Dredging Up the Past: Gertrude 2005–2025 – Panel and Launch
Presented by Perimeter and Gertrude
Details
Free, no booking required
NGV Federation Court
180 St Kilda Rd, Melbourne VIC, Australia
Dates
Sun 17 May 3 – 4pm
Perimeter and Gertrude launch Dredging up the Past: Gertrude 2005–2025 (Perimeter Editions 117).
The launch takes the form of a conversation between Mark Feary and Charlotte Day, exploring questions of institutional memory and the shifting conditions that shape artist-centred organisations.
Taking the publication as a starting point, the discussion reflects on Gertrude’s history and probes the tensions between archival impulse and forward momentum: what it means to revisit institutional histories, how they are written and what remains unresolved or contested within them.
Charlotte Day brings a long-standing relationship to Gertrude, having worked at Gertrude in the 1990s, and as editor of the organisation’s twentieth anniversary publication, A Short Ride in a Fast Machine: Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces 1985–2005 (2005).
Day’s perspective, alongside Mark Feary’s curatorial work across institutional and independent contexts, informs a discussion that moves between reflection and speculation, examining how contemporary institutions narrate themselves and how those narratives might be productively unsettled.
Presented within the context of the Melbourne Art Book Fair at the National Gallery of Victoria, the launch situates Gertrude’s publishing and program within broader conversations around contemporary art institutions: where they have come from, how they are sustained and where they might yet go.
Participants
Mark Feary
Mark Feary is the Artistic Director of Gertrude.
He has worked within the visual art sector for over twenty years in a range of contemporary art centres, universities, museums and artist-led initiatives, with an emphasis on contemporary art and almost exclusively within the not-for-profit sector.
Feary has worked in curatorial and programming roles at the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney; Artspace, Sydney; the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne; and West Space, Melbourne.
Charlotte Day
Charlotte Day is Director of Art Museums at the University of Melbourne, with oversight of Buxton Contemporary and the Potter Museum of Art.
Previously the Director of Monash University Museum of Art, Charlotte has more than twenty-five years’ experience as a curator and arts manager.
She was formerly an Associate Curator at ACCA, Director of Centre for Contemporary Photography, and has held positions on several arts boards and local, state and federal government arts and funding panels, including roles at Gertrude from 1995 onward.