“Factory Fetish”
Zanny Begg, Gordon Matta-Clark, Agnes Denes, Sean Dockray, Francesco Finizio, Micah Hesse, Callum Morton, Ishai Shapira Kalter and Anna Witt
13 Nov → 12 Dec 2015

Factory Fetish explores the all too usual trend and the uncomfortable proximity between artists’ attraction to underdeveloped urban spaces and their eventual discovery, commercialisation and development by real-estate speculators. Through the development of cultural capital we see a translation into market value in which sites of culture are holding bays for property development. In this way art practice is regarded as a resource, that can be used both positively and on the other hand sustains exploitative systems, including forms of self-exploitation through social networks and gentrification. 

More broadly, Factory Fetish looks at how the arts have been placed in cornered by the forces of capitalism to facilitate gentrification but also to present alternatives to this, means to critically engage with these issues and and reroute them where possible.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Liang Luscombe and Sean Dockray have developed the short survey project The Real Estate Survey. Its purpose is to collect some basic data about how much money from arts workers and arts organisations in Melbourne trickles down to real estate. The Real Estate Survey as a way of jumpstarting a conversation about finance, gentrification, organisational forms, etc.
To undertake the short survey>

Zanny Begg is a Sydney-based artist whose work focuses on political activism and community. Zanny’s recent exhibitions include Little Baghdad, Powerhouse Youth Theatre, Fairfield, 2015; Utopia Pulse – Flares in the Darkroom, the Secession, Vienna, 2014; and Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, 2015; The List, Cambelltown Arts Centre, 2014.

Gordon Matta-Clark is widely considered one of the most influential artists working in the 1970s. He was a key contributor to the activity and growth of the New York art world in SoHo from the late 1960s until his untimely death in 1978. His practice introduced new and radical modes of physically exploring and subverting urban architecture.

Since her exhibition career began in the 1960s, Agnes Denes has participated in more than 450 exhibitions at galleries and museums throughout the world. A primary figure among the concept-based artists who emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, works by Agnes Denes are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Hirshhorn Museum and many other major institutions.

Sean Dockray is an artist, a founding director of the Los Angeles non-profit Telic Arts Exchange, and initiator of knowledge-sharing platforms, The Public School and Aaaarg.org. Dockray is a PhD candidate in Visual Art at the Victorian College of the Arts and currently lives in Melbourne.

Francesco Finizio: I latch onto situations, forms and places that concentrate questions relating to power, economy, communication. The form a work will assume is dictated by material contingencies and contextual specificities. I increasingly entertain the idea of acting like a ghost or spirit. Ghosts don’t build things. They move things, objects and people. They have no body so they “rent” bodies through which they can act upon the world.

Micah Hesse (b. 1991 New Mexico, USA) is based in Chinatown, New York City and graduated from The Cooper Union School of Art in 2013. Recent group exhibitions include: Telepathy or Esperanto, at Centre for Contemporary Art FUTURA, Prague; Needless to say i have some unusual habits, at La Fondazione RivoliDue, Milan.

Callum Morton has exhibited nationally and internationally since 1990. In addition to his studio work, he is Professor and Head of Fine Arts at Monash University.

Ishai Shapira Kalter is based in Tel Aviv and New York and is MFA candidate at CUNY Hunter College, NY (2017). Recent solo exhibitions include: Raw-Art Gallery, TelAviv (2015), along with Duo exhibitions at STA Gallery, Tel-Aviv (2014) and Hachanut Gallery, Tel-Aviv (2014).

Anna Witt lives and works in Vienna. Recent exhibitions include: Public Emotions, Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin (2014); Worst fear, best fantasy, Stacion, Center for Contemporary Art, Prishtina, Kosovo (2014); Ökonomie der Aufmerksamkeit, Kunsthalle Wien (2014).

Joshua Simon is director and chief curator of MoBY-Museums of Bat Yam, Israel, and author of numerous publications including most recently Neomaterialism (Sternberg Press, 2013).