“Inside/Out” : A Speculative Exhibition between White Rabbit Gallery and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art
This project (“Inside/Out”, 2022) was awarded the MUMA Curatorial Training Program ($5000 Industry Placement).
Please contact me via email ( sueann-c@outlook.com ) for a copy of my hand-bound publication, at a small fee. Free digital copies are available too.
Image of “Inside/Out” (2022) self-binded publication. Containing a speculative catalogue essay, annotated list of artworks and programming, floor plans and annotated bibliography. Please email me for a physical or digital copy of the publication.
Installation View of “Inside/Out“ (2022) at MADA NOW 2022 Grad Show in Monash University. Image credit and photography: Andrew Curtis and MADA.
Inside/Out (2022) wants to do many things. This speculative exhibition began as an imagination of the generative possibilities between 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and White Rabbit Gallery. With only a kilometre keeping them apart, I couldn’t help but fantasise about the critical possibilities that could emerge from 4A and White Rabbit’s shared cultural and spatial affinities. White Rabbit Gallery wields influential power over the representation of Contemporary Chinese Art in Australia, withholding one of the largest private collections of Contemporary Chinese Art in the world. The private collection is upheld by the white South African billionaire and philanthropist, Judith Neilson. 4A Centre of Contemporary Asian Art also upholds a prominent role within its locality of Chinatown as a publicly funded non-for- profit organisation that facilitates community and socially engaged programming and exhibitions with local Asian diasporic artists and practitioners. Inside/Out recognises the missing engagement between both organisations and hopes to convey an imaginative future for Contemporary Asian Art in Sydney. This exhibition is inspired by movement, hybridity and migration witnessed through both organisation’s transnational and cross-cultural dialogue with Asia.
Inside/Out (2022) proposes to imagine how this collaboration might look by swapping the artists and programming, and in turn their audiences which are typically affiliated with each organisation. Curated bodies of work from White Rabbit’s existing private collection of Contemporary Chinese Art will be exhibited in 4A’s gallery space in Haymarket, Sydney. And 4A’s distinct cultural public programming will be distilled into White Rabbit’s gallery space in Chippendale, Sydney. Activating the sites through reciprocal exchange and engagement, this fantasy exhibition directly responds to the relational, cultural, and spatial horizons and affinities between the two organisations. Growing up in Sydney, 4A and White Rabbit exemplified the heterogeneity of Sydney’s local arts ecology and its profound relationship with Contemporary Asian Art and the Asian diaspora locally and internationally.
The ideas that inspire this speculative exhibition are relational, community-spirited, and artist- led at heart. At the formative stage of this project, I was informed by my existing research on non-western and transcultural exhibition histories in the west. I found myself being held by the myriad voices of curators, writers, researchers, teachers, and practitioners. The profound works of Apinan Poshyananda, Brian Martin, Homi K Bhabha, Hou Hanru, Jill Bennett, Melissa Chiu, Nikos Papastergiadis, Stuart Hall, and Tara McDowell have made a transformative impact upon the development of this project. This fantasy exhibition began as a critique of Judith Neilson’s collection and curatorial practices, but it quickly transformed into something bigger. I shifted my focus to a questioning of how we can expand the nexus of understanding cultural identity and differences through the modes of migratory aesthetics, exchange, and hybrid modalities. Realised through a catalogue essay, artwork and programming summaries, floor plans and an annotated bibliography - a hand-bound publication is the final articulation of this speculative exhibition. This project invites MADA students, artists, curators, teachers, and friends to embrace the contradictions, duality, and hybridity that come with mediating cultural differences amid capitalist globalisation. This project embodies hope and longing contingency that this engagement could transpire one day. Inside/Out serves as a provocative proposition for future critical imaginations and conversations, speculating the possibilities through hybridity and ceaseless movement.
”Inside/Out” (2022) features artworks and programming that responds to the hybrid modes of expression and aesthetics existing within the globalised trans-cultural art world. Influenced by both the past, present and future, this speculative exhibition is about embodying cultural identity as always in the constant state of being in and out, global and local, material and immaterial all at the same time.
