DAI #12 Contour Biennale 8 / Roaming Assembly – Planetary Records: Performing Justice Between Art and Law. Co-curated with Natasha Ginwala. Full public program TBA, 2017.
DAI #10 Roaming Assembly – Infrastructural Rifts: Souls and Soils of Disaster Developmentalism. Co-curated with Farid Rakun, Ruangrupa. Psychomaterial economies of belief, labour, subsistence and investment surrounding large scale infrastructural developments of the present, 2017.
Poetics and Infrastructures of Political Form (Seminar) and ‘From Warehouse to Data Centre: Contours of Extraction, Finance and Logistics’ (Talk by Brett Neilson) co-curated and lead with Marina Vishmidt as part of the DAI and MKMA Academies at the Jakarta Biennale, curated by Ruangrupa, 2015.
Some Profound Misunderstanding at the Heart of What Is, co-curated with Marcel Dickhage and Cathleen Schuster, 2014. This collaborative artistic research exhibition project of the Jan Van Eyck ‘Moving Images of Speculation’ Inlab, at Hedah Centre for Contemporary Art, Maastricht, explored the spatialization of the essay film in recent art, in the context of contemporary linkages between film form and finance. The exhibition incorporated readings, screenings, talks, a research tour and roundtable, with contributions by Sven Lutticken, Thijs Witty, Vlidi Jeric and JVE artists.
The Leisure Class, co-curated with Kathryn Weir, Head of International Art and Cinema, for Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art and Australian Cinematheque, 2008.
An integrated exhibition of art and film which drew its curatorial structure from economist Thorstein Veblen’s celebrated early critique of consumer culture, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), this Australian Cinematheque project traced shifting links between economics and desire, property and celebrity, visible leisure and detached cool in international and Australian film, video and installation works dating from the 60s to today. Read the review by Danni Zuvela here.
Video Ground, Curated by Rachel O’Reilly and Commissioned by MAAP Multimedia Art Asia Pacific, 2008. An international touring moving image program featuring contemporary moving image work by artists from Australia and Aotearoa/NZ using video to rethink historical and narrative accounts of place. Videoground was inspired by recent critiques of locative media art paradigms and place-interested aesthetics by a broader field of cultural critics from the antipodes. Screening venues: Bangkok Experimental Film Festival (Thailand), the Chicago Film Studies Centre (USA), and the Judith Wright Centre, Brisbane.Curator’s notes on individual works and artists are included in the Online Supplement.
Kiss of the Beast: From Paris Salon to King Kong, (Assistant Curator) Curated by Tedd Gott, National Gallery of Victoria, and Kathryn Weir, Head of International Art and Film, GoMA, now Director of the Department of Cultural Development, Centre Pompidou, 2006.
An integrated exhibition and film program, ‘Kiss of the Beast’ is the premiere program of the Australian Cinémathèque. The ‘Kiss of the Beast’ exhibition explores the origins of the classic 1933 film King Kong through art, film, literature and popular culture from the late nineteenth century to today. King Kong’s iconic image of Fay Wray in the arms of a gorilla can be traced to the widely exhibited sculpture Gorilla carrying off a woman 1887 by French artist Emmanuel Frémiet. With this work as a starting point, ‘Kiss of the Beast’ explores depictions of the gorilla after its discovery by Western naturalists in 1847, and examines debates at that time about Darwinian theory and the relationship between humans and primates. The exhibition features more than 100 works, including posters, sculptures, paintings, prints, rare books, engravings and films, and coincides with the latest cinema remake of King Kong by New Zealand director Peter Jackson.
Rachel O'Reilly 