Brook Andrew, Madison Bycroft, Katthy Cavaliere, Daniel Crooks, Julie Davies, Stano Filko, Patrick Pound, Alex Rizkalla, Si Yi Shen, Kieren Seymour, Batia Suter, and Tarryn Love

WORLDING presents the works of twelve national and international contemporary artists that speak to a mobile understanding of how artists partake in the designing, building, and organising of a personal world through their practice.

Under the curation of Platform Arts’ Dr Amber Smith, the ‘worlding’ practices proposed in this exhibition reflect how artists un/build worlds and re/imagine the world as-it-is, with consideration to alternate realities, memory fields, truth-telling, and material-semiotic worlds. The mediums span video and digital media as well as object-based and archival practices, foregrounding First Nations and Diasporic perspectives, which together examine how everyday objects and technologies infiltrate artistic practice by co-opting and subverting these materialities.

These central themes culminated from Amber’s 2022 PhD: ‘Collecting, Display, and World-Building in Contemporary Art Practice: Putting the Wunderkammer back to work’. This research saw Amber investigate and unravel the more unconscious motivations behind object-based, accumulative art practices. Through Worlding, Amber invites viewers to contemplate how one exists among, between, and surrounded by material networks of things.

Worlding runs as a six-week program that begins with a curator floor talk at 3.00pm, followed by an opening event at 4.00 pm on Saturday, June 8th. There will be free public events in partnership with The Centre For Reworlding, including a screening of Refugium followed by a Q+A session on Friday, June 28th; a cross-sector panel talk drawing on world-building expertise from an architect, author, game designer, and an exhibiting artist on Saturday, June 15th. Platform Arts will also host open sessions of the game Dungeons & Dragons in Gallery One throughout the exhibition phase.

“By confronting our own attempts to world-build, we gain insight into the purpose of worlding being about identity and creating an environment that signals back to us—sometimes unconsciously—our identity and essentials like security and self-actualisation. We like to know that our immediate world meets our needs and desires.”
— Curator Amber Smith