PHOTO 2024: Future Anterior
Joseph Blair, Indra Liusuari, Autumn Royal, Emily Simek, Bixiao Zhang, Joy Zhou
28 Feb–23 Mar 2024
Future Anterior features the work of lens-based artists who subvert the use of archival technologies as tools of control. Taking its name from the future perfect tense — the “will have been”— Future Anterior explores new methods of record creation which reject the inert chronicling of places and events.
Looking to deconstruct the oppressive logic of surveillance, classification, and preservation embodied by traditional archiving techniques, artists mobilise the material conditions, associations, and histories both indexed and concealed by the image frame. Experimenting with different modes of documentation, Future Anterior offers a flexible basis for collective memory; inviting a space for speculation by thinking through the document as a renewable resource for elaboration and play.
Works by Joseph Blair, Indra Liusuari, Autumn Royal, Emily Simek, Bixiao Zhang & Joy Zhou.
Curated by Mia Palmer-Verevis, Emeline Robinson-Shaw and Madeleine Sherburn
Presented as part of PHOTO 2024.
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(re-) trieved, covered & sourced
Wednesday 13 March 6-8pm at Photography Studies College
In a workshop that embraces ubiquitous photography, artist and Photography Studies College lecturer, Joseph Blair, and Future Anterior co-curator, Madeleine Sherburn, invites participants to explore the expansive realm of the 'archive' and its potential within a new-photographic context. The session aims to uncover new modes of image-making beyond conventional methods, prompting to craft visual narratives from the wealth of materials available in our image-saturated environment. Blair will share his experiences working within this framework, explore the ethics, processes and considerations required when working with such mediums. Participants will create a small series using found/sourced images (from either the participant's archive or supplied images), re-contextualised through sequencing, or reworking images entirely with digital process.
Participants will need to bring in their own source materials to use, via usb stick.
General Admission Tickets cost $50.
PSC Student Discounted Tickets available.
Discount tickets are available for those who identify as being of First Nations descent.
Please register your attendance online.
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who ate the archive?
Saturday 16 March 2–4pm at BLINDSIDE
‘who ate the archive?’ is an interactive composting workshop for catalogue hoarders, facilitated by Emily Simek and Joy Zhou at Blindside. Participants are invited to bring in paper-based archival materials, and share a memory of when they pocketed a catalogue or room sheet from an exhibition. Why did you take that home? What is it doing now? These materials will be collectively metabolised through conversation and then composted onsite in a worm farm. A liquid fertiliser (worm wee) will be produced as an archive of these digested memories and shared with participants after the closing of the exhibition.
Please register your attendance online.
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Future Anterior Artist Panel & Public Reading Thursday 21st March 6 - 8pm at BLINDSIDE
Join us as the artists, curators, and writer, Autumn Royal, discuss the works presented in their exhibition, Future Anterior. Delving into more of the focus behind ‘the will have been’, how anarchiving techniques can invite a space for speculation by thinking through the document as a renewable resource for elaboration and play. Royal will also read their commissioned texts that go alongside the artists’ works.
FUTURE ANTERIOR exhibition texts
Into the Wormhole – Mia Palmer-Verevis on co-worming (2024) by Emily Simek and Joy Zhou
Telling History Slant // There Are Rocks in My Brain - Emeline Robinson-Shaw on Interstitial Dreaming (2024) by Bixiao Zhang
The Ports of Forgotten Futures - Madeleine Sherburn on Oceans 36 (2024) by Joseph Blair and Inpres No. 14/1967 (2024) by Indra Liusuari
Works by Joseph Blair, Indra Liusuari, Autumn Royal, Emily Simek, Bixiao Zhang, Joy Zhou
Curated by Mia Palmer-Verevis, Emeline Robinson-Shaw and Madeleine Sherburn
Poetry by Autumn Royal. Design Umi Otto.
Future Anterior features the work of lens-based artists who subvert the use of archival technologies as tools of control. Taking its name from the future perfect tense — the “will have been”— Future Anterior explores new methods of record creation which reject the inert chronicling of places and events.
Looking to deconstruct the oppressive logic of surveillance, classification, and preservation embodied by traditional archiving techniques, artists mobilise the material conditions, associations, and histories both indexed and concealed by the image frame. Experimenting with different modes of documentation, Future Anterior offers a flexible basis for collective memory; inviting a space for speculation by thinking through the document as a renewable resource for elaboration and play.
Curated by Mia Palmer-Verevis, Emeline Robinson-Shaw, and Madeleine Sherburn
Thanks to our Exhibition Supporters:
This program takes place on the land of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. We recognise that sovereignty was never ceded - this land is stolen land. We pay respects to Wurundjeri Elders, past, present and emerging, to the Elders from other communities and to any other Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders who might encounter or participate in the program.
Joseph Blair (b. 1995) works between photographic, mixed media, and moving image mediums. Blair’s practice speaks on the technologically mediated existence and explores the concerns that are inherent in this terrain. Blair’s work has a keen focus on the social and emotional consequences arising from our collective interactions which occur as a result of new technologies and online spaces. Key areas of focus include surveillance and security, the eroding of geographic boundaries in the digital sphere, and the dynamics between the natural and electronic environments. Blair’s work navigates this liminal space/self by grappling with raw and vibrant imagery taken from both the obscure and the mundane.
Indra Liusuari is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice includes audio-visual media, documented performance, installation, and publication. Conceptually, Liusuari is focused on critical discourses around the presence of white supremacy in the gay subculture and the gentrification of ethnic enclaves, which manifest via absurdist exaggeration and satirical self-exotification. Brutalist architecture and industrial design, audio-visual remnants of the 1990s and early 2000s, and the underground rave scene have become paramount influences in their practice. Liusuari has been awarded the Cultural Visions Grant from RMIT Culture, the Liquid Architecture’s Graduate Prize, and a First Class Honours for their research on problematising [gay] Asian men’s fetish for white homosexuals using Brutalism and Eurodance. Liusuari has presented works with Immigration Museum, Blindside, RMIT Culture, Pink Dot Singapore, West Space, and recently with Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien (DE) and unthaitled x soydivision Berlin.
Autumn RoyalBorn 1987, Mildura/on the unceded lands of the Latji Latji and Nyeri Nyeri people
Lives and works Naarm/Melbourne
Autumn Royal creates drama, poetry, and criticism.
Emily Simek has a practice in digital art, installation, writing and gardening. Her work explores interspecies relationships within food webs and the community garden as a place for collective practice. She is a caretaker of a worm farm compost system, and contributor to Patch-Work, a collaborative project with Merri Cheyne at CERES Community Garden.
Bixiao Zhang (Frankie) is a digital artist and Ph.D. candidate at RMIT University living in Naarm (Melbourne). Her practice-led research, a fluid entity termed “The ElectroPoetics”, proposes a performative approach to digital media and algorithmic architecture, driven by the intersections of Chinese Shanshui (mountain-water) thought, feminist eco-poetics, and electro-dynamism. Her performative “Shan-shui” practice situates dynamic digital substrates for transversal modes of engagement and co-current mattering, an approach that accentuates tacit resonance as primordial modes of care. Bixiao won the 2021 Dean’s Award for her research project, her latest projects include artist residencies and exhibitions across Australia and Internationally.
Joy Zhou is a trans-disciplinary artist and design practitioner based in naarm/melbourne. Their practice generates from embodied experiences and communicates complex intersectional relations. Expanding from their background in interior design, Joy works with immediate situations, including sonic, graphic, performative, spatial and socially-engaged practices. They often interrogate norms with queering gestures and aim to amplify unnoticed existence in everyday life. These gestures unfold as encounters and events, that draw upon the people, their interrelation with space, and the overlapping contexts.
Mia Palmer-Verevis is an emerging curator, writer and arts worker with experience working with early-career artists and organisations across the non-profit sector. She is currently completing a Master of Art Curatorship at the University of Melbourne and holds a Bachelor of Arts (Art History). Dedicated to contributing to Melbourne’s contemporary art community, Mia has curated exhibitions at George Paton Gallery and Linden New Art, and holds a position as Media Coordinator on the Board of Directors at Blindside ARI.
Madeleine Sherburn is an artist, emerging curator and arts worker in Naarm (Melbourne), whose creative practice focuses on the relationship between the spectator, space and place, through photography, video, installation and text as the acting medium. Sherburn is currently the Ballarat International Foto Biennale’s Assistant Curator and is both on the board as Sponsorships and Partnerships Coordinator and the Gallery Assistant for BLINDSIDE Artist Run Space. They have also been involved with Speculative Horizons, an international collaboration between Kuwait and Australia through contemporary photography. They have previous experience in gallery management, content creation & coordination, marketing, and public projects.
Emeline Robinson-Shaw is an emerging curator, arts worker and researcher from Aoteroa living in Naarm. She is currently completing a Master of Arts (by research) in Art History at Monash University, and is on the Blindside Board of Directors. Her research is on labour, social practice, and contemporary aesthetics. She also paints, mostly cows.