Deep dive: Artist lecture with Andy Butler
White-Saviour-Industrial-Complex
What happens when profoundly white and colonial cultural infrastructure decides they want to empower you, or people who look like you? Deeply collaborative in his approach to art, Butler has been writing, curating and making art since 2016, when he was first taken on as a diversity hire during a wave of institutional ‘inclusion’ in the second half of the 2010s in Australia.
Growing up in country Australia at a time of deep public invisibility and open hostility towards non-white migrant populations, the whiplash of shifts in rhetoric has borne practices and discussions across the continent with critical rigour and idiosyncratic ways of working.
Andy will track key artistic and curatorial projects from the past seven years. He’ll reflect on various strategies and critical questions that have arisen in a moment of deep cognitive dissonance, when inherently conservative structures of power say that they’re progressive now and will solve structural racism and other -ism’s, and try to make sense of why artists might continue to engage with museums and institutional infrastructure when they’ve shown themselves to be inherently extractive.
The lecture will be followed by a Q&A.
Booking is encouraged but not essential.
WHAT TO EXPECT
This event is free.
This event will be held in the Kit, which can be accessed by the main gallery entrance or alternatively by our car park on 8 East St for assisted access.
This location is accessible with assistance.
This event will be seated and microphones will be used.
Light refreshments will be provided.
BIOGRAPHY
Andy Butler is an artist, writer, and curator living in Naarm Melbourne. His visual practice employs moving image, performance, painting and text to consider strategies for maintaining hope and optimism at a time of political upheaval, with a strong focus on the political currents of the Indo-Pacific region. Andy has undertaken several residencies including with Asialink, Manila, Powerhouse, Sydney, and the Humboldt Forum, Berlin. He has recently developed significant commissions with the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art and Ian Potter Museum of Art. Recent curatorial projects have been developed with Monash University Museum of Art and UTS Gallery, Sydney.