Unruly Guests: Inside (Out) the Institution

Unruly Guests: Inside (Out) the Institution. The conditions of professional exhibition and performance contexts need to be constantly agitated. White boxes, black cubes, public spaces and educational institutions- have all been colonised and encoded with layers of historical and contemporary behavioural and social norms. These in turn have been upended and disrupted by artists time and time again (as chronicled by O’Doherty (1968), Krasny (2019) Harvey & Russel-Mundine (2019)). Nevertheless artists, performers, and the institutions that house them, seem to constantly drift back into opposition; artists disrupt, and the institutions they topple, reassemble and fortify. In this paper I will explore ongoing methods of rupture employed by artists who work within (and around) these institutional contexts. Using a selection of Australian and New Zealand based artists and performers (such as Megan Cope, Katie Lee, Lauren Gower, Kate Newby and Moorina Bonnini), I will show how methodologies employed by these artists expose the structures that we work within. That is, by incorporating the conditions of institutional space into their material and embodied practice, these artists reveal institutional frameworks in operation. However, I will also show that in doing this, the artists share alternative ecologies and communities of practice, ways of seeing, doing and knowing. And, that by coming inside the institution, artists aren’t necessarily claiming an alliance, but instead continuing to gently to push back— as unruly guests. I propose the delivery of my paper to include a performative component, one that acknowledges the many elements and agents that have contributed to the context in which the paper is delivered.