The Theatre is Lying

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Dec 15, 2018 – Mar 24, 2019

Australian Centre for Contemporary Art

Anna Breckon and Nat Randall, Rear View, 2018, video, installation view, ACCA. Courtesy the artists / Photo Andrew Curtis

ACCA is pleased to present the inaugural Macfarlane Commissions, a new multi-year partnership designed to support the production and presentation of ambitious new projects by contemporary artists. The Theatre is Lying is the first in this series of exhibitions, encompassing major works by Anna Breckon and Nat Randall, Sol Calero, Consuelo Cavaniglia, Matthew Griffin and Daniel Jenatsch.

Anna Breckon and Nat Randall, Rear View 2018, production still. Courtesy the artists / Photo Ross Turley

Matthew Griffin, Melbourne shuffling, 2018 site-specific installation, installation, ACCA. Courtesy the artist / Photo Andrew Curtis

Constructed as an exhibition in five acts, The Theatre is Lying brings together artists who create alternative narratives and worlds through illusionary, cinematic and theatrical devices, including installation, mise-en-scene, historical re-enactment, digital montage and compositions with video, light and sound. In a series of new commissions, participating artists explore the manipulation of information and images, notions of artifice and illusion, ideas of transparency, reflection and phantasmagoria, and an engagement with the representations and misrepresentations of cinema and media.

Matthew Griffin, Shallowest part, 2018, installation view, ACCA. Courtesy the artist / Photo Andrew Curtis

Matthew Griffin, The outernet, 2018, installation view, ACCA. Courtesy the artist / Photo Andrew Curtis

Matthew Griffin, Melbourne shuffling, 2018 site-specific installation, installation, ACCA. Courtesy the artist / Photo Andrew Curtis

Through the white cube of the gallery and the black box of cinema, The Theatre is Lying proposes the gallery as a transformative threshold addressing ideas of truth and fiction, perception and abstraction, and the warping of time and space. The exhibition also considers the role of the spectator as an active agent in a world in which we are all actors, and the increasing interplay between subjective and objective, or psychic and social structures. Set against theaters of media and politics that are increasingly informed by trickery and sleight of hand, The Theatre is Lying offers a means to reflect upon, critique and even escape – if only momentarily – the everyday reality of our fictive life and times.

Sol Calero, La puerta, 2018 (foreground, detail), installation view, ACCA, Courtesy the artist, Barbara Gross, Munich and Crèvecœur, Paris / Photo Andrew Curtis

Matthew Griffin, Gums, 2018, site-specific installation, installation view, ACCA. Courtesy the artist / Photo Andrew Curtis

Sol Calero, La puerta, 2018 (foreground, detail), installation view, ACCA, Courtesy the artist, Barbara Gross, Munich and Crèvecœur, Paris / Photo Andrew Curtis

The Macfarlane Commissions

The Macfarlane Commissions is a new series of exhibitions at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art featuring new commissions by five mid-career Australian and international artists. To be held every second year for a period of six years, artists will be invited to make a new large-scale work to be presented as a keynote project in ACCA’s exhibition program.

Consuelo Cavaniglia, present distant, 2018 (detail), installation view, ACCA / Courtesy the artist, STATION, Melbourne and Cronenberg Wright Artist Projects, Sydney. Photo Andrew Curtis

Daniel Jenatsch, The Sheraton Hotel Incident, Installation view, ACCA, Courtesy the artist / Photo Andrew Curtis

The Macfarlane Fund

The Macfarlane Fund is a new philanthropic initiative established in 2017 to honor the life of respected Melbourne businessman Donald (Don) Macfarlane, who throughout his life took immense pleasure in the arts. The Macfarlane Fund’s primary focus is to offer financial support across the career span of artists, with three main funding streams developed at graduate, mid-career and senior levels.

Artists include Sol Calero, Consuelo Cavaniglia, Matthew Griffin, Daniel Jenatsch, Anna Breckon and Nat Randall. Curated by Max Delany and Annika Kristensen.