Artists: Hayley Millar Baker, Maree Clarke, Dean Cross, Brad Darkson, Matthew Harris, James Howard, Jazz Money, Mandy Quadrio, this mob, and Cassie Sullivan.

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Image credit: Dean Cross ‘On who goes to The Gallows 1997-2023’ (detail). Installation View, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne 2023, Commissioned by ACCA.

Courtesy the artist and STATION, Melbourne. Photograph: Andrew Curtis.

Image Description: Close-up of silver metal grandstand seats. A yidaki is placed on two red-toned bricks on one of the seats, which runs across the centre of the image.

Between Waves continues the Yalingwa exhibition series devoted to highlighting the significance of First Nations contemporary art practice of the Southeast within a national context. The exhibition explores the visible and invisible energy fieldsset in motion by these ideas, to illuminate interconnected shapeshifting ecologies within, beyond and between what can be seen.

Between Waves amplifies concepts related to light, time and vision – and the idea of shining a light on our times – as expressed by the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung word ‘Yalingwa’. The exhibition presents the work of ten First Nations artists and collective including Maree Clarke, Dean Cross, Brad Darkson, Matthew Harris, James Howard, Hayley Millar Baker, Jazz Money, Mandy Quadrio, this mob, and Cassie Sullivan.

The exhibition presents ten ambitious new commissions that traverse internal and external worlds, embracing the sensory and cyclical rhythms of light and sound, thinking and feeling, listening and seeing, interwoven with ideas of material memory. Through a range of contemporary artforms including video, installation, poetry, projection, photography, painting, sculpture, sound, printmaking, and a digital commission, the invited artists have developed reflective and site-responsive projects which explore and experiment with the intersection of material and immaterial realms of knowledge and knowing.

Participating artists embrace the push and pull dynamics that flow beneath the surface, navigating ideas of presence and absence, the known and unknown, transgenerational and collective consciousness. Together the artists prompt reflection on life shifts and cycles and centre notions of remembering, rehabilitation, regeneration and reclamation.

Between Waves stages a call for relational accountability and ethical responsibility, locating individual experience not at the centre of the world, but as an inherent part of its fabric. In doing so, the exhibition reflects on the interrelationship between life, materiality, people and place, and a need to find balance.

While light can stimulate sight and is said to reveal truth, it can also be blinding and obscuring. Equally, while darkness is seemingly used to conceal, it is within the darkness, the in-between places and spaces that no one wants to venture, that truth seemingly lingers; rippling inward and outward, above, below and between the surface.

Between Waves is an exhibition developed by the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) touring nationally with NETS Victoria, curated by Jessica Clark.

Exhibition Partners

Exhibition Supporters

This project has been supported by Creative Victoria through the Yalingwa Visual Arts Initiative and the NETS Victoria Exhibition Development Fund; and the Australian Government’s Visions of Australia program.

NETS Victoria Supporters

National Exhibitions Touring Support (NETS) Victoria is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria, by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body, and through the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian, State and Territory Governments. NETS Victoria also receives significant in-kind support from the National Gallery of Victoria.