Balnaves Contemporary Photomedia
We Used To Talk About Love saw the Contemporary Galleries of the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) reconfigured by Jan van Schaik, from Minifie van Schaik Architects, in collaboration with the exhibition’s curator, Natasha Bullock. Reorganised into a labyrinthine passage of interconnecting rooms, this architectural intervention worked to choreograph the audience’s movements, quietly guiding visitors from one artist’s work to the next, from start to finish. Intimate spaces opened up onto expansive vistas, then twisted back round into angular passageways that ebbed and flowed in scale and sympathy with each of the selected works. Complementing this constructed progression was a narrative that was articulated through titled zones that created poetic, affective clusters—‘To begin with the flesh’, ‘Expressive abstractions’, ‘An archive of feeling’ and ‘Filthy, crushing, ending’. Together the architecture and chapters heightened the sense of the audience’s body in relation to the space, arousing feeling in the movement through it. It was a well thought out detail that set the scene, especially considering that ‘emotion’ was on the agenda, and as Bullock suggested in her catalogue essay, ‘love is enacted, even performed’.1
As the second iteration of the biennial Balnaves Contemporary, We Used To Talk About Love continued the series’ aim to provide young and mid-career Australian artists with the opportunity to present recent works in a major Australian gallery. Featuring Polly Borland, Paul Knight, Angelica Mesiti, Darren Sylvester, David Rosetzsky, Eliza Hutchison, David Noonan, Justene Williams, Glenn Sloggett, Grant Stevens and Tim Silver (listed in their order of appearance within the exhibition), We Used To Talk About Love did this without stretching itself too far. Nearly all of the selected artists had either exhibited at the