Sun 4 Aug
2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
Photography was once heralded as a truth-telling medium, known for its ability to hold a mirror to society. With the increase and normalisation of digitally constructed images including AI, the world is now saturated with manipulated images, and its truth-telling ability has been bought into question.
In this discussion, we bring together four artists whose works appear diverse but contain similar explorations. Each of these artists' work is constructed, whether analogue or digital, or produced by collage or assemblage. In a social and technical context very different from that in which photography was first invented, these artists question the changing role and meaning of images over time.
Join artists/ curators Kiron Robinson and Izabela Pluta, artists Andrew Tetzlaff and Grace Wood and MAPh Senior curator Angela Connor to ask: What is the role and function of contemporary photography if images can easily be constructed and manipulated? How does photography today relate to its past, and is it even photography anymore?
About Izbela Pluta:
Izabela Pluta is a Polish-born, Australian based artist whose expanded photographic practice has developed a unique visual language of spatial and representational means to signal a different modality of vision. Her work explores the intersection of photography with concepts of time and memory, and questions of place. She currently lives and works between the lands of the Awabakal and Worimi in Awabakal country (Newcastle) and the lands of the Bidjigal and Gadigal (Sydney). Pluta’s work has most recently beenpresented in Blue Assembly:Oceanic Thinking, The University of Queensland Art Museum (2022) and in Warsaw as part of Śliczna jest młodość naszego wieku. Foto-albumy 1850-1950 at Muzeum Warszawy, Poland (2024).
Selected solo exhibitions include Nihilartikel, UNSW Galleries (2022); Variable Depth, Shallow Water, Spazju Kreattiv, Malta, (2021); and Figures of slippage and oscillation, Artspace, Sydney (2018). Other recent commissions include Counter forces for Bundanon Regional Art Museum’s inaugural exhibition From Impulse to Action (2022); Radical Slowness, The Lockup, Newcastle (2022); and The National 2019: New Australian Art, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2019).
Pluta was the recipient of the 2019 Perimeter Small Book Prize for her publication Figures of slippage and oscillation, and her second artist book Nihilartikel was released in 2023. Pluta is a Senior Lecturer at UNSW Art & Design Sydney and an Artistic Associate at the PowerhouseMuseum. She is represented by Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert, Sydney.
About Kiron Robinson:
Born in Bangladesh, Kiron Robinson is an artist who lives and works out of Naarm/Melbourne.
He loves photographs but does not trust them. His work circulates around a set of ideas that he recognises in the photograph – belief and doubt and doubt in the ability to believe except through doubting. Robinson has curated a number of exhibitions questioning the contemporary photographic condition including Is/Is not at West Space, (2016), Looking but not seeing at Benalla Art Gallery, (2018) and Not for the sake of something more, Sarah Scout Presents as part of PHOTO 2020, (2021). Robinson’s work most recently has been presented in Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria, (2023) Doubt (Again), Realm Artspace, (2023) and is held in a number of public and private collections.
Currently Robinson is the Head of the photography studio at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. He is represented by Sarah Scout Presents.
His favourite gum is Hubba Bubba grape.
About Andrew Tetzlaff:
Andrew Tetzlaff is a Melbourne-based artist who is interested in the use of aesthetics to encourage embodied experience. Tetzlaff has exhibited in Australia, Germany, Austria, South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan, and most recently at Kuiper Projects, Brisbane (2023), MAMA, Albury (2021), Incinerator Gallery, Aberfeldie (2019), Five Walls, Footscray (2019) and Hong Kong Print Workshop (2019). In addition to working independently, Tetzlaff is also a member of the art collective CONCRETE POST. He holds a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Art, Boston (2002) and an MFA from RMIT, Melbourne (2006). In 2023 Tetzlaff completed a practice-based PhD from RMIT, applying theories of Posthumanism and the Kyoto School of Philosophy to the practice of sculptural photography.
About Grace Wood:
Grace Wood is a multidisciplinary artist from Naarm, Australia, creating image-based installations that utilise collage, photography, drawing, painting, and sculpture to interrogate the status of contemporary photography. Since graduating from the Victorian College of the Arts with a Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) (2014), Wood has exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions and her work is held in public and private collections across Australia.
Recent exhibitions include Soft Bodies, LON Gallery, PHOTO 2024; Slide, Melbourne Now, NGV (2023); Spring 1883, The Hotel Windsor (2023); The Sun at Midnight, The Hellenic Museum (2022); Thirsty, LON Gallery (2022); GardenVariety, Royal Botanic Gardens PHOTO 2021; Ground Control, Richmond Town Hall (2021); and The Image Collective, Blindside (2021).
Free program
