Database

Shannon Brett (b. 1973) is a proud Wakka Wakka/Butchulla/Gooreng Gooreng artist, designer, educator, researcher and curator, currently completing a PhD in Social Justice at the Queensland University of Technology in Meeanjin/Magandjin (Brisbane). Their research on whiteness responds to systemic racism and misogyny in Australia from decolonial and black feminist perspectives. Brett is a current member of the Contemporary Aboriginal Art Collective proppaNOW, and also Adjunct Curator at the Institute of Modern Art in Meeanjin/Magandjin (Brisbane). They hold a Bachelor of Contemporary Australian Indigenous Art from the Queensland College of Art and have worked in numerous arts institutions throughout Australia.

Sir Sidney Nolan (1917–1992) was one of the leading Australian artists of the 20th century, best known for his interpretations of Australian historical figures including the explorers Burke and Wills, Eliza Fraser and the bushranger Ned Kelly. His Kelly saga features highly stylised depictions of the bushranger and the Australian landscape and serves not just as a historical account, but also as a catalyst to explore themes of love, myth, and identity. Although Nolan studied at the National Gallery of Victoria’s School of Art in the 1930s, he was essentially self-taught and was well known as a voracious reader. From 1938 he was supported by art patrons John and Sunday Reed. Their house, ‘Heide’, in the outer Melbourne suburb of Heidelberg (now Heide Museum of Modern Art), was a meeting place for Melbourne's avant-garde, and where he first began his affair with Sunday Reed. In 1951 Nolan moved to London and remained living in England until his death in 1992 at the age of 75. "Although Nolan’s primary relationships were all with women, in 1947 Nolan referred to himself as ‘ambidextrous’ (his word for bisexual) to poet and editor Barrett Reid. Not long after meeting Reid, Nolan depicted himself in a portrait as Arthur Rimbaud, the 19th-century French poet and lover of poet Paul Verlaine. By this time, Nolan’s ménage à trois with the Reeds had run its course." - Art Gallery of New South Wales

SJ Norman (b. 1984) is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and cultural worker. His practice is counter-disciplinary and formally promiscuous. His body of work to date has included more than 20 works of long durational performance, and a significant body of other work embracing sculpture, photography, textiles, film and spatial audio. He is also the author of one book of fiction, with a second forthcoming. His work across forms is connected by a deep and abiding pre-occupation with the body and its mysteries, a concern originating from his foundational training in dance and theatre, as well as his Indigenous, queer, trans and disabled subjectivities. For his work in the fine arts, performing arts and literature, Norman has been the recipient of numerous awards, including: the 67th Blake Prize (formerly the Blake Prize for Religious Art), a 2018 Sidney Myer Fellowship and a 2019 Australia Council Fellowship. Recent exhibitions include the 22nd Biennale of Sydney and the 4th National Indigenous Art Triennial. His acquisition history includes major public collections, such as the National Gallery of Australia. His first work of fiction, *Permafrost* (UQP, 2020), won the 2017 Kill Your Darlings Prize for Unpublished Manuscript. It was listed for 6 major literary awards upon publication, including the Australian Society for Literature Gold Medal, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards in 2 categories, and the Stella Prize. He was awarded the 2022 Peter Blazey Prize for Non-Fiction for his essay *The Salt Lake*. He has been listed in many other prizes for prose and verse, including the Elizabeth Jolley Prize for Short Story and twice for the Judith Wright Prize for Poetry. He works extensively as an independent curator of performance, music, public discourse and pedagogical programs. He has run workshops and masterclasses at many institutions, including Pratt Institute, Princeton University, University of California and the Center for Art and Research Alliances (CARA). In 2019, he initiated the Indigenous-led, queer-focused interdisciplinary arts and pedagogy platform Knowledge of Wounds, which he continues to co-organize with Dr Joseph M. Pierce (Cherokee Nation Citizen) since 2019. He is a transmasculine Koori, born on Gadigal country. His maternal ties are to north-western Wiradjuri and Ngyiampaa-Wailwan Country (the community of Nyngan, NSW) and his paternal ties are to West Yorkshire, UK. He lives and works in Lenapehoking/New York City.

Soda Jerk is an Australian artist duo who make sample-based films with a rogue documentary impulse. They are fundamentally interested in the politics of images; how they circulate, whom they benefit and how they can be undone. After living and working in New York for over a decade, they relocated to Europe in 2023. Soda Jerk’s archival practice traverses art and experimental cinema, and they have collaborated on projects with cyberfeminist collective VNS Matrix and electronic music group The Avalanches. Their video installations and multi-channel lecture performances have been presented at art institutions including the Centre Pompidou, Moderna Museet, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Whitworth Art Gallery, Barbican, Chisenhale Gallery, Hartware MedienKunstVerein, MCA Chicago, National Gallery of Art Washington DC, Wexner Center for the Arts, Walker Arts Center, Pioneer Works, Video Bureau Guangzhou, Tai Kwun Contemporary Hong Kong and Seoul Museum of Art. Their work has also screened extensively within film festivals and international cinema institutions such as the British Film Institute and Anthology Film Archives. Their recent feature *Hello Dankness* premiered at the 2023 Berlinale and won numerous cinema awards including Best Feature at the Atlanta Film Festival and Lausanne Underground Film & Music Festival, as well as the Melbourne International Film Festival’s Blackmagic Design Australian Innovation Award. It had its New York premiere at the Museum of the Moving Image as opening night film of Prismatic Ground, followed by a theatrical run at Manhattan’s iconic Film Forum. *Hello Dankness* follows their controversial political revenge fable *Terror Nullius*, which was disowned by its commissioning body, who called the film “UnAustralian”. *The Guardian* named the “dizzyingly ambitious satirical work” one of the best Australian movies of the decade.

Spiros Panigirakis is interested in the way in which presentational devices, furniture and organisational frameworks influence the construction of meaning, form and sociability. He has long engaged the role of the studio as a space of production in which results of artistic ‘fieldwork’ are synthesised and transformed. This research-led practice re-envisages situations of cultural and personal significance in the form of diagrams, mappings, manuals, texts and patterns as well as sculptural referents. Panigirakis often works with groups in both a curatorial and collaborative capacity to address the sited conditions of art and, when working on an individual basis, he alludes to these issues within the content of the work. *Garden states* for example reflected on the relationships and rituals developed within the suburban gardens inhabited by Panigirakis’s parents and their peers. A functional sculpture, it contained diagrammatic drawings depicting networks of people and social systems, reflecting Panigirakis’s interest in the underlying structures of places and groups.

Susi Blackwell (b. 1969) is an Australian artist and printmaker. She was an early member of the activist print making collective Inkahoots in Brisbane in the 1980s. In 1994 she collaborated with Angela Bailey on the production of the HIV/AIDS political poster 'Dam Dykes', as part of an Inkahoots exhibition project. Elizabeth Ashburn writes, "the poster was to be have launched at the Brisbane City Hall Gallery in 1994. However, the council decided that the poster was 'offensive' and refused to hang it. It was explained to the artists by a council representative that hanging the poster would do 'more harm than good and would needlessly offend public taste" (Elizabeth Ashburn, Lesbian Art, 1996, p. 38-9). Blackwell also modelled for the 1991 poster 'Celebrating Change' by Inkahoots member Robyn McDonald, which featured a gay couple and a lesbian couple kissing and embracing (a work now in the collection of the Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art).

Sydney Long (1871–1955) was born in Goulburn, NSW and trained in Sydney at the Art Society of New South Wales School, studying under AJ Daplyn and Julian Ashton. He began exhibiting works in 1894 and became most well known for his art-nouveau inspired depictions of the Australian landscape. “Sydney Long was a man of secrets. We do not know for certain when he was born or who his parents were. Although he married, fellow artist Roy de Maistre disclosed that the two had been lovers. The curator of a major Long exhibition in 2012 suggested that Baron von Gloëdon’s photographs of naked Sicilian boys were the inspiration for Long’s 1894 masterpiece *By tranquil waters*." - Art Gallery of New South Wales

Tay Haggarty’s practice explores how reductive forms can be used as an open field to reflect upon personal and shared queer experience. Their works take the form of collaborations, performances, videos, sculpture and public art. Haggarty uses industrial and ready-made materials that, when arranged within a space, heighten precarious elements through tension and balance. Their work is often minimal and site specific. Haggarty is a co-director of DRIVER ARI and is one half of the collaborative duo Parallel Park. They completed a post graduate degree in Public Art at Monash University in 2022 and their Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) degree at the Queensland University of Technology in 2015. They have had solo shows at the Institute of Modern art, Kunstbunker ARI and Wreckers Artspace. Haggarty has also shown in group exhibitions with Metro Arts, Bus Projects, UNSW Galleries and more. They were the 2019 recipient of the Jeremy Hynes award.

TextaQueen (b. 1975) is a multi-genre artist of Goan descent living on unceded Wurundjeri land. Known for using the humble felt-tip marker to create majestic portraiture, their work complicates assumptions around identities at the intersections of gender, race, sexuality and ability. Their practice envisions an ever-expanding alternate universe of collective and transformative possibility, centring those not often witnessed in states of empowerment. Encompassing drawing, painting, printmaking, video, performance, curating, music, writing and murals—in collaboration with other displaced and diasporic people—they deliver irreverent satire in enticing colour and detail that disrupts all the “isms” entrenched in the status quo. Texta contemplates dis/connection to cultural and colonial legacies, interrogating the many ways in which they find themselves precariously balanced across ancestral and stolen lands. TextaQueen’s work has appeared at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), Brisbane; Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney; Western Exhibitions, Chicago; 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, London; and Kunsthalle Darmstadt, Germany; and is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane; Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne; Monash University of Modern Art, Melbourne; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth; and the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra. Mural commissions include de Young Museum, San Francisco; Murray Art Museum Albury, Albury; City of Moreland, Melbourne; and City of Melbourne. They have had mentorships with Emory Douglas and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarashina in Oakland, California; a 2017 State Library of Victoria Creative Fellowship; and residencies at ACME, London; International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York; and QAGOMA. A mid-career survey exhibition toured nationally via Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery in 2017.