Visit

69 Capel Street, West Melbourne VIC 3003

Open 12pm-5pm, Thursday - Sunday

Access

KINGS Artist-Run is a wheelchair accessible venue. Unfortunately, there is no wheelchair accessible toilet. Please contact the gallery with any access requirements and we will endeavour to support your visit.
KINGS Artist-Run Social Story

Email ›
Facebook ›
Twitter ›
Instagram ›

Subscribe To Our Newsletter







About

Kings Artist-Run provides a location for contemporary art practice, supporting distinctive experimental projects by artists at all stages of their careers.
More information ›

KINGS Artist-Run acknowledges the Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung people of the Kulin Nation as the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we operate.

We offer our respect to Elders both past and present and extend this offer to all Australian First Nations people.

Affect and Exchange

Anthea Behm
Chto Delat
Liang Luscombe
Patricia L Boyd
Sean Dockray
Sidsel Meineche Hansen
Curated by Benison Kilby



07 May 2016–28 May 2016

Affect and Exchange is an exhibition that addresses the relationship between economic exchange and subjectivity within the shifting social institutions of capitalist society. It brings together a group of international artists, using a range of media to explore the current social and economic system and its emotional impact. Its title is borrowed from an essay by contemporary artist, Melanie Gilligan, and the works all bear witness in their own way to the intersection between affect, bio-politics and capital. Encompassing painting, photography, video and printmaking, the works examine the medical industry, psychiatry, the police force and architecture. Since the 1980s, theorists such as Foucault, Guattari, Lazzarato and Berardi have designated the production of subjectivity as an important contemporary political problem and one that might indicate an exit from the current political impasse in which we are caught. The exhibition attempts to set this theoretical and political issue into productive dialogue with the artworks, not only to highlight the way that artists are addressing it, but also in order to raise the question of what role art can play in creating new forms of subjectivity.

Sidsel Meineche Hansen’s work examines the use of psychiatry as a bio-political regime that shapes the emotions of the consumer/patient. Set inside clinical interiors, her CGI animation Seroquel ® (2014) takes the bipolar medication of the same name as its subject in order to expose the relationship between psychoactive drugs, social control, and the way they both operate on an intimate and molecular level.

Two forms of mark making coalesce in Patricia L Boyd’s photographs, which show shadows cast by graffiti falling onto a floor sculpture by the artist. Skin marked by round bruises left after cupping therapy is the subject of the floor sculpture. Black and white images embedded under glass display a body concerned with maintaining health and, one might infer, productivity. By permanently fixing the transient shadows of graffiti, the artist draws together two socially coded spaces, the inside and outside of the gallery, and disrupts the clear distinction between them.

Investigating the amount of rent paid by art institutions and cultural workers, Sean Dockray and Liang Luscombe have created a Real Estate Survey. Their work delves into the history of ‘rent stress’ and how it relates to other forms of stress, whether psychological or material.

Anthea Behm’s abstract paintings use pepper spray to allude to recent demonstrations and protests and their policing. The paintings mimic and re-function Abstract Expressionist painting, hinting towards the relationship between Abstract Expressionism and the American ideology of freedom. The works shed light on forms of control and affect in terms of the pain that pepper spray induces on the body and its psychological repercussions.

Taking the form of a humorous musical, Chto Delat’s film The Lesson on Dis-Consent (2011) is based on a number of texts produced by the anti-psychiatry movement which emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, particularly those of the Socialist Patients Collective in Heidelberg. Staged as an interaction between performers and museum goers at an opening in Baden Baden, the work critiques the modern concept of a healthy lifestyle and questions how it might be radicalised.

 

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.

See all projects by:


  • Anthea Behm is an Australian artist. In 2011 she undertook the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program in New York. She has had solo exhibitions at Minerva Gallery, Sydney, Ideas Platform at Artspace, Sydney, F.L.A. Gallery (with Lisa Iglesias), Gainesville and Golden Gallery, Chicago. Her work has been included in the group exhibitions, ‘A Painting is a Painting isn’t a Painting’ at the Kadist Foundation, San Francisco, ‘Respond’ at Smack Mellon, New York, ‘The Disappearance’ at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore, ‘Performing Transition’ at Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki and ‘Dallas Biennale’, Dallas Contemporary.
  • Chto Delat was founded in 2003 in Petersburg by a group of artists, critics, philosophers, and writers from Saint Petersburg, Moscow, and Nizhny Novgorod with the goal of merging political theory, art, and activism. Chto Delat as a collective operates in different media such as video films, graphics, and murals, learning theatre, newspaper publications, radio plays, and militant theory. The artistic activities of Chto Delat are orchestrated by four member artists, Tsaplya (Olga Egorova), Nikolay Oleinikov, Glyuklya (Natalia Pershina), and Dmitry Vilensky who often cooperate with Russian and international artists and researchers in joint projects realized under the collective name of Chto Delat.
  • Liang Luscombe is an Australian artist. She has had solo exhibitions at Boxcopy Contemporary Art Space, Brisbane, Sutton Project Space, Melbourne and TCB Art Inc, Melbourne. She has participated in group exhibitions at Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, 3rd Ural Industrial Biennial, Russia, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery at the University of Western Australia, Wollongong Art Gallery, Good Press Gallery, Glasgow, I.C.A.N., Sydney, Moona Project Space, Perth, Utopian Slumps, Melbourne, The Romanian Academy, Rome and XYZ Gallery Tokyo.
  • Patricia L Boyd is an artist based in London and San Francisco. She has had solo exhibitions at Jan Kaps Gallery, Cologne, Kiria Koula Gallery, San Francisco, YEARS, Copenhagen, Modern Art Oxford and ohi0 Gallery, Glasgow, and was commissioned by Frieze Film, London, in 2013. She has participated in the group exhibitions, ‘Dependency’ at Gasworks Gallery, London, Steirischer Herbst, Graz, the 12th Lyon Biennale, ‘How Can You Relate? A Case of Alienation and Closeness’ at the Showroom, London, ‘Exchange’ at Flat Time House, London and ‘The End of Violent Crime’ at Queer Thoughts, New York.
  • Sean Dockray is a Melbourne based artist, a founding director of the Los Angeles non-profit Telic Arts Exchange, and initiator of knowledge-sharing platforms, The Public School and Aaaaarg. His work has been included in the group exhibitions ‘Imaginary Accord’ at The Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, ‘Factory Fetish’ at West Space, Melbourne, ‘Vantage Point’ at the Substation, Melbourne, ‘Public Library’ at Württembergishcer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, ‘Wide Open School’ at the Hayward Gallery, London, ‘New Construction in Video Art’ at California Museum of Photography, Riverside and ‘Shadowboxing’ at the Royal College of Art, London.
  • Sidsel Meineche Hansen is a London based artist. Her practice is centred around the idea of nervousness as a form of institutional critique. She has had solo exhibitions at Gasworks Gallery, London, Temporary Gallery, Cologne, Kunstlerhaus Bremen, Trondheim Art Museum, and Cubitt Gallery, London. She has participated in the group exhibitions, ‘Visceral Blue’ at La Capella Gallery in Barcelona, ‘Uncanny Valley’ at Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, ‘Rehearsals in Instability’ at Andreas Huber Gallery, Vienna, ‘Forensics’ at HKW, Berlin and ‘Europe Europe!’ at Astrup Fearnley Museet, Olso.