Agent Bodies

BACKGROUND: This project expands critical research into creative practice, human agency, performance, identity, and the body. Agent Bodies considers new propositions of how we understand bodies today and contextualises several propositions around what a body could be. Fluidity, hybridity, permeability and ambiguity are interrogated through several creative works. This project has an affinity with radical forms of queerness, intersubjectivity, and intersectionality. Relevant theorists include Michel Foucault, Karen Barad, Judith Butler, and Jack Halberstam. CONTRIBUTION: This curatorial project was co-curated with Professor Mikala Dwyer and included 17 significant Australian and international artists probing the body in their practices, including Cassils (CAN/US), Lucian Freud (UK), Yhonnie Scarce (AUS), Mike Parr (AUS), Leigh Bowery (AUS/UK). The artists were carefully selected for their diversity of interrogations. Each artists considered human agency within its social context, resulting in works that question the performance of identity, bodies in motion, and various states of bodily integrity, including birth, sex, and death. SIGNIFICANCE: This project was selected by the curators at RMIT Gallery to be one of their four major exhibitions for 2022. The catalogue essays were written by Professor Susan Best and Professor Edward Colless. The project was widely covered in the media, including interviews on JOY FM and 3RRR, and reviews in Memo Review and Art Almanac.