Fashion & Art explored in COLLECTION+: CHRISTIAN THOMPSON AT SCAF

Christian Thompson, one of Australia's most significant indigenous artists, will be the focus of a new exhibition presented Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF) exploring the intersection of art and fashion through his cross-disciplinary work. Presented from October 23 until 12 December 2015, Collection+: Christian Thompson includes photography; sculpture, performance, film and video works that appropriate traditional Aboriginal iconography, often creating fashion-related imagery with original and compelling contemporary art results.  

Collection+: Christian Thompson is the fifth exhibition in the SCAF Collection+ series that incorporates key works from the Gene & Brian Sherman Collection alongside works loaned from major public and private collections worldwide. For this exhibition, works by Christian Thompson have also been borrowed from the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA). A new sculptural work, All Revolutions are Led by the Young, 2013 will also be premiered as part of the exhibition.

The exhibition is curated by emerging Melbourne-based curator and lawyer Alana Kushnir, who has explored concepts of collection and ownership, questioning what it means to truly own or possess something. Kushnir has looked into concepts such as the extinction and rediscovery of indigenous languages and the appropriation of indigenous Australian material culture. Kushnir draws a connection between these questions and Thompson’s photographic series, We Bury Our Own, which has been selected from the 900 piece Gene & Brian Sherman Collection.