Working across vectors of care, responsibility and honesty, this exhibition welcomes us into a space that demonstrates the unsettling strength and uncanny beauty of hybridity, entanglement, vulnerability and more expansive forms of belonging.
Amidst the imagination of four renowned Australian artists, whose diverse practices activate affective affordances through media and materials that test and register the emotional equilibrium of our times, we are invited to recalibrate learned behaviours and visceral responses, reconsidering how we live together on a shared planet.
From unique perspectives and traditions, each artist explores how embodiment, identity and environment shape one another. Together, they model how art can respond to the challenges of the contemporary world.
Jointly presented by the McNally School of Fine Arts at LASALLE and the School of Art at RMIT University, this exhibition proposes arguments and presents counterpoints for Affective Technē: Art, Care, and Creative Futures, the 2026 edition of a biennial RMIT-LASALLE Creative Higher Education Futures Symposium which takes place from 15 to 17 October. By doing so, the exhibition forwards exhibition-making as a reflexive and relational mode of practice-led academic research.
Let’s feel our way through multiple centres of gravity to know and shape possible futures.
Artists
Christian Thompson
Drew Pettifer
Mikala Dwyer
Patricia Piccinini
This exhibition is curated by Cissie Fu and Peter Hennessey, with spatial and textual annotations by students of LASALLE’s BA (Hons) Art Histories and Curatorial Practices: Asia and the World.
Image courtesy of the artist and Ames Yavuz Gallery. Safely Together (2022) Patricia Piccinini.