Laure Prouvost: Oui Move In You, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, March 23–June 10

Language, tunnels, the earthly and sensual, and the complicated search for meaning — such elements define Laure Prouvost’s arresting, montage-driven video works, which are transformed by their ever-careful installation. Prouvost is a contemporary icon: the French-born artist, who now works in Belgium, represented France at the 2019 Venice Biennale and won the prestigious Turner Prize in 2013.

Having only ever viewed scattered works by Prouvost in group exhibitions, it’s genuinely exciting to await her first major Australian survey. Transforming ACCA into “a labyrinthine and other-worldly environment”, the show promises to take viewers from the underground to the earth, and into the celestial. Prouvost’s witty, compelling works never feel explicitly prescriptive, but rather gesture towards sensations and ideas — this time on motherhood, connection and the natural world.

Nan Goldin: The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, Ballarat Art Gallery, March 2–June 2

Nan Goldin, now aged 70, is a pioneering photographer, the subject of an award-winning documentary, an activist who has successfully held to account the billionaires behind the US opioid epidemic, and she has just topped ArtReview’s Power 100 list — a ranking of contemporary art’s most influential. Goldin’s famous 1980s series, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, is coming to Ballarat.

The seminal documentary-style photographs arose from Goldin’s friendships and close relationships, showing the struggles and desires of diverse sexuality and gender, all with great intimacy and empathy. Yet, also present is a melancholic tenor knowing how the HIV/AIDS crisis affected this community. Goldin, a New York icon, has always linked photography with social purpose. This show is part of PHOTO 2024, a Victoria-wide series of photographic exhibitions throughout March.

Jill Orr: The Promised Land Refigured, Linden New Art, February 24–May 19

In 2012, Jill Orr created a series of performative photographs titled The Promised Land, haunting images of a figure sailing a skeletal boat. The photographs partly recall the ferryman Charon of Greek mythology, who carries passengers across the River Styx, but they were also taken at sites of migrant arrival around St Kilda and on the Yarra River banks, a landscape synonymous with impressionist, colonial paintings. As part of PHOTO 2024, Orr will reimagine these images through a new sculptural and photographic installation, speaking of climate change, the government’s inhumane asylum-seeker policies and the impacts of colonial expansion.

Such reconfiguring comes from an artist who has transformed performance and photography in Australia and is now revisiting the foundations of safety and sovereignty — but, as the title suggests, promises are notions awaiting fulfillment.

Cutting Through Time: Cressida Campbell, Margaret Preston and the Japanese Print, Geelong Gallery, May 17–July 28

After recent, tremendous print-centred shows by Mandy Martin and John Nixon, Geelong Gallery interweaves the influence of Japanese woodblock prints (Ukiyo-e) with two esteemed Australian artists: one who is living, Cressida Campbell, and modernist painter and printmaker Margaret Preston (1875-1963). There will be works by Preston and Campbell alongside Ukiyo-e prints and woodblocks from the late 18th to mid-19th centuries, illustrating landscapes to geisha. There will also be prints by Hishikawa Moronobu, Kitagawa Utamaro, Utagawa Kunisada and Katsushika Hokusai.

I’m most excited to see Campbell’s work interact with these influences; her use of colour and pattern, her intricate capturing of flora, the bush and everyday interiors, and how she elevates the supposedly mundane as being foundational, fragilely connected to life.

Julia Gutman: Everyone You Are Looking at is Also You, Sullivan+Strumpf, March 21–April 13

When Julia Gutman won the 2023 Archibald Prize for depicting her friend, the singer-songwriter Jessica Cerro (aka Montaigne), she was one of the youngest artists to win and one of only 11 women. Now she’s creating a sequel to her 2022 sold-out debut exhibition. Her “patchwork paintings” are created from found textiles, often donated by family and friends, with Gutman honouring the fabric’s personal resonances. But there’s also an art historical element. For instance, one work in Gutman’s upcoming show sees her warring with herself, an appropriation of an 1876 work Arrest for Witchcraft by John Pettie.

In a show centring on reflections and fractured portraits, Gutman makes tacitly political points about womanhood, art history, memory and the fragmented nature of personhood: her images exist harmoniously and on the precipice of collapse.

The Arena, Buxton Contemporary, May–October

From ancient clashes to modern sport to political and cultural performances (and even reality television and social media), the physical and conceptual idea of the arena has sustained for thousands of years — which Buxton gallery explores in a show on performance, entertainment and competition. The arena is where civic life gathers, from the few to the many, and such spectacle is interrogated through moving image, sound, dance and sculptural intervention. Buxton has a reputation for well-conceived exhibitions, with confirmed artists so far including Cate Consandine, Laresa Kosloff, Yona Lee and Taryn Simon.

Yet while focusing on performance, it’s also a space for viewers to consider their role as spectators. And there is, of course, a meta-conversation: the art world — its institutions, artists, works and audiences — is its own arena.

Intimate Imaginaries, TarraWarra Museum of Art, November 30–March 10, 2025

The title Intimate Imaginaries could be a stunning description of any artist’s inner world, but this TarraWarra Museum of Art (TWMA) show brings together 13 artists who practice from Arts Project Australia (APA), centring on how the artists perceive and understand the world.

For an art industry intent on fostering diversity and unfettered expression, this is a reality at APA, an internationally renowned Melbourne studio and gallery for artists with an intellectual disability.

Conceived by TWMA curator Anthony Fitzpatrick and coinciding with APA’s 50th anniversary, the show features Samraing Chea’s drawings of witty social commentary, Terry Williams’ hand-stitched soft sculptures of everyday objects, Alan Constable’s ceramic cameras, Lisa Reid’s sculptural domestic objects and Cathy Staughton’s paintings that merge fantasy, technology and autobiography.

Daniel Boyd, STATION Gallery, June 8–July 13

Daniel Boyd does meaningful, emotive and political things with painting. Best known for his style of tiny “lenses”, he inverts traditional figuration by complicating the act of looking and while this makes a formal point, Boyd also interrogates Australia’s Eurocentric art canon, colonial history and cultural memory. A Kudjala, Ghungalu, Wangerriburra, Wakka Wakka, Gubbi Gubbi, Kuku Yalanji, Yuggera and Bundjalung man with Ni-Vanuatu heritage, Boyd has recently held major solo shows at the Art Gallery of NSW, Gropius Bau in Berlin and the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane.

In early 2024, he’ll have a solo show at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York (which represents artists like Tacita Dean and Maurizio Cattelan). The STATION exhibition marks Boyd’s first Australian commercial showing for 2024.

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