Lisa Radford
“Stranger than fiction”

Although it’s described as a precinct, I have spent much of the past five years hoping Collingwood Yards is not the prison for culture and art the term suggests. After fleeing central Melbourne, West Space is now a few doors up from the recently saved Tote and above Hope St Radio. The peripatetic life of this small organisation is hard to ignore, given that not one small arts body is left in the CBD after exploding rents caused the exodus of artist-led spaces such as TCB Art Inc., Bus Projects and KINGS ARI.

Joanna Kitto, Director of West Space, was previously a curator at
Samstag Museum of Art and co-director of fine print magazine. The exhibition Stranger than fiction makes connections with works by a range of local and international artists at various stages in their career, from Mununjali artist Nicholas Currie, now in his 20s, to Egyptian artist Basim Magdy, an established artist now based in Basel.

The phrase “stranger than fiction” is a response to the shock of the reality in truth. It doesn’t take long before our negotiation of contested realities collapses into post-truth, fake news, known knowns and unknown knowns. Advocates of inconvenient truths are imprisoned – think Julian Assange and David McBride – or lose funding, like Forensic Architecture, a group that researches state violence at Goldsmiths College, London.

Author Ernst van Alphen notes that art is forced to navigate the loss of narrative that occurs in direct relation to the increase in archives. Consequently, art becomes increasingly heavy-handed, burdened by a responsibility to address political morals corrupted by inadequate media and discourse. The difference between a critique of post-truth and the questions in the exhibition’s title is embodied in the materiality and form of the works selected.

The works all share a drive for something beyond that which is considered fact. What about what connects us? Our wonder in the world? The possibility of a future? Can we make visible the contradictions in class, culture and history that the state seeks to deny?

Kitto asks as much in her catalogue essay, a humble but comprehensive black-and-white photocopy that traces the material and conceptual manoeuvres of the works and the eight artists included in the exhibition.

Entering the exhibition, I am immediately overwhelmed by the sense that I have entered a chamber. Corporeal, almost Gregorian, my viewing route is interrupted by a sound that I can’t immediately locate. Archie Barry’s Wall choreography (2024) morphs the room into a polyphonic choir and resonates through the gallery, simultaneously immersing me in the architecture and drawing me into my own chest. The hum, as I hear it, registers as an empathic wave in my body at the same time as it hits my ears.

I turn to the centre of the one-room gallery and encounter the solidity of a plywood door that is rudimentary in its manufacture and dysfunctional, in Spot the difference (door) (2024) by Nicholas Currie. As much a painting as it is a sculpture, a security door emblem is snaked in white gesso paint across the surface of one side. Its “real” handle provides no opening. The threshold is the surround. Paired black thongs wait at the door, implying the subject has entered. A horseshoe hanging above the door points up, letting luck either run out or be redistributed. A pink candle, very upright and seemingly precarious, awaits a light during my visit, but will burn with time. Time is money, right?

Plywood is not a mirror, but there is a sense of reflection. I walk in and around the architecture this work is making present. I meet a brown baseball cap blazoned with “A”, hung above a crisp white linen shirt and dark blue jeans. It is a sardonic material manifestation of (in)visibilities and presences –the white screen door a semiotic device, seemingly impenetrable but definitely circumnavigable. Histories can be changed.

I look towards the windows that face south and to the city and read the material listings of Rosie Isaac’s Tip test (2024), which makes materially present a horizon line now lost to urban density. What is tipping in this test?The flourish at the west edge of the length of steel that spans two of four windows is securely bound to the architecture, rather than to the gallery wall. Tip test is not baroque so much as curled and alphabetic. Angles and height determine what the eyes can perceive. The solidified horizon divides the surrounding suburb from the cityscape, from which hang colour fields of blotting paper.

To the rear wall of the gallery, two high-definition televisions play a mirrored recording. Rä di Martino’s two-channel video-cum-karaoke, Afterall (A Space Mambo) (2019), recorded in a rubbish dump on the moon, is a somewhat Lynchian The Fifth Element. Apple screensavers morph into space junk while spirits squat, attired in garbage bags. Figures emerge and disappear, pixelated and stardusted as if forming and re-forming as vectors in space.
I realise I am watching an opera of sorts, presented in fragments from a future past. I think of Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play.

I listen to a lesson in the world’s potential to sing, a whispering Italian diva waiting for a new sun. Vincent Gallo. The Legend of Kaspar Hauser. Koi fish in infinite space. A mambo. A complex pattern of steps. I have dissolved into someone else’s databank, longing for a space able to house Stranger than Fiction in the kunsthalle it warrants.

The montage merges a dump into religious painting, positioning a hub cap as a halo to the sound of a computer rebooting over and over again. I look up again to the ceiling and realise it holds a network of cymbals (or symbols), hub-cap high hats networked as if they are diagrams extracted from a biology text. Held together by magnets, Total dissolved fluids (2024), Rosie Isaac’s second work in the exhibition, literally reflects back at me the place where I stand and the chromium I can’t see.

Andrea Illés’s absence is an ongoing present. In sorry I was so hungry (2024), a live feed to her window on a Mac desktop documents a wheeled travel case being dragged through an unfamiliar landscape, including encounters with a horse and travel companions. There is a lightness in the burden translated through her moving images that traverses performance and document.

Teresa Busuttil’s sculptural puzzle, time poor dream pool (2024), and the excellent short digital video, Charismatic Inflation (2021), puncture place with varying weights and predatory humour, while Sammaneh Pourshafighi’s marbled monoprints, part of the series All the Devils Are Here (2024), are made with ebru techniques, rendering visible the liquid nature of memory.

Upstairs, two films by Basim Magdy future-code a poetry for the present. The 16mm films are transferred to high-definition montage to collate images familiar and strange alongside textual narration, keyed sound and monochrome. His 2011 work, 13 Essential Rules for Understanding the World, and the more recent FEARDEATHLOVEDEATH (2022) open the relationships between memory, history and death.

A program of performances, symposiums and conversations accompanies the exhibition – their sum equal to, rather than greater than, any of the exhibition’s parts. The glimpses of this temporary community convened by Kitto shared physically in space, on 80gsm paper and online, remind me that ambition is not confined by capital. Not all the time, anyway.

Originally published in The Saturday Paper, August 2024.