Tune in at 8:30am to hear Andy Butler chat to The Breakfast Spread about the upcoming exhibition Always there and all a part.
Always there and all a part presents works that interrogate the complexities of navigating race in the arts. Whiteness is at the foundation of the sector, and the exhibition plays with the tension between diversity and inclusion discourse and the institutional Whiteness that frames the practices and bodies of non-White artists.
Spanning both gallery spaces of BLINDSIDE, Always there and all a part unpacks what it means to make work for a White artistic community that is invested in creating an aesthetics of inclusion, while simultaneously only extending conditional invitations to diverse artists from within White spaces. The exhibition troubles these aesthetics and power dynamics at their borders and boundaries, across photography, performance, printmaking, video and installation.
BLINDSIDE is excited to host Andy Butler as the recipient of the 2017 BLINDSIDE Emerging Curator Mentorship. Andy Butler is a Filipino-Australian writer, emerging curator and artist. His practice interrogates the tension between diversity and institutional Whiteness in the arts. He is a participant in Footscray Community Art Centre’s 2017 Emerging Cultural Leaders program, and is undertaking a Glenfern Fellowship through Writers Victoria. Andy’s writing has appeared in Overland and Art+Australia, and is forthcoming in Runway. He is on the Programming Advisory Committee for the Emerging Writers Festival, and a committee member of Chapter House Lane.
The six month mentorship with curator Emily Cormack, is focused on curatorial research and the development of an exhibition at BLINDSIDE that interrogates Whiteness in the Australian arts sector. A key research question is to investigate how cultural diversity and inclusion discourse circulates in the arts, and to ask artists from different cultural groups to respond to the hegemonic and Eurocentric values that form the foundation of visual art in Australia.
