anti-aria for ater-
6 July 2024 - 8 September 2024
Curator:
Artist(s): Abbra Kotlarczyk
Location: The Atrium
This exhibition is the final instalment in a three-part series of exhibition reading rooms by artist Abbra Kotlarczyk that are centred around genealogy, familial history, material and elemental kinships, and queer modes of reading and resistance.
anti-aria for ater- draws from, while also representing an operatic break with, the paternal line of its previous two iterations. The exhibition centres feminist and autobiographical psychogeographies of fire as they intersect with the history and architecture of the gallery’s incinerator, known colloquially as ‘The Destructor’. The exhibition title draws on the etymology of the root word ‘ater’ meaning fire (blackened by) and ‘aria’ meaning air (a melody for a single voice). It exists as an anti-proposition for solo expressions of creation—familial, artistic and otherwise—drawing on the pyrotechnical tensions implicit in extinction and extermination, rebirth and rejuvenation.
Envisioned as an expanded publication, this three-chapter ‘book’ cycles back to its beginning to round out with a coda, reflecting the adjacencies of water to fire in the afterlives of the artist’s grandparents and the site of the gallery/incinerator itself.
Abbra Kotlarczyk was raised on Bundjalung Country in the subtropical ruins of a decommissioned banana plantation. She makes art, curates, reads, writes, edits, parents and gardens—sometimes all at once—in an attempt to outmanoeuvre the forces that pit us against enmeshment. Her creative practice aims to destabilise hierarchies of visual, linguistic and sensorial modes of relating, with her work often taking place trans-historically through expanded notions of care, labour, queerness, ecology, publication and embodied poetics. A poem of hers won the 2022 Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize and in 2023 she was the recipient of the Footscray Art Prize Residency Artist Award.
Friday, 5 July, 6-8pm
The opening night, with speeches and a Welcome to Country, will be held at Incinerator Gallery alongside exhibitions These Arms Hold and EPAR OPAR.
Reading Performance
Saturday, 31 August, 2:30pm arrival, for a 2:45pm start
Join artist Abbra Kotlarczyk and poet Autumn Royal for an afternoon of spoken performance, presenting poetic and auto-fictive texts central to the exhibition reading room anti-aria for ater-.
The performance will draw out key themes from the exhibition, activating an operatic and dialogic response to the emotional terrain of gendered and familial experience, set against the climatic intensities of a fuel-loaded planet.