(Un)conditional III

(Un)conditional III
Melbourne Art Fair
Cushla Donaldson & Ayesha Green
2–5 August 2018

(Un)conditional III includes new work by Ayesha Green (Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Kahungunu) and Cushla Donaldson. This exhibition in the Melbourne Art Fair Project Rooms is part of The Physics Room’s itinerant operating model for 2018 and draws on the ideas of reciprocity, trade and exchange, hosting and guesting. This iteration of the (Un)conditional series, taking place outside of Aotearoa, explores human and cultural movement across oceans.

Green’s research-based painting practice attempts to relocate and redefine the power relationships of, and within, Māori representation. Kurawaka is a new work comprising of four large-scale paintings completed on full sheets of plywood. Depicting two generations of Green’s maternal whānau, as well as the illustrated record of New Zealand flora from Joseph Banks’ Florilegium, Kurawaka traces living connections of lineage and displacement over expansive distances.

Cushla Donaldson’s new work 501s foregrounds the historical instrumentalisation of glamour and soft power. Donaldson has created a gigantic moving image work referencing a legendary event at the Carnival of Venice in the 1600s in which a giant glass slipper was put in a public square and filled with wine. Donaldson has built a mechanism into the work that allows participants outside the fair to text in and disrupt the seductively spinning crystal shoe to speak back to the present and prevailing power structures.

Thanks:

The Physics Room, Ayesha, and Cushla would like to thank Jan Warburton Charitable Trust and the Wallace Arts Trust for their generous support of this project. Cushla would like to thank Filipa Payne and Erina Morunga (Iwi 'n' Aus), David Hall, James Hunter, and Jerome Ngan-Kee. Ayesha would like to thank Phoebe Madeleine and The Blue Oyster Art Project Space.

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For more information about visiting the Melbourne Art Fair, click here. The Art Fair is a ticketed event. 

General Admission:
Thursday 2 August, 12.00pm to 5.00pm
Friday 3 August, 12.00pm to 9.00pm (Friday Up Late)
Saturday 4 August, 10.00am to 6.00pm
Sunday 5 August, 11.00am to 4.00pm

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Ayesha Green (Ngāti Kahungunu, Kai Tahu) is an artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau. She graduated with a Master of Fine Arts from Elam in 2013 and completed a Graduate Diploma in Museums and Cultural Heritage in 2016. Recent exhibitions include Alma Venus, Corbans Estate Art Centre (2018), Summa Pete, Papakura Art Gallery (2017), 2. Spirit of the Thing Given (Māori), RM Gallery (2017), Biographies of Transition, To Busy to Think, ARTSPACE (2017).

Cushla Donaldson is an artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau. Her practice seeks to identify, expose, and act upon schisms in the heated environment of late capitalism. Her writing has come to include fiction alongside essays on art, politics and film theory. She graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts before gaining her MFA from Goldsmiths College, University of London, as a recipient of the Anne Reid Scholarship. She has exhibited in New Zealand, Europe and Japan. She has participated in residencies in Estonia and in the Manawatū, New Zealand and has taught Art and Film Theory at Auckland University and Unitech, Auckland.