In Gallery 2 and Screen Room is Peach Blossom Spring | Cacotopia, an international group exhibition which addresses life in the digital age – fecund with imaginary potential but mired at the same time in environmental decay. Each of the eight exhibiting artists uses digital media in varying ways – largely through film, photography and printing – to negotiate meaning and generate critical enquiry within this shared global terrain. Key to their aesthetic investigations is a belief in the role of art to challenge and shape social identity, across cultural and national lines and as an active visual encounter. The eight artists operate from various cities around the globe: Darwin, Sydney, Portugal, Beijing, London, while the exhibition’s curator, Reg Newitt, has been largely based in Beijing over the past decade. An expanded version of the exhibition will run concurrently at Kui Yuan Gallery, Guangzhou, China, 22 November to 28 December 2014.

Artists: Jayne Dyer, Andy Holden, Bu Hua, Gary Lee, James Newitt, Wayne Warren, Jason Wing, Wang Zhiyuan

The dual-exhibition project has been produced with assistance from the Copyright Agency Limited Cultural Fund, Australia.

Catalogue of the exhibition.

Exhibition-related paper presented at Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art, Nov 2014

Artist talk: 11am, Saturday 15 November 2014

Darwin-based photographer Fiona Morrison’s solo exhibition yè​qǔ continues her interest in the nocturnal, or more precisely ‘the shift in reality that accompanies nightfall’. Often set in suburbia or suburban hinterlands, Morrison’s night-time vignettes are generally devoid of people even in a densely populated city such as Beijing, China, where the images for this current series were shot. ‘The lack of physical human presence’, writes Morrison, ‘invokes a memory and/or a trace of people who are invisible and forgotten’. Morrison’s photographs also function as a record of and aesthetic response to local architecture as well as the idea and affect of ‘locale’.

Words will never hurt me (2014) is an installation-based work by Adelaide-based artist James Tylor. The work comprises video footage and three plum tree sticks inscribed with the word ‘Aboriginal’. The work draws on the primary school recollections of Tylor’s great grandmother, Grace (Campbell) Summers, who would get beaten around her legs with sticks by the white children and called ‘Aboriginal’. ‘It is such a strong oral story in our family’, writes Tylor, ‘because we can’t trace our Aboriginal ancestry back to a language group’.

Tylor is a Masters (Visual Art) graduate from the South Australian School of Art, University of South Australia. His work explores Australia’s cultural representation through alternative photography mediums, sculpture, installation and video inspired by his multi-racial heritage involving Aboriginal, English and Maori-Australian ancestry. The showing of Words will never hurt me;in Darwin coincides with Tylor's finalist representation in 2014 Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards. Tylor’s work features in Australian public and private collections; he is represented by Marshall Arts Gallery, SA; Vivien Anderson Gallery, VIC; and Paul McNamara Gallery, NZ.

In Gallery 1, Archie Moore, curated by Dr Wes Hill.

Considered one of Australia’s most inventive contemporary Indigenous artists, Archie Moore’s practice revolves around slippages in language and identity, often evoking the ways in which cultural context affects meaning. Born in Tara, Queensland, but based in Brisbane for most of his life, Moore has achieved widespread acclaim throughout Australia since graduating from Queensland University of Technology in 1998. His first solo exhibition in Darwin, False Friends will foreground Moore’s new media practice, and will involve the re-staging of earlier works alongside new works that have been specially made for the NCCA. Curated by Wes Hill, the exhibition will bring to light Moore’s interest in vacillating identities, with the artist directing his practice towards specific sociopolitical issues while shirking clear-cut resolutions.

False Friends essay by Wes Hill

Exhibition opening Thursday 18 September, 6-8pm

Melbourne-based artist Nina Ross delves into linguistic domain with her digital video work The language between us (2011), a pithy play on the process of language acquisition/exchange, and showing in NCCA’s Screen Room. Her interest in the subject stems from having spent several years living in Norway, ‘learning Norwegian’, as she writes, ‘for my partner’, and grappling anew with the task of making a language one’s own. In 2013 Ross received a Master of fine art (research) degree from Monash University, Melbourne. And was awarded the Vice-Chancellor's commendation for masters excellence for her thesis Finding a voice: An exploration of the impact of language acquisition on identity using self-protraiture performance video.

Exhibition opening Thursday 18 September, 6-8pm

Mid-career artist Skye Raabe returns to Darwin for her solo exhibition home, in Gallery 2. An installation consisting of works on paper, text, photography and in-situ wall panel, home further extends Raabe’s investigation into interpretations of ‘site’, (loaded) space, absence contained within space, and forms of abstraction and temporality. home references the architectural and the performative within the architectural, continuing Raabe’s practice of combining media and her process as a conceptual artist, whilst paying homage to the materiality of her early-career works. 

home is an allusion to the constructed, the deconstructed, and the yet to be constructed; both a playful take on home as we know it, and a psychological entrée into the subtle and intangible.

The comforting promise comprises a bunch of soft banana sculptures made of the plastic sheets that are used to make cheap travel packing bags, and cotton fillings. This work underlines the tradition of consuming imported food in Australian society, inspired by some histories which record that bananas were first brought to Australia by Chinese migrants in the mid-1800s. Zhou fashions her 'bananas' from the travel bag material that has cultural associations with Asian migrants, prompting us to consider the Asian influence in Australia's food industry.

Zhou is a Chinese-born artist who migrated to Australian in the mid-2000s. A previous resident of Darwin, she now resides in Melbourne where she is undertaking a Masters in Visual Arts at Victorian College of the Arts. Zhou’s Box Set installation is presented with support from The Australian Artists’ Grant, a NAVA (National Association for the Visual Arts) initiative, made possible through the generous sponsorship of Mrs Janet Homes à Court, and the support of the Visual Arts Board, Australia Council for the Arts.

NCCA presents Vexed, a solo exhibition by Fiona Foley in the main gallery and screen room. Taking its name from Foley’s 2013 video work which was filmed in Alice Springs, Vexed concerns the disruption to traditional courting and betrothal/marriage customs wrought by colonisation. Implicit in this scenario is the vexed and changing role of Aboriginal women on the colonial frontier. The exhibition will feature retrospective works by Foley that address the same theme, as well as a new letter-based sculpture spelling the words ‘Black Velvet’, produced in association with Brisbane-based Urban Art Projects.

Fiona Foley is a Badtjala artist from Fraser Island (Thoorgine), Queensland, who resides in Brisbane. She is one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists; in 2014 she was awarded the Australia Council’s Visual Arts Award, recognised as a ‘fearless advocate for Indigenous political and social equality’.