In partnership with the 2017 Melbourne Festival, the Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) will present ‘The humours’, an international group exhibition bringing together six artists to consider how comedy and absurdity can reveal the underlying complexities of contemporary quotidian life.
Taking these defining themes into play, this exhibition of new commissions and recent works comprising installation, moving images, performance and photography will pay particular attention to the roles of language play and physicality in unexpected, unsettling preconceptions. ‘The humors’ will explore the artists’ ability to disclose concerns about race, labour, gender, politics and history through various comedic personalities, strategies and tropes (including physical movement, scripted dialogue, comic timing, exaggerations of scale and absurdity).
MUMA’s Senior Curator Hannah Mathews explains, “‘The humours’ is a diverse exhibition which aims to be more than a collection of different types of humorous art. What the show does is to look at humour, at what comedians do, the skill and the craft of that and what that allows us as the audience to see and engage with: those bigger ideas around identity, history and politics”… “to confront social problems through these quite complex emotional, physical, behavioural experiences.”
‘The Humours’ will include a range of approaches to look closely at “what makes funny” rather than identifying “what is funny”. The exhibition features a seven-channel video installation, Live (2014), by acclaimed American conceptual artist Glenn Ligon, as well as new commissioned works by Australian artist collective Barbara Cleveland that propose the idea of bad timing as a feminist strategy. Additional artists include; Gabriel Abrantes (PRT), Matthew Griffin (AUS), Mary Reid Kelly (USA) and Mika Rottenberg (ARG).
Monash University Museum of Modern Art (MUMA)
7 October to 16 December, 2017
Melbourne
