The body is the point of departure for an exploration of contrasting experiences of distance and intimacy. ‘Measures of Distance’ features works from the 1960s to the present, it includes performance and body art, earthworks, abstract paintings, installation and film and video. Archetypal forms such as the circle, spiral, silhouette and cut-out create visual links across the exhibition.
The title alludes to the way artists investigate themes of emotional and physical distance or closeness (sometimes articulated as belonging and displacement). Travel and journeys (through the landscape or within the self), histories of colonisation, migration, and exile and return, appear alongside investigations of what it means to belong to a culture, a people, locality or home.
The exhibition focuses on regions such as Europe, United States, South America, Africa and West Asia, Australia and the Asia Pacific region. Artists include Georg Baselitz, Willem de Kooning, Yoko Ono, Robert Smithson, Ana Mendieta, Mona Hatoum, Armando Andrade Tudela and Francis Alÿs.
Measures of Distance Exhibition
18 November 2017 – 29 July 2018
GoMA, Brisbane
www.qagoma.qld.gov.au
