Deborah Kelly

Bio

Deborah Kelly (b. 1962) is an artist of mixed settler ancestry who works across disciplinary and geographical boundaries to produce artworks which encompass collage, installation, event and performance. Her projects often start outside of art institutions, and some of them stay there. Posters for social movements, printable window protest signs and a billboard that ended up in the Mardi Gras parade. A choreographed dance as a momentary monument to the Tiananmen Square protests, disseminated on YouTube and performed in cities around the world. Kelly’s projects across media are concerned with lineages of representation, politics and history, and practices of collectivity from the epic to intimate. Some of Kelly’s projects that originate as political practices are picked up by art institutions, and others are devised directly for, with, or against them. Beware of the God (2005) was commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) and deployed across Sydney as postcards, PSAs and projections onto clouds. No Human Being Is Illegal (2014–19), 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014), unfolded through hundreds of group collage sessions and is now in the collection of the Wellcome Trust, UK. Kelly has exhibited extensively around Australia, and in the biennales of Singapore, Sydney, Thessaloniki, TarraWarra, Cementa, and Venice. Recent solo exhibitions include The Gods of Tiny Things, Australian Centre for the Moving Image (2021); Life in the Ruins, Fabian & Claude Walter Galerie, Zurich (2018); and Venus Envy, Kvindemuseet, Denmark (2017). In December 2019 she won first prize in the Fotogenia Festival, Mexico City and was International Artist in Residence, Wellcome Trust, London. Her multidisciplinary religious work CREATION was included in The National 4: New Australian Art, MCA (2021) and continues to build intention and congregation.

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