The University of Melbourne unveiled a major group exhibition, The same crowd never gathers twice, presented at Buxton Contemporary from 10 May to 13 October 2024.
The exhibition featured six leading international and Australian artists, including new work by Cate Consandine, Riana Head-Toussaint, Yona Lee and the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, alongside significant projects by Taryn Simon, Angela Goh and Laresa Kosloff.
Curated by Annika Aitken, Curator, Art Museums, the University of Melbourne, the exhibition tested the limits of the ‘arena’ — the setting where people come together to collectively witness and participate in public life. Spanning moving image, sound, sculptural intervention and performance, the works considered the social and structural architectures that bound these spaces, and by extension, the elastic nature of performance and reality, audience and participant, public and private. Like theatres, sports stadiums and ‘the media’, the art gallery was an arena subject to its own specific conditions. The exhibition invited visitors to consider their own roles, expectations and ways of being inside this space.
Unfolding over five months, the physical gallery was offered as a site for critical discussion and performance responses. The exhibition premiered the anticipated multi-channel film work RINGER by artist Cate Consandine, which reimagined the world of roller derby as a tensile site of violence between players. Featuring a score by Grammy award-winning composer François Tétaz, Consandine explored the physical expression of psychological and emotional states, centering on the relationship between bodies and their contingent registers. Cate Consandine said: “The film meditated upon the peripheral dimensions of the female gaze, capturing the alertness of its acute sense, psyche, and immersive power. Filmed in the Martyn Myer Arena at the University of Melbourne, the work invited the viewer to grasp at forces and encounters that reached toward the outer edges of the visual field.”
South Korean-born, Aotearoa-based artist Yona Lee presented a new large-scale, site-specific installation commissioned for Buxton’s Heritage Gallery. Widely recognised for her sculptural works that played with notions of public and private space, transit and migration, Lee combined stainless-steel tubing — ubiquitous to the public realm — with furniture and other functional objects to highlight tensions between public and private experience. Blurring the edges of the gallery, the installation guided and disrupted movement through its spaces, both inviting and restricting physical interaction.
New York-based multidisciplinary artist Taryn Simon presented the major sound installation Assembled Audience in Australia for the first time. As part of her ongoing investigation into the rituals of public life, the work broadcast individual applause recorded at concerts, sporting events and political rallies held in Columbus, Ohio’s three major public venues. Columbus — nicknamed “Test City USA” — closely mirrored the nation’s demographics and was a critical gauge for predicting political outcomes and testing new commercial products. Assembled Audience gathered the recordings of individual audience members — each representing diverse political, corporate and ideological allegiances — into a single, simulated and ever-changing crowd. The work considered the use of applause as a barometer of public opinion and spotlighted techniques for manipulating or manufacturing public adulation — subjects that reverberated in an age of digital fabrication. Taryn Simon said: “We collected individual applause from every public event over a one-year period — a Katy Perry concert, a Worship Awakening Conference, the Ohio Republican Party State Dinner, a conference on glass problems... All these clashing politics, ideologies, and corporate affiliations were reassembled again and again into a single manufactured crowd. The objects of the applause — the singers, the basketball players, the politicians, the business tycoons — were all missing and interchangeable to the point of being irrelevant.”
Interdisciplinary artist Riana Head-Toussaint showcased the video work Animate Loading: 1 and a new choreographic commission Guided Wrestling in July. Animate Loading: 1 was the first film version of Head-Toussaint’s site-responsive choreographic work, a disability-led project with access-centred principles at its core. Filmed in a rooftop carpark on Darug Land, a dynamic group of performers drew on diverse movement languages and experiences to activate a space and bring its seen and unseen dimensions into focus. The work served as an embodied call to action: to disrupt, resist and change our relationships within and around so-called public space. On the new commission Head-Toussaint said: “As we continued to witness genocide, colonial displacement, pain and grief all around the world — on our own shores and further afield — many of us became stuck in overwhelm, unable to process our emotions, and further silenced and invalidated by the government, media outlets, our own friends and family, and our peers. Guided Wrestling emerged in response to this. The performers moved through their emotions; their actions and offerings were invitations for audiences to do the same.” Performances took place on 4, 5 and 6 July 2024.
The exhibition highlighted the recent acquisition of Body Loss by Sydney-based dancer and choreographer Angela Goh by the University of Melbourne. An iterative and evolving performance work that responded to the built form of the gallery, Body Loss tested the limits of both the body and its physical environment by scaling the architecture of the space. A single vocal note was recorded and looped back, like a disembodied siren call. This work had been exhibited in London, Munich, Brussels, Texas, Melbourne and Sydney. Charlotte Day, Director, Art Museums, said:
This was the first acquisition of a performance work by the University of Melbourne. We were excited to be working with Angela to bring Body Loss into the collection in perpetuity, and to present a new iteration during The same crowd never gathers twice.
Performances took place on 21 May 2024 with Angela Goh, with a further performance later announced.
The exhibition also brought together a group of super-8 works by Melbourne artist Laresa Kosloff, produced between 1998 and 2010. Kosloff’s practice examined representational strategies linked by an interest in the body and the tension between received cultural values, individual agency and free will. Kosloff’s Trapeze (1998), from the Michael Buxton Collection, was presented alongside later works capturing incidental actions and interactions in public space. Filmed in iconic locations across Melbourne and the US, the works called attention to performative aspects of everyday life, and the relationship between the individual and the collective.
Throughout the exhibition there was an expanded range of live events and programs, including performances, talks, film screenings and a symposium, as well as a concert curated in response to the exhibition by students from the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, led by Dr Joseph Lallo. Over 2000 UoM students participated in 23 academic engagements.
A major collaboration with Melbourne Conservatorium of Music students, working with Dr Joseph Lallo through his concert curation teaching and research, continues to be a successful three-way endeavor between curatorial, public programs and academic engagement teams at Buxton Contemporary. In this semester-long curriculum engagement, students developed a concert in response to the exhibition’s themes and curatorial approach, including five new compositions. In recognition of their contribution, the students were included as participating artists in the exhibition by curator Annika Aitkin.
I remember our brainstorming weeks, the entire ensemble wandered the exhibition and began improvising with a sense of community and play that I haven’t experienced in music in too, too long. The weeks we spent bringing our ideas to life together have been really special, with our conversations and ideas contributing to the final concert as music as the music. I’m really proud of the concert we’ve created.
Student feedback
Visitation to The same crowd never gathers twice exhibition continued the positive upwards trend for post Covid impacted exhibitions. Total visitation to the exhibition was highest for summer exhibitions, and sixth highest since opening.