The Georges Mora Fellowship Board is proud to announce that Phuong Ngo has been awarded the 2021 Georges Mora Fellowship, including a $10,000 grant. A panel of judges including Pip Wallis (Curator of Contemporary Art, National gallery of Victoria), Raafat Ishak (Head of Painting, Victorian College of the Arts), Charlotte Day ( Director, Monash University Museum of Art), Caroline Field (Curator, Australian Catholic University Art Collection), Zara Sully (Director, Sawtooth ARI), Linda Short (Senior Curator, State Library Victoria) and Jade Hadfield (Exhibitions Curator, State Library Victoria), were impressed by Ngo’s proposed project, Racist Furniture.
Ngo will source and dismantle European Labour Only furniture and reconstitute them into new art and design objects, centring his own labour and addressing historical exclusion and othering.
Chairman of the Georges Mora Fellowship Board, Clive Scott AM, said: We are delighted to award Phuong the 2021 Fellowship, and to support him in bringing 'Racist furniture' to life. It is a remarkable project that will allow locals and visitors alike to connect to a time in Victorian culture. We wish Ngo’s the best of luck with his project.
Image courtesy of the State Library of Victoria. L-R: Danny Pearson (Minister for Creative Industries), Phuong Ngo (GMF Fellow), Sarah Slade (Acting CEO State Library of Victoria), Clive Scott AM (General Manager of Sofitel Melbourne On Collins).
Phuong Ngo Biography
Phuong Ngo is a Vietnamese-Australian artist and curator living and working in Naarm (Melbourne). He is currently co-director of Hyphenated Projects with Nikki Lam, and curator at large at the Substation. His practice is concerned with the interpretation of history, memory and place, and how it impacts individual and collective identity of the Vietnamese diaspora. Through an archival process rooted in a conceptual practice, he seeks to find linkages between culture, politics and oral histories and historic events. Ngo’s collaborative practice with Hwafern Quach, Slippage, examines the cycles of history in conjunction with current geopolitical and economic issues through the lens of vernacular cultures, artifacts and language. Taking their Vietnamese and Chinese ancestry as a starting point and foregrounding their work in the personal, Slippage utlises ceramics as a medium to further critique issues closely linked to historic and contemporary forms of imperialism and global politics. His notable exhibitions include, APT10, QAGOMA (2021); Drunken Swine, First Draft (2019); Expansionism V, Bendigo Art Gallery (2019); Article 14.1, Sydney Festival & MCA (2019); Primavera, MCA (2018); New Histories, Bendigo Art Gallery (2018); Conflicted: Works from the Vietnam Archive Project, The Substation (2017); Article 14.1, Next Wave Festival (2014); Melbourne Now, National Gallery of Victoria (2013); Domino Theory, Centre for Contemporary Photography (2012).
Image courtesy of new fellow Phuong Ngo. Drunken Swine, 2019. Installation at Firstdraft, Sydney.