Beneath the Surface, Behind the Scenes at Heide Museum of Modern Art

A new exhibition at Heide Museum of Modern Art aims to showcase the connections between a series of significant works by contemporary Latin American and Australian artists.

Running Saturday July 29 to Sunday October 22, Beneath the Surface, Behind the Scenes collects a group of artists who “embrace instability, and recognise forms of erasure and new realms of possibility, critically engaging with unacknowledged or difficult histories, as well as impacts on our changing society and natural environments.”

Those artists include Ecuadorian Estefania Penafiel Loaiza, whose installation Figurantes (Extras) transfers anonymous bystanders in news articles into a series of numbered glass vials, in a comment on the ways individuals are defined and dehumanised within institutional systems. Brazilian artist Berna Reale’s Palomo sets the artist as a authoritarian figure on a painted-red horse riding through the streets of Belem do Para, Brazil, while Peruvian Ximena Garrido Lecca’s large-scale woven copper wall sculpture La Red III (Network III) interlaces Indigenous Peruvian textile traditions with tension between Peru’s ancestral knowledge and modern industrialisation, and Venezuelan artist Alexander Apostol’s photographs explore the dynamics of contemporary Venezuela.

Australian artists in Beneath the Surface, Behind the Scenes include Lauren Brincat’s site specific installation Backstage, which sees a selection of paint-splattered, pre-used fabric drop cloths and floor coverings arranged to create new spaces for audience interaction.

Gunditjmara and Djabwurrung artist Hayley Millar Baker’s series of intricate collages, Even if the race is fated to disappear (Peeneeyt meerreeng / Before, now, tomorrow), combine photographs by the artist and her grandfather of places that have played an important part in her family’s experiences. Meanwhile Nicholas Mangan’s large-scale sculpture Sarcophagi, comprised of a range of materials that include coral residue and calcium carbonate, act as a memorial for the environmental toll on the Great Barrier Reef.

Beneath the Surface, Behind the Scenes runs at Heide until Sunday October 22, 2023.

See the full program of artists and book tickets.

Broadsheet is a proud media partner of Heide.