Olivia Koh awarded 2024 fellowship

The Georges Mora Fellowship board are delighted to announce Olivia Koh as our 2024 fellow.

Shining 顯影

During this fellowship Olivia Koh will produce an intertextual moving image work that explores twentieth century diaspora stories in East and South East Asian regions. Shining 顯影 takes the format and pages of a community published xerox magazine as inspiration for a new moving image work; drawing on articles, advertisements and gossip tabloids from this publication, the migration history of the artists' paternal family and fictional characters. Drawing on local and international networks, a collection of archival and newly shot footage, using techniques of collage, montage and animation, letters, photos and documents are interspersed throughout this video work in Mandarin, Hokkien, Bahasa Melayu/Indonesia and English language. The research will engage with the history of xerox publications, including how the photocopier replaced or superseded previous technologies, and how this technology affected and increased access to grassroots and community publishing.

Artist bio 

Olivia Koh is an artist and researcher working in moving-image production. She considers how personal migration histories are expressed and performed through the moving image; videos that mediate new relationships to places, memory and forms of storytelling. Koh holds a Master’s degree (Research) from the School of Art, RMIT University (2023). Recent exhibitions include ‘Island Shapes 岛屿形状’ on Runway Journal, ‘Minyak Sawit Keluarga (Palm Oil Family)’ with Hyphenated Projects & ACMI (2023), ‘Artist Film Program’ at Melbourne Now, NGVA (2023). Olivia is a Teaching Associate at Monash University and RMIT University.

Rosie Issac awarded the 2023 Georges Mora Fellowship

Rosie Issac awarded the 2023 Georges Mora Fellowship


The Georges Mora Fellowship board is delighted to announce our 2023 fellowship has been awarded to Rosie Isaac.

Isaac will develop her project ‘A stored charge: a material study of electrical technologies and embodied futures’ which will explore the materiality of electricity and how electrification, and more recently battery technology, shapes social and political imagination. The project will challenge the dichotomy between the organic and the inorganic, considering how metallic elements are absorbed and used within the body and how our nervous system functions electrically.

Beginning with materiality, the stuff of electricity, Isaac will weave the social, political, and speculative possibilities out of it. Batteries store chemical energy that is converted to electricity, that will allow EVs to replace petrol cars, or that will store sun for cloudy days. Batteries carry optimism – they are a technological solution to the climate crisis. But inevitably there are environmental and human costs to extracting the materials required to produce this ‘miracle’. In this project, Isaac frames the battery as a silver bullet, symbolic of a desire for technology that will save us from climate catastrophe. Throughout the fellowship, Isaac will research the 18th century discovery of electricity and its production as ‘magic’ and spectacle. Examining the electro-chemical processes that allow battery materials (lithium, graphite) to store, release and then recapture power.
 

Rosie Isaac (b. Naarm/Melbourne, 1990) is an artist with a research-based sculpture, writing and performance practice. Rosie’s practice focuses on the power relations embedded in language and other social institutions. She is interested in art making as a form of attention, one that might imagine different material and social futures. Recent projects include an iterative performance ‘What we habitually call’ first performed in 2021 at Ace Open as part of Reading Circles; ‘Brain blankets’ in collaboration with Aodhan Madden at the Foundation Fiminco, Paris, in 2021; ‘Intestine in my eye’ part of Next Wave Festival 2018; and ‘BACKWARD PLAY’ as part of Person, Woman, Man, Camera, TV at 99% and Blindside in 2022. Her writing has been published in un. Magazine and Cordite Poetry review. She has worked in community radio production and as the co-editor of un. Magazine in 2020 with Elena Gomez. She is currently working on a solo sculpture show to be presented at Flippy’s Gallery in November 2022. Rosie is a Sessional Academic Lecturer at the Victorian College of the Arts.

2017 Fellowship Fundraiser at Sofitel Melbourne On Collins

In late October, the Georges Mora Fellowship Board, our past Fellows, and our supporters celebrated the life and legacy of Georges Mora with a French-Resistance themed fundraising event at Sofitel Melbourne On Collins. 

Guests enjoyed the delicious canapes, eclairs, crepes and live music while bidding on the Silent Auction items and hearing current Fellow Catherine Evans and past Fellow Trent Walter speak about development of their art. A big thank you to everyone who attended and made the evening such a great success, and congratulations to our winning bidders!

The Georges Mora Fellowship is made available with the generous financial support of art lovers. All donations, no matter how large or small, enable the significant development of an artist’s ideas. If you weren't able to attend the event but would like to contribute to the future of Australian contemporary art, you can download a copy of our donation form here. Or to learn more about other ways that you or your organisation can become involved with the Fellowship, contact us. 

We'd like to thank all the wonderful supporters of this event: Sofitel Melbourne On Collins, Alliance Francaise, Donegans, LaTrobe Art Institute, NAVA, State Library Victoria, Keon Couture, Madam Rouge, Marriner Group, Melbourne International Comedy Festival and Melbourne Theatre Company.

ROSS COULTER'S "AUDIENCE" SERIES

Having secured funding to publish a book, 2010 Georges Mora Fellow, Ross Coulter, is in the process of photographing an audience gathered in every gallery in Melbourne, watching a performance that doesn’t exist. The project tilted “Audience” is a photographic series that documents an audience who is gathered in a gallery space and has been instructed to imagine that they are viewing a performance art event. Participants are required to stand or sit in an empty gallery, in which there is no art, while black and white photographs are taken of them. The subjects are asked to direct their gaze to different parts of the gallery space and evoke a variety of expressions.

By drawing on the visual language of 1970s performance art documentation images, he is seeking to construct a photographic archive of an audience witnessing a number of performance (non) events in and around Melbourne. In this series of black-and-white photographic prints however, the performer and performance are absent, cropped out of the picture. The focus of the images is both the audience, looking on with a variety of expressions as they bear witness to a non-event, and the identity of the gallery space itself. Australian artist and art historian Charles Green notes that, “through documentation (of performance art happenings or events), the exemplary ‘truthfulness’ of performance deteriorates.” 

INEZ DE VEGA'S 'PERFORMING DISORDER!'

With a planned production date of October 2017, Performing Disorder! will be the outcome of Inez de Vega’s 2014/2015 Georges Mora Fellowship in partnership with the State Library of Victoria.

Performing Disorder! is a fully immersive spectacle of spoken word, dance, song and projected image that will take place under the library's famous dome. At night, the panopticon of the dome will erupt with a madness and pathos that will unveil the true stories of women incarcerated in Victoria’s psychiatric institutions. Set in an institutional time warp, the audience will be transported from the 1890s, through the now and into the future.

Half theatre/half art-installation, it involves collaboration with up to 35 artists, dancers, singers, composers, choreographers, producers, technicians and mentors, and is De Vega's most ambitious project to date.