Witness Ambitious New Artworks With the Return of ACCA’s Emerging Artist Exhibition Series

After a decade-long hiatus, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) is bringing back an exhibition series titled NEW, showcasing emerging artists from across the nation. The series originally ran from 2003 to 2016 and exhibited artists including Angelica Mesiti, Marco Fusinato, Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro, all of whom went on to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale of Art.

Now, ACCA is going all-in on showcasing the next generation of local artists with the NEW26 exhibition, which runs from September 18 to November 22. This iteration features new commissions from seven up-and-coming Australian artists, who work across media including painting, film, sculpture and the written word. Following this first exhibition, the series will continue its comeback in a biennial format, showcasing a cohort of audacious new artists every two years.

Sophie Prince, who has co-curated NEW26 alongside ACCA’s senior curator Shelley McSpedden, says the art gallery is bringing back the exhibition series to highlight ACCA’s “legacy of commissioning ambitious contemporary art.”

“Instead of reinventing the wheel with a new platform, Myles [Russell-Cook, ACCA chief executive and artistic director,] wanted to celebrate the launching pad that NEW had been by revitalising it for artists today,” Prince says.

The seven emerging artists taking over the ACCA space this spring are: Amanda Bell, Amanda Bennetts, Nicholas Currie, Naveed Farro, Caesar Florence-Howard, Diego Ramírez and EJ Son. Each present artistic work contemplating the most pressing issues and questions of the day, such as the impact of AI technology and its relationship to the body, defiance against bureaucracy, and how we navigate the notion of legacies in an increasingly divided world.

“It is interesting when you bring artists together who are working at the forefront of rigorous investigations,” Prince says. “We are on the cutting edge of what is going to be important in more mainstream forums soon.”

Take Amanda Bennetts’s major sculptural work Axis Mundi, which interrogates how data collection is used to measure the human body and its potential biases against disability. Or Naveed Farro’s investigation into how technology can mediate a relationship between him and his ancestral homeland of Iran, despite him never having travelled there.

Meanwhile, Noongar artist Amanda Bell creates abstract worlds through the medium of film as a means of resisting colonial definitions of her humanity. Another highlight includes artist and writer Diego Ramírez’s large-scale multimedia installation, which humorously references tarot card reading and explores the bureaucratic holding patterns that lead us to either conform to a society or critique it.

McSpedden and Prince selected the seven artists on the basis that each was at a critical turning point in their practice.

“They’ve got their style and concepts that interest them … now they’re ready for their ambitions to take them to a new level,” says Prince. “The concept [for this exhibition] is really platforming artists who are pushing their practice forward in new and exciting ways … We were thinking about what makes their work experimental, challenging, critically engaged and rigorous.”

Entry to the NEW26 exhibition is free and it’s on from September 18 to November 22. ACCA is open from 10am to 5pm on Friday, and 11am to 5pm on Saturday and Sunday.

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