About

This blog archives the things I do in the world. It is updated intermittently.

I am a writer/artist, researcher, curator and educator, born in an industrial harbour city called Gladstone in Queensland, Australia, on the unceded lands of the Gooreng Gooreng people. I lived most of my life on the east coast of Australia before pursuing further professional development in Europe (NL/GER). Ongoingly, my work explores relationships between art and situated cultural practice, media philosophy and political economy, and is particularly informed by  (post-) language poetry, feminist and postcolonial/anti-colonial investments. Curatorially, I  specialized in contemporary international installation art, film, video and networked media, with special focus on practices from South East Asia, Australia and the Pacific.

I have a BA in Literature from the University of Queensland and an MA (Cum Laude) in Media and Culture from the University of Amsterdam, which theorized videographic crisis genres in contemporary international art as post-fordist commodities, symptomatic of art’s own neoliberal transition amidst the precarity of museological liberalism.

Prior to 2008 I was a curator of Film, Video and New Media at the Gallery of Modern Art / Australian Cinematheque in Brisbane, where I was also a member of the Asia Pacific Triennial curatorial team. In addition to co-curating exhibitions and screening programs there, I was also responsible for overseeing the museum’s inaugural technical production and acquisition of archival films and negative materials – four films by Indian modernist filmmaker Kumar Shahani, renowned as the subcontinent’s first structural filmmaker.

My critical writing has been published by Cambridge Scholars Press, MIT Press, Postcolonial Studies, and RealTime Arts, in museum publications, networked ebooks (V2 Institute for Unstable Media), independent exhibition catalogues and DIY zines.  An analysis of my independent writing and publishing features in a chapter of the book Intimate Ephemera: Reading Young Lives in Australian Zine Culture by Dr Anna Poletti. I was an OZCO Runway curatorial visitor to the 2007 Venice Biennale, Documenta and ZKM, a winner of the Lord Mayor’s Young and Emerging Artist Fellowship 2008, and a curatorial advisor to the Place, Ground and Practice working group of the Pacific Rim New Media Summit, of the International Society for Electronic Arts, San Jose, 2005. I have been a recipient of literature, new media and visual arts grants from the Australia Council for the Arts, and Arts Queensland, and contributed my knowledge and expertise to organizations, conferences and symposia in Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Germany, Thailand, Indonesia, the UK and USA.

My artistic work has been presented or exhibited at Qalandiya International (Jerusalem), Tate Liverpool (Liverpool), David Roberts Art Foundation (London), Institute of Modern Art (Brisbane), Museum of Yugoslav History (Belgrade), and upcoming at Eflux (NYC) and Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven).

Qualifications:

BA English and Comparative Literature, University of Queensland / Monash University, 2003
MA Media and Culture (Cum Laude), University of Amsterdam, 2011

Post-academic residency, Jan van Eyck Academie, 2013-14.

Awards:

Mondrian Fonds Fellowship 2013-14

Amsterdam Merit Scholarship, University of Amsterdam 2009-10
Brisbane Lord Mayors Artist Fellowship 2009
Runway Emerging Curator Scholarship (Australia Council New Media Board) 2005
Story of the Future Grant for New Work (Australia Council Literature Board) 2007

Professional Positions:

Seminar Leader, ‘At the Limits of the Writerly’, How to Do Things with Theory program, Dutch Art Institute, Arnhem, NL (current).

Curatorial and Special Projects Consultant at Multimedia Art Asia Pacific (2008-2011) the only non-profit media art organisation dedicated to profiling, biennial exhibiting and networking the Asia Pacific region.

Curator of Film, Video and New Media at the Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art and Australian Cinémathèque (2004-2008) the publicly-funded contemporary international art and film museum in Brisbane, Australia.

Program Co-Manager and editor at This is Not Art (2002 – 2003) the independent international media art festival in Newcastle, Australia.

Program Co-Manager of the National Student Media Conference (2002), Newcastle, Australia.

Curatorial member, Place, Ground and Practice working group of the Pacific Rim New Media Summit, ISEA, San Jose USA (2006).

See also my linkedin profile for more info: http://nl.linkedin.com/in/racheloreilly