‘From the other side’ is a new exhibition at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) in Melbourne which is on now and will be on view until 3 March 2024. The show is curated by Elyse Goldfinch and Jessica Clark.
If our dystopian future is upon us, it would be normal to harbour feelings of fear, panic, and doom. Of course, fear is not a new mode of the human condition, and people have sought ways through art to cope with it for time immemorial.
‘From the other side’ helps us to ‘walk through the fire’ of worry and discontent with a range of artworks that use tropes of horror as a medium to conjure up imaginings of ‘the collective anxieties and fears of our times, from sexual liberation to new technologies, racial tension to gender subversion.’
ACCA says that feminist, queer and non-binary subjectivities will be a focus, noting ‘Centring the fear of the monstrous-feminine, the exhibition raises questions about the often-harmful representation of female monsters — the witch, the hag, the monstrous mother, the shapeshifter, the possessed woman — and how she has been reclaimed by female storytellers in recent years. The monstrous-feminine resists the prototypical role of women in horror, as either victims or final girls; instead she performs the dual roles of temptress and castrator — alluring yet repulsive, contaminating yet pure.’
Australian and international artists contributing to ‘From the other side’ include Naomi Blacklock, Mia Boe, Louise Bourgeois, Cybele Cox, Theron Debris, Karla Dickens, Lonnie Hutchinson, Naomi Kantjuriny, Minyoung Kim, Maria Kozic, Jemima Lucas, Clare Milledge, Tracey Moffatt, Suzan Pitt, Julia Robinson, Marianna Simnett, Heather B Swann, Kellie Wells, and Zamara Zamara.
On the summer evenings of 16 and 17 February you can enjoy ‘Screams on Screen’ at The Capitol on 113 Swanston St, a specially curated experience comprising art, screening, music and talks which ‘captures horror’s potential to empower social ‘otherness’, from marginalised identities to taboo revolts against constrictive social structures.’