Dis/Appearance: Repatriation

RESEARCH BACKGROUND: The brief for the exhibition 'Mortality' was the exploration "of life's journey from the moment of lift-off to the final send-off and all the bits in between". The work by Charles Anderson for the exhibition responded through a meditation upon places of waiting, evoking the fragility, temporality and homelessness of both people and things in our contemporary world. RESEARCH CONTRIBUTION: The Dis/Appearance project is an ongoing 'thinking in matter'. This project aims to critique current hierarchies and taxonomies of space and aims to explore alternatives to the dominant paradigm of material production. It seeks to locate other possibilities of visibility, other possible formations and inscriptions of the spatial, and other possible forms of production and documentation. The project investigates places of being and becoming, with a particular focus upon places of waiting: the hospital ward, the doctor's surgery, the refugee centre, and places of recuperation and recovery. These places of appearance are places where we ourselves, and others normally transparent to or absent from us, become troublingly opaque and present. Thus waiting rooms are not only 'places of making and unmaking' but collection points of brokenness. The work on exhibition is a collection of in-between things carefully arranged or posed to inhabit and reconfigure a transitional space. Dis/Appearance: Repatriation is a tableau, a kind of delay, and as such articulates a poetics of the in-between. RESEARCH SIGNIFICANCE: The exhibition 'Mortality' at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, which was part of the Melbourne International Arts Festival, included works by leading national and international artists, including Aleks Danko, Tacita Dean, Sue Ford, Bill Viola, and the Bureau of Inverse Technology.