Of Stadiums and Construction Sites (Ne change rien pour que tout soit différent),
a project by Lisa Radford

Of Stadiums and Construction Sites (Ne change rien pour que tout soit différent)¹ is a response to the socio-political events that precede and unfold during the decade from 2005 to 2015. Artists working in and around Gertrude formed new critical vocabularies amongst the shifting cultural landscape, while the institution itself was shaped by those same forces. 

Traversing writing, performance, sculpture, and installation, the project is framed by an assembly of re-staged exhibitions—Pat Foster and Jen Berean, Low Expectations, Murray White Room, 2008; Ardi Gunawan, luckily there’s no inside, Open Archive, 2011; and Another Yummy Fantasy II, TCB art inc., 2011. The project is bookended by a collapsing pinboard wall containing a Warburgian arrangement of iconographically collected images acting as a subjective index to an incomplete archive. 

Interspersed with a cacophony of objects and artworks, this temporary stadium attempts to reconstruct discourses and legacies specific to Naarm Melbourne at this time and lays bare the entanglements between artistic practice, polis and politics as a kind of resistance to the neo-liberalisation of art.

Exhibition texts by Rosemary Forde and Patrice Sharkey. 

Lisa Radford works with others as a way of examining what is both spoken and beyond speech. With Sam George, she used conversation and oral histories to produce works that refer to documentary processes, shared narratives, and coded language. The evolving project Concrete Archives documents the shared experiences of 2 women: one Aboriginal, Yhonnie Scarce; the other non-Aboriginal, Radford, involving fieldwork to local and international sites of nuclear colonisation, genocide and memorialisation. Radford is a Senior Lecturer at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. She was a Gertrude Studio Artist with DAMP between 2009 to 2011 and with Sam George from 2019 to 2022.