Primavera 2024: Young Australian Artists opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia

[30 August 2024, Sydney], The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA Australia) opened today Primavera 2024: Young Australian Artists, with five artists selected for this year’s exhibition – Teresa Busuttil (SA), Chun Yin Rainbow Chan  (陳雋然) (VIC), Aidan Hartshorn (ACT), Monica Rani Rudhar (NSW) and Sarah Ujmaia (VIC).

Primavera 2024, curated by Lucy Latella, considers the possibilities of cultural connection in the face of social, political and geographical challenges. These early-career artists revisit and reimagine family histories to question how cultural identities are shaped and held, and how they continue to evolve with each generation.

Curator Lucy Latella said: ‘The artists in Primavera 2024 draw on a range of media to connect with their culture, community and family, and bring to the fore that which has been concealed or overlooked. Their diverse works highlight that culture isn’t simply inherited but formed in the present.’

Primavera is MCA Australia’s annual exhibition showcasing the work of Australian artists aged 35 years and under. Now in its 33rd year, Primavera continues to be a significant platform for early-career Australian artists and curators to present exciting new work. Since its inception, the exhibition series has presented the work of over 250 artists and over 30 curators and propelled the careers of many of Australia’s most significant artists.

Primavera 2024 curator Lucy Latella joined MCA Australia in 2019 and has organised a range of exhibitions and building commissions with Australian and international artists. She is curator of Julie Rrap: Past Continuous (2024), Lucy Simpson: Holding Ground (2023) and co-curator of Anywhere but here: MCA Primavera Acquisitions (2020).

Suzanne Cotter, Director, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia said, ‘Primavera: Young Australian Artists is a highlight of our programming year when we can share with the public the art of now and its future.’

A salvaged fishing boat takes the form of a grotto, or shrine, with a bench where visitors can sit and reflect. Encrusted with seashells, sinners grotto (2023), evokes Busuttil’s late father’s work as a fisherman, as well as his sea voyage from Malta to Australia. New works Jesus was a Capricorn (2024), Over Sea (Self Portrait) (2024) and Isimghu (Listen) (2024), made by the artist in Malta draw on a range of religious, historical and pop culture references, reflecting the small nation’s long history under various colonial powers, and the melding of cultural and contemporary influences that continue to shape the experiences of young people in Malta and across the diaspora.

Chan’s Long Distance Call 長途電話 (2024), is a new immersive installation that combines silk painting, animation and a soundscape that samples a ringing telephone. It is partly a memorial to the international calls between Chan’s mother and late aunt when Chan’s immediate family migrated from Hong Kong to Sydney in the mid-1990s. Expensive at the time, these precious phone calls provided the artist with a rare glimpse into the Weitou dialect and forms of kinship. An imagined view from her aunt’s grave across an ever-changing Hong Kong is inked across the banners. Experimenting with translation through ChatGPT, Chan has written a lament in the Weitou dialect, which plays in the gallery and is expressed on silk with deconstructed calligraphy and wax resist. Through repetition and degradation, Chan plays with ideas of tradition and authenticity across generations.

The Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme is commonly referred to as one of Australia’s great nation-building projects. Commencing in 1949, it was built on sacred Walgalu sites which are now largely inaccessible due to controlled dam levels. For the artist’s community, the scheme has ‘weaponised’ the Walgalu ancestor, Bila (Water), by manipulating the river systems and creating industrial barriers to Country.

Yiramir Mayiny (River People) (2024) employs industrial aluminium to form four large diamond shields referencing Wiradjuri and Walgalu motifs and ancestral shield design, providing a voice for the rivers. The visibility and invisibility of significant cultural sites and recorded histories are mirrored in ghostly photographs of water discharged by Snowy Hydro, reminiscent of 19th-century silver gelatin landscape photography and the Rorschach ink blot psychological test. While acknowledging the benefits of Snowy Hydro in providing energy across eastern Australia, Hartshorn highlights its ongoing environmental and cultural impact with the scheme’s forthcoming expansion.

Hoops That Once Belonged To My Mother (2022) and Earrings That My Mother Kept For Me (2024) draw on her diverse ancestral roots. Two pairs of ornate gold earrings gifted by her father to her Romanian mother as an Indian marital custom are replicated and monumentalised in terracotta.

Hoops that went unworn and were since sold are memorialised by the artist as lost heirlooms. A pair that was kept are now her treasured inheritance, connecting the artist with a patrilineal line of Punjabi goldsmiths and continuing Indian traditions of matrilineal gold wealth.

We Were Connected in a More Complicated Way Than Either of Us Could Even Begin to Understand (2023), a video work narrated by the artist, considers cycles of death and renewal, the impermanence of the body and ancestral guidance across generations.

And thank you to my baba for laying the timber floor (2024), comprises nearly 4000 pavers of fired and unfired shell grit, a material that is also found in limestone. When compressed under immense heat and pressure over millennia, limestone becomes marble. Ujmaia draws parallels between the slow transformation of these raw materials into valued stone, and the way oral languages evolve across generations.

En masse, the pavers are reminiscent of the town squares – places of communal gathering and cultural exchange – in her parents’ hometown of Ankawa. Traces of chalk, associated with language and learning, transfer onto the visitor as they traverse the pavers, which subtly clink underfoot to evoke the activity of the marketplace. Each paver has been cast by hand, highlighting the individual migrant experience and Ujmaia’s father’s profession as a labourer to provide for his family in Australia.

New wall works reference the Syriac Heritage Museum in Ankawa, whose collection of donated everyday objects has connections to Chaldean culture. They also recall the artist’s family gatherings around the dining table where a bowl of sunflower seeds would always be present.

Primavera 2024: Young Australian Artists is a free exhibition on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Level 2 Galleries, from Friday 30 August 2024 until Monday 27 January 2025.