Exhibition At Centre For Contemporary Photography

Lisbeth Thalberg
Behind Glass - Lisa Sorgini

The Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP) is currently exhibiting four shows by prominent practising Australian artists Ying Ang, Miriam Charlie, Odette England and Lisa Sorgini. These four exhibitions are united by their exploration of themes of family, care, motherhood, place and belonging.

Getting to Borroloola - Miriam Charlie
Getting to Borroloola – Miriam Charlie

“CCP is delighted to be starting 2023 with such an impressive list of shows. These four artists, in their own ways, are defining contemporary photographic storytelling. Each of these projects have received local and international acclaim in the past year, and we are excited to be showing these wonderful images in Australia for the first time” says Daniel Boetker-Smith, CCP Director

Curator Catlin Langford notes the importance of the exhibitions: ‘these four shows make visible stories which are often not seen or represented in the general media or culture. These projects by leading artists are witness to girls’ and women’s experiences, from the anxiety and unknown of pregnancy and childbirth, the often invisible and unacknowledged care given by women, to the lives and experiences of girls and women in rural locations.’

CCP is the leading contemporary photo-based arts not-for-profit (charity/DGR status) organisation in Australia, and has been fostering local, national and international engagement with photography, and connecting communities through the power of photography since 1986. These exhibitions align with CCP’s mission to exhibit and celebrate photographic media and artists and engage with current and critical ideas through images, and with new ways of communicating and connecting.

Dairy Character - Odette England
Dairy Character – Odette England

The exhibitions close 9 April 2023.

A number of public programs will take place across the exhibition period, including:

9 March, Thursday, 6pm: Writing Motherhood

Panel with writers Ashe Davenport, Laura McPhee-Browne and Edwina Preston to discuss their recent publications which evoke and record the experiences of pregnancy, mothering and motherhood.

Further details available here.

23 March, Thursday, 6pm: Caring for the Caregivers: Mothers and birthing parents

The Quickening - Ying Ang
The Quickening explores the transformation and lived experience of a woman in her motherhood/matrescence and postpartum depression/anxiety. The work interrogates the under-represented transition of biological, psychological and social identity during a complex and yet ubiquitous phase of life.You begin your life in expansion. From rolling to crawling to walking, your reach moves outwards from infancy through to adulthood. At the cusp of motherhood, everything instantaneously moves in reverse. Your world begins to shrink, to coalesce into the tight sphere of domestic life. What was once the sun is now the light in your living room. What was once the road, becomes the hallway to the bathroom. Everyone you once knew, becomes the squalling baby in your arms, suddenly unknowable, inconsolable and opaque in their needs and wants. As the external landscape of your old world shifts from mountains to lakes, the change also begins within. In increments and then suddenly faster and faster, you become internally unrecognizable. The task of navigating this new geography, the new days and nights, how you eat, how you sleep, how you love – this seismic transition – is called “matresence”.The Quickening details the claustrophobia, myopia, paradoxical loneliness and luminance of this transformative time.Finalist for the Vevey Images Grand Prix for 2019Julia Margaret Cameron Award Honorable Mention for 2019Solo exhibition at Rencontres d’Arles 2019Winner of the BIFA Documentary Photo Book Prize 2020Finalist for the Lucie Foundation Photo Book Prize 2020Finalist for the Perimeter x PHOTO 2021 International Photobook Prize

Panel discussion with Eleanor Jackson, Natalie Kon-yu, Helen Ngo and Skye Stewart, chaired by Ruth De Souza, focusing on the concept of care.

Further details available here.

25 March, Thursday, 2pm: Connection; care and community: a collection of shared readings

Join Torika Bolatagici, artist, writer and founder of the Community Reading Room to share excerpts from texts pivotal to her practice, with a focus on the themes of connection, care, collections and community.

Further details available here.

We are also running online events in collaboration with prominent academic Carol

J. Adams and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Centre for Contemporary Photography

404 George St, Fitzroy VIC 3065, Australia

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