and also

This exhibition, as part of Artbank’s celebrations for our 45th, looks back at key moments and projects from our collective history. In 2013-14 Artbank’s then Senior Curator Daniel Mudie Cunningham commissioned a series of time-based works, when Artbank was a bit placeless, as it moved premises from Rosebery to Waterloo in Sydney. The series was titled Performutations. The name was meant to reflect this period of change and flux, or ‘mutation’, and to supplement the lack of a physical exhibition space. The focus was also on a critical engagement with performance-based work.

The phrase ‘and also’ suggests addition, layering, and connection. While each work in the exhibition stands alone, they also speak to each other — bodies in spaces, gestures echoing past and present, movements unfolding across time.

and also responds to the physicality of space, and the exhibition space. Laresa Kosloff’s Kinetic Connect, from the Performutations series, was the starting point for further exploration of performance based, time-based media in collection and really anchors the exhibition both historically and conceptually. Kosloff performs a ‘walking’ action using sculptural extensions from her feet while seated on a bench in a public space. Her performance is relatively stationary, and also echoes the sound of shoes walking. The work transforms an ordinary action or movement into a reflection on the language of movement and the body, and how it is constructed within public space. 

Liv Moriarty’s Also and Also gives the exhibition its title and conceptual frame. Through a diagrammatic text installation, Moriarty maps relationships between ideas and actions—how one moment leads to another, and also opens new possibilities.

Simone Slee’s Rocks happy to help, hold up, hold down continues this dialogue between the body and the agency of materials. Her suspended body appears to be supported or held up by a flexible wooden band, and also resisted by it —revealing how acts of balance, and also the process of making an artwork, depend on tension, cooperation, and vulnerability.

Amrita Hepi’s Knightengale phace (nightengale face) I explores identity through resemblance and repetition. Performing with her sister, who closely resembles her, Hepi moves together and also apart—reflecting on kinship, mirroring, and the subtle distances between bodies that appear the same.

Barbara Cleveland’s Bodies in Time revisits feminist performance histories. Their work recalls earlier gestures, and also reimagines them in the present, showing how performance endures as both memory and living practice.

Together, these works reveal performance as an ongoing practice of connection—still and moving, singular and shared, always and also.