The MAPh Foundation is thrilled to announce that MAPh Director Anouska Phizacklea will be joined on the judging panel by award-winning artist Michael Cook and Rhana Devenport ONZM, Director of the Art Gallery of South Australia.
Michael Cook is a Brisbane-based contemporary photographic artist of Bidjara heritage. Over the last decade, Cook has produced works that interrogate the legacy of colonisation and invite the viewer to experience the other side of the coin, roles in reversal and histories re-written.
The importance of Cook’s work has been acknowledged with a number of prizes and awards, most recently he won the Fisher’s Ghost Art Award (2022) and the Josephine Ulrick and Win Schubert Photography People’s Choice Award (2022) and was also a finalist in the Bowness Photography Prize (2022).
Cook has exhibited extensively nationally and internationally in the last decade. His work is held in major Australian collections including National Gallery of Australia; Art Gallery of New South Wales; National Gallery of Victoria and Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, and in significant International collections, including the British Museum, London; Fondation Opale, Switzerland; The Museum of World Cultures, Netherlands; Museum of Contemporary Aboriginal Art, Utrecht; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; and the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, USA.
Rhana Devenport ONZM is a museum director, curator, editor and cultural producer whose career spans art museums, biennales and arts festivals. She is currently Director, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, and was Director, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, New Zealand from 2013–18.
Devenport was curator of Lisa Reihana: Emissaries, the New Zealand Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia in 2017. Her curatorial interests include contemporary art of Asia and the Pacific, time-based media, social practice and international collaboration. She has developed projects with Brook Andrew, Jonathon Jones, Fiona Hall, Nam June Paik, Lee Mingwei, Yang Fudong, Nalini Malani, Yin Xiuzhen, Song Dong, and Julian Rosefeldt.
She was Director of Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Zealand (2006–13) where she led the Len Lye Centre project; Manager of Public Programmes, Biennale of Sydney (2005–06); Curator in Residence, Artspace NZ, Auckland (2005); Visual Arts Manager, Sydney Festival (2004); and Senior Project Officer, Asia Pacific Triennial, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia (1994–2004).
In 2018 Devenport was appointed an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for her ‘Services to Arts Governance’.
Anouska Phizacklea (BA (hons), MA, MCom, CPA, GAICD) is Director of the Museum of Australian Photography (MAPh). Phizacklea has expertise across the visual, decorative and literary arts as well as finance and organisational development, with Masters Degrees in both Fine Arts and Commerce.
In 2023 she joined the board of the Melbourne Queer Film Festival (Treasurer). She has held senior management positions at leading Victorian public institutions, Heide Museum of Modern Art and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), and worked for many years in art research and valuations in galleries and auction houses in Melbourne and London.
Since her appointment at MAPh Phizacklea has curated group and single artist exhibitions with leading Australian practitioners including Allusion & Illusion: the fantastical world of Valerie Sparks (2018), Robyn Stacey: as still as life (2018), The Tucker portraits (2020) , Tamara Dean's Leave only footprints (2022) and commissioning exhibitions Portrait of Monash: the ties that bind (2020), STAGES: photography through the pandemic (2021) and the upcoming major survey exhibition and publication of Anne Zahalka, ZAHALKAWORLD – an artist’s archive (2023).
