Future Remains: The 2024 Macfarlane Commissions at ACCA

Returning for its fourth year, Future Remains: The 2024 Macfarlane Commissions puts the spotlight on seven of Australia’s most exciting artists, including some at the very beginning of their careers.

The 2024 edition showcases major projects that reclaim and reimagine the artists’ material, cultural or ideological inheritances to better understand the past and uncover new possibilities for current and future worlds. The source material ranges widely, from family histories to official archives, but in the end each work explores how the past and present intertwine, and how history can be reinterpreted to set a new course for the future.

One of the highlights is a moving, multi-part weaving by Brisbane-based artist Kim Ah Sam. The innovative textile piece maps her life story, including her connection to her grandmother’s Kuku Yalanji Country and her father’s Kalkadoon Country.

A large-scale installation by Perth’s Teelah George combines the artist’s own embroidery and bronze work with found materials like discarded truck vinyl and Blu Tack to explore the instability of historical narratives. Emerging Melbourne artist Alexandra Peters subverts notions of individuality and authenticity by juxtaposing techniques borrowed from high art and mass production.

Elsewhere, early-career artist and writer Andy Butler presents a three-channel moving-image installation showing Asian Australian actors recreating scenes from golden age films. Wiradjuri artist Joel Sherwood Spring uses AI and gaming technology to satirise historical Indigenous stereotypes and envision alternative futures. And there are two ambitious sculptural installations: a fantastical talisman by Fijian Australian artist Salote Tawale, and an elaborate stage set by Nicholas Smith that delves into repression in regional suburbia.

The exhibition is supported by The Macfarlane Fund, and it’s free to enter.

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