endearment acquires infinite appetite. Beastliness synthesises traditional handmade photomontage with digital animation into a dalliance with predatory, reckless sirens.

Boxset

Hey Hetero! is a public art collaboration between artist Deborah Kelly and photographer Tina Fiveash. The project's six pieces have been seen in illuminated public advertising spaces, city billboards, magazines, books, newspapers, bus ads, postcards, galleries, and online. Hey Hetero! has appeared in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, New Delhi and Wellington since 2001, when it won the major award of the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras Festival. It headlined the Glasgay festival, Glasgow, in 2006, and in 2011 appeared on 1,500 posters around Claremont, California. In 2013 it will be seen in advertising spaces across Skopje, in Macedonian. Hey Hetero! returns the gaze at heterosexuality: the privileged sexuality which makes gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender movements both possible and necessary. In the form of simulated mainstream advertisements, the work invites heterosexuality into public discourse.
Note: No heterosexuals were harmed in the creation of this artwork.

Through a collaborative mixed-media installation, Golda and Johnson activate a critical space about the ways in which migrant and non-migrant artists can address the entanglement between the felt and socio-political dimensions of migratory and intercultural living in Australia.

Using compound narratives satirically distorting fact and fiction from an otherworldly perspective, Agnew tells a story of Eve and Eve through stop-animation, drawing and installation. Eve and Eve fall in love in paradise but as dramatic addictions to vanity and jealousy unfold, paradise is lost. In the meantime, a suicide bomber suffers a confused sense of identity in following orders of an indoctrinated mission - faced with conflicting decisions and her sense of worth, she faces her immortality at the expense of good and evil.

Ghost Citizens: Witnessing the Intervention is about the removal of citizen rights by the Federal Government Intervention in the Northern Territory (2007 to 2012) seen through the practices of Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists. Ghost Citizens looks at the return to protectionist policy and the willful diminishing of an Indigenous participatory voice - the loss of citizenship rights; of the right to homelands; and self-determination.

Through projected animation of mannequins, Halliday takes a glimpse into a world inhabited by beautiful, stern, plastic people - figures who attract the eye with there seductive and glamorous affectations but who also repulse, with their cold stylised and sterile visages that reveal materialistic and simplistic desires.