Catalogue
2025
Bureaucracy of Feelings
23 August – 12 October 2025
Gertrude Contemporary, Preston South
Author: Diego Ramírez
Past is Prologue is a year-spanning program marking and reflecting on forty years of Gertrude. Across four interrelated exhibitions, contributing curators will chart the history of this organisation and its community, and commission new works by leading Australian visual artists.
On the occasion of Bureaucracy of Feelings, curated by Diego Ramírez, Gertrude is pleased to publish the fourth and final edition of a curatorial publication series to coincide with the year-long program.
Price: $8 (including GST)
Exhibiting Artists: Moorina Bonini, Sarah Brasier, Daisy Collier, John Elcatsha, Jemi Gale, Thea Jones, Michael Kennedy, Katie Paine, Sophie Penkethman-Young, Steven Rhall, Lucreccia Quintanilla; and collaborative work by Leonie Brialey, Sia Cox, Gabriel Curtin, Jonathan Daw, Jorgen Doyle, Charlie Freedman, Russell Goldflam, Tam Hanson, Harry Hayes, Vito Lucarelli, Meret McDonald, Dan Murphy, Seraphina Newberry, Garden Reflexxx, Beth Sometimes and Betty Sweetlove.
Writing by Diego Ramírez. Edited by Brigid Moriarty, Mark Feary and Sharon Flynn, designed by Narelle Brewer, printed by Adams Print.
Bureaucracy of Feelings
23 August – 12 October 2025
Gertrude Contemporary, Preston South
Bureaucracy of Feelings approaches the last decade of Gertrude through an anthology of Registered Charity: a small artist run space that neighboured the former for 17 years, until both galleries relocated to new premises. In an era of structured dissent, the curator of Bureaucracy of Feelings directed Registered Charity from 2018-2023, at which he met a number of artists who were responding to the administrative language—statements, policies, metrics, appointments, protocols—that dominated the last decade, in their artistic practices. In a series of new commissions, Lucreccia Quintanilla quotes corporate aphorisms; Moorina Bonini considers the impermanence of bodies that transit institutional spaces; Jemi Gale doodles like a frenzied clerk; and Michael Kennedy reduces an oeuvre of artworks to the indexification of files. Indeed, Bureaucracy of Feelings builds upon the premise of an anthology within a retrospective, to chart artists who were actively building, shaping and resisting frameworks that directly or indirectly supported Gertrude’s activities over the last decade. By operating as arts administrators, board members, on advisory panels, and volunteers in the broader art sector in tandem with their artistic practices.
What is the shape of the non-profit structure on display? Did professional managerialism become a standard response to social issues over the past ten years? Has this style, position or strategy achieved its aims or simply increased the volume of rules, procedures, HR speak, administrative forms and social media activity that engulfs our everyday lives? These queries become a site of poetic and artistic production, scraping lyrical residue from this corporate excess to reconfigure its homogeneity. Steven Rhall discloses his income statement; Daisy Collier ponders on the status of bricks and mortar on Unceded Land; Sarah Brasier paints about typing; Thea Jones stages a circle of pathos; Katie Paine repurposes office furniture with discretion; former members of Watch This Space stage a board meeting as a puppet show; Sophie Penkethman-Young meditates on the indeterminant progress of loading bars and spinning wheels; and John Elcatsha replicates their eye-strained prescription on glass.