Output details

Front of House

Front of House was an exhibition of the work of four collaborators at Parasol Unit, (16th April - 29th May 2008). The collaboration was between two artists, the Australian Narelle Jubelin, renowned for her intricate petit-point’s of photographs of historically charged locations, and Portuguese installation artist and sculptor Angela Ferreira, as well as Spanish architect, Marcos Corrales, and myself as curator.

The project sought to address the nature of collaboration within exhibition practice. The title of the show refers to the public areas of theatres and concert halls, and the exhibition sought to bring unarticulated spaces and stories from the backstage into the foreground.

Before the exhibition, the four participants had already collaborated, in various combinations, on no fewer than 27 projects, and Front of House was a manifestation of their previous work together. The display took the form of a survey of established works reconfigured in the space by Corrales. Alongside some previous projects, Ferreira developed a substantial new work that revisited the Mozambique of her teenage years by re-modelling the optimistic architectural structure of an early broadcasting tower. Jubelin’s work revisited the more prosaic vernacular of her family home in a Sydney suburb in a slide-projection piece that documented the evolution of the house and its relation to its environment. The artists explored biography, political histories evident in particular architectural sites, and the ways in which those ideas or objects might be transposed and reinterpreted as they travel from one context into another.

The collaboration shown at Parasol Unit has since seen 11 more productive projects between participants. Front of House was an important part of this generative and long-term process, marked by a catalogue, of which I was editor (ISBN 978–0–9560247–0–1), and for which I wrote the preface.