Catalogue
2025
Of Stadiums and Construction Sites (Ne change rien pour que tout soit différent)
21 June – 10 August 2025
Gertrude Contemporary, Preston South
Authors
Rosemary Forde, Patrice Sharkey and Lisa Radford
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 Of Stadiums and Construction Sites (Ne change rien pour que tout soit différent), a project by Lisa Radford, Gertrude is pleased to publish the third edition of a curatorial publication series to coincide with the year-long program.
Price: $8 (including GST)
Exhibiting Artists: Ardi Gunawan, A Constructed World, nat&ali, Foster Berean, Kate Smith, Alex Vivian, Joshua Petherick, James Deutsher and LAC, Christopher LG Hill, Ash Kilmartin, Danielle Freakley, Hoddle (Caeylen Norris), Debra Kunda, Aaron Rees and Holly Childs.
With writing by Rosemary Forde, Patrice Sharkey and Lisa Radford. Edited by Brigid Moriarty, Mark Feary and Sharon Flynn, designed by Narelle Brewer, printed by Adams Print.
Of Stadiums and Construction Sites (Ne change rien pour que tout soit différent)
21 June – 10 August 2025
Gertrude Contemporary, Preston South
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.
1 The project’s title reprises Alicia Frankovich’s 2006 exhibition at Gertrude, with bracketed words borrowed from Jean-Luc Godard via Slavoj Žižek and a commentary on Blair Trethowan’s Change (2005).
