PROTEST IS A CREATIVE ACT, MUSEUM OF AUSTRALIAN PHOTOGRAPHY /  by Helen Grace

A quick visit to Melbourne at the weekend to attend the opening of this new exhibition at MAPh. I’m happy to have work included amongst a marvellous group of legendary figures. A timely show.

Protest is a creative act

By facilitating a conversation between women and nonbinary artists across the decades, Protest is a creative act confirms that many of the issues addressed by women photographers in the 1970s – around the body, sexuality, race, national identity and the environment – have not been resolved.

These concerns are shared today by a younger generation of artists who build upon inheritances of the past, demonstrating their objection and defiance through new creative strategies. Collectively, the historical and contemporary works in the exhibition show the importance of friendship and community, and the good that can come from working together to advocate and agitate for change.

Protest is a creative act is curated by Guest Curator Kelly Gellatly and Angela Connor, Senior Curator at MAPh.

Participating artists
Jesse Boylan, Sophie Cassar, Miriam Charlie, Virginia Coventry, Mary Cox, Brenda L Croft, Destiny Deacon, eX de Medici, Sandy Edwards, Bonita Ely, Liss Fenwick, Sue Ford, Juno Gemes, Viva Gibb, Helen Grace, Janina Green, Ponch Hawkes, Siri Hayes, Amrita Hepi, Naomi Hobson, Alana Hunt, Carol Jerrems, Ellen José, Laresa Kosloff, Rosemary Laing, Honey Long and Prue Stent, Angela Lynkushka, Ruth Maddison, Alex Martinis-Roe, Viv Méhes, Eden Menta and Janelle Low, Jill Orr, Daisy Noyes, Ruth O’Leary, Wendy Rew, Elvis Richardson and Virginia Fraser, Therese Ritchie, Jess Schwientek, Tara Shield, Tina Stefanou, Salote Tawale, Kawita Vatanjyankur, Jemima Wyman

7 June – 31 August 2025
Museum of Australian Photography

860 Ferntree Gully Road
Wheelers Hill Victoria 3150


SONIC TRILOGY - PART OF WOMANIFESTO INSTALLATION AT SHARJAH BIENNIAL /  by Helen Grace

We’re happy that Sonic Trilogy, a collective project as part of the Womanifesto WeMend installation is now showing at Sharjah Biennial - Sharjah Biennial 16: to carry, February 6th - June 15th, 2025

For more on the WeMend Project, see here

And some pix from the Womanifesto Sydney group’s work-in-progress for the Sharjah Biennial, carried to Bangkok by Phaptawan Suwannakudt for assembly before being carried to Sharjah

PHOTOSYNTHESISERS: WOMEN AND THE LENS, TE URU /  by Helen Grace

Thrilled to be in this awesome show and looking forward to visiting in early May

Photosynthesisers: Women and the lens

16 FEB – 25 MAY 2025
GALLERIES TWO, THREE

420 Titirangi Rd

Titirangi, Auckland

+64 9 817 8087info@teuru.org.nz

Photosynthesisers: Women and lens is an exhibition of photographs and videos by 41 women artists and collectives from Aotearoa and Australia, including fa`afafine1, queer, and trans women, and those with ancestral ties to Aboriginal, Māori, and diasporic communities. Produced between the 1960s and 2024 by four generations of artists, exhibited works collectively offer cross-cultural and intergenerational perspectives on the social, political, and cultural conditions that impelled their capture.  

The exhibition title draws on photosynthesis, the process by which plants absorb, transform, and redistribute light energy. Likening this alchemy to that of lens-based practices, Photosynthesisers holds that exhibited photographs and videos transmit sociopolitical energy through a similar adaptation of light. Passed through the lens of one context, light forges images that are preserved for others, forming pleats in time, carrying manifold, often quiet conditions that produce and reproduce history with shifting resonance as time develops. The camera enables this world-building transformation, channelling information through a socio-material network, like a root system. The gendered framework for Photosynthesisers derives its shape from a similarly diverse and evolving complex of positions and pulses—identity is taken as a malleable form of expression, rather than a fixed category. 

From feminist utopias to traumatic domestic memories, nuclear fallout to patriarchal monuments, gay liberation to motherhood, interpersonal relationships to cultural heritage and ecology, housing and labour to forms of violence, the effects of time to gender, sexuality, love, and community, the photographs and videos in this exhibition map wide-ranging social and political concerns—many from queer and feminist positions. Numerous works feature the artists themselves, functioning as self-portraits to varying degrees of performativity. Others document local communities, events, or actions. Some are documentary or diaristic in nature, while others relay personal, interpersonal, or societal circumstance through constructed imagery. All share in the astute and caring observation of their makers, whose materialised visions connect us to the diversity of human experience through intimate details, subversive ideological positions, and ranging emotional registers—all of which might otherwise be lost to sweeping accounts of history. Importantly, the rendering of these observations into shared aesthetic experience is not an endpoint, but rather a passage through which lens-based practices transmit energy in the form of images and desires that exhort critical reflection.  

The exhibition is accompanied by a reader, which collates 30 texts produced between 1981 and 2024 by artists, curators, and writers from the region. These texts take the form of article, essay, interview, lecture, review, thesis, or subchapter, collectively tracing parallel ideas, exhibitions, and histories.

Curated by James Gatt. 

1 Fa’afafine is a third gender. This Samoan term translates as ‘in the manner of a woman’.

Presented in association with Te Ahurei Toi o Tāmaki Auckland Arts Festival 2025.

2025 Paris Residency Fellows /  by Helen Grace

The Power Institute:
Foundation for Art and Visual Culture

https://www.powerinstitute.org.au/2025-paris-residency-fellows

Very happy to be part of this group! Looking forward to Paris next year!

Cité Marais

Bundanon Visit for Wilder Times Show Opening and Artist Talk /  by Helen Grace

For the opening of Wilder Times, on July 6th, we were accommodated in the Glenn Murcutt-designed Boyd Education Centre. Beautifully austere little pods, very Japanese-inspired.

And the night before our artist talk, telescopes arrived in the forecourt of the Boyd Education Centre and we went star-gazing in the cold, Scorpio striding across the sky in the middle of the Milky Way - and the Dark Emu!

Serious Undertakings in 'Wilder Times ... Bundanon from July 6th /  by Helen Grace

I’m happy to announce that the remastered Serious Undertakings (1983) will be shown in the forthcoming WILDER TIMES: Arthur Boyd and the mid-1980s landscape at Bundanon, July 6 – October 13, 2024.

I’m thrilled to be in this show, amongst the tradition of landscape painting with which Serious Undertakings was engaging at the time. The work will be shown in its own ‘screening room’ within the show.

Press release here

Poster Design: Jan Mackay, 1983