Events

Melbourne Art Library was delighted to welcome Jenna Lee to lead our Artists' Syllabus in February 2024. 

Jenna Lee shared two essays which have impacted her artistic practice: ‘Around and Within’ by Freja Carmichael featured in Becoming Our Future – Global Indigenous Curatorial Practice (Art Gallery of South Australia, 2020) and ‘Mother Tongue’ (Gertrude Contemporary, 2018) presented as part of the Octopus exhibition series. 

Artists’ Syllabus invites local artists and designers to select and share a text that has been influential to their practice. By sharing selected passages, the artist will give unique insight into the significance of the text from their perspective. Through this exploration we will seek to discover the direct, tangential or unexpected ways the text has had an impact on the artists’ chosen discipline/s, creative process, and approach to presenting completed works. In group discussion, we will untangle the themes explored in the text and bring attention to those formative passages which sparked an ‘ah-ha moment’ or cemented in the mind. More broadly, we will get together to exchange our ideas (and our reading lists).

Supported by City of Melbourne Arts Grants and Michael Robertson.

Image: Gianna Rizzo.


Jenna Lee is a Gulumerridjin (Larrakia), Wardaman and KarraJarri Saltwater woman with mixed Japanese, Chinese, Filipino and Anglo-Australian ancestry. Using art to explore and celebrate her many overlapping identities, Lee works across sculpture, installation, body adornment, moving images, photography and projection.

With a practice focused on materiality and ancestral material culture, Lee works with notions of the archive, histories of colonial collecting, and settler-colonial books and texts. Lee ritualistically analyses, deconstructs, and reconstructs source material, language and books, transforming them into new forms of cultural beauty and pride, and presenting a tangibly translated book.

Driven to create work in which she, her family, and the broader mixed First Nations community see themselves represented, Lee builds on a foundation of her father’s teachings of culture and her mother’s teachings of papercraft.

Represented by MARS Gallery in Naarm (Melbourne, Australia).

What power dynamics are at play in the distribution of information? How democratic is ‘collective’ knowledge? And how are individuals and collectives disrupting the flow of information?

The Distribution forum series prods, unravels, makes-visible, and excites non-mainstream ways of information sharing. Engaging publishers, editors, and alternative institutions, the series explores active projects in Naarm/Melbourne that question the traditional flow of information.

Join Isabella Hone-Saunders of Seventh Gallery, Sophia Cai of Bus Projects and Beatrice Rubio-Gabriel and Katie Paine of KINGS Artist Run Initiative as we discuss the role of artist run initiatives in knowledge sharing.

Supported by the City of Melbourne.

What power dynamics are at play in the distribution of information? How democratic is ‘collective’ knowledge? And how are individuals and collectives disrupting the flow of information?

The Distribution forum series prods, unravels, makes-visible, and excites non-mainstream ways of information sharing. Engaging publishers, editors, and alternative institutions, the series explores active projects in Naarm/Melbourne that question the traditional flow of information.

Join Melbourne Art Library, Another World Library, and Murmur Library as we discuss the role of independent and alternative public libraries.

Supported by the City of Melbourne.

Another World is a library and research project for imagining socially and ecologically sustainable futures in community. The library is focused on theory, poetry, and fiction that opens up possibilities for radical change. AW has previously been in residence at Bus projects, Watch This Space Gallery, and Arts Gen, and has run multiple workshop series on utopian and speculative theory and fiction.The Utopian Visions Research Collective has developed as an offshoot of the AW Utopian Visions workshops, with the group meeting regularly to learn together and think about possibilities for the future, through writing, excursions, readings, art, and film.

The Murmur Library is dedicated to providing a space for people and their stories to exist outside of the white gaze. Their focus is to highlight and house Black, Indigenous and other culturally diverse voices in poetry, fiction, non-fiction, children’s literature, zines and magazines.

As an artist, knowledge, learning, sharing, and research usually take different modes, not limited to just reading and writing. Where does this fit in within an institution?

Reflecting on my time in academia, during my time in the library I have pondered; what constitutes knowledge, what makes knowledge valid when it doesn’t fit in a box? Where does cultural knowledge, storytelling, anecdotes, gut feelings, oral history go? And why isn’t it automatically good enough?

Join Lara for a discussion and sharing around the 'dining table'. Light refreshments provided.

Proudly supported by the Besen Family Foundation.

Melbourne Art Library is delighted to welcome Ruth Höflich to lead our next Artists' Syllabus.

For this Artists' Syllabus, Ruth will discuss Esther Leslie’s essay: ‘Fog, Froth and Foam: Insubstantial matters in substantive atmospheres’ in relation to some themes in her own filmic works. The informal presentation will also draw on examples of prose and poetry that have informed her ideas.

Artists’ Syllabus invites local artists to select and share a text that has been influential to their practice. By sharing selected passages, the artist will give unique insight into the significance of the text from their perspective. Through this exploration we will seek to discover the direct, tangential or unexpected ways the text has had an impact on the artists’ chosen discipline/s, creative process, and approach to presenting completed works. In group discussion, we will untangle the themes explored in the text and bring attention to those formative passages which sparked an ‘ah-ha moment’ or cemented in the mind. More broadly, we will get together to exchange our ideas (and our reading lists).

Supported by City of Melbourne Arts Grants and Michael Robertson. 

Image: Ruth Höflich.


Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London in the UK and this particular essay was published as part of the anthology ‘Electric Brine’ edited by curator Jennifer Teets. The publication is associated with the online study group Matter in Flux of which Ruth is a member.

Ruth Höflich is an artist who works with moving image, photography and peer dialogue. Often starting with the photograph as the daily imprint of energy and information flows, her work combines speculative and experiential elements to animate the sub-visible and interstitial spaces of images and how we relate to them.

Superimposing different sensory and cognitive registers, her work builds on the history of montage techniques in experimental filmmaking where cadence is considered a tool for accessing new contingencies. Unseen images are anticipated through the space of relation or the milieu of the cut. In turn, each project becomes an exercise in form-finding and an attempt at articulating emergent properties, sense or atmospheres within existing architectures of sight and logic.

Her work has been screened and exhibited internationally, including most recently the National Gallery of Victoria (2023); Callies’s, Berlin (2023); Gertrude Contemporary (2022); TCB Inc. (2022); Rotterdam International Film Festival (2021); Images Festival, Toronto (2021); She Makes Noise, Madrid (2021); Pravo Ljudski Film Festival, Sarajevo (2021); Art Gallery of NSW (2021); Art Encounters, Timisoara (2021). She was the recipient of the the George Mora Fellowship at the State Library of Victoria (2019), and the Emerging Artist Award of the City of Munich (2016) and completed residencies at Banff, Canada and Grizedale Arts, UK amongst others. Currently a studio artist at Gertrude Contemporary, she also collaborates as part of Halpert/Höflich and is a member of the study collective Matter in Flux. She teaches into the Honours Program at Monash University as well as the Print and Drawing Department at the Victorian College of the Arts. Ruth holds an MFA from Bard College, NY.