Posters from the urban jungle
Viva la Revolucion! Whether you’re after sexual, political or cultural revolution, it’s all here in Dell Gallery at Queensland College Art’s ‘Zootopia: Posters from the Urban Jungle’. The revolution lives on in the fluorescent poster paint and agitprop styling of this gathering of over one hundred and forty political posters from the heady era of student protests, rallies, marches and political subversion. A call to arms for a contemporary generation and a salute to a prior one, this exhibition encompasses posters on issues that are far from nostalgic and forgotten. By including work from the ’60s right up to last year, the curators have allowed the posters to contextualise and invigorate one another; those from the dawn of the political poster movement in Australia reinvigorated by the relevance of their contemporary successors, which in turn draw their strength from the energy and example of their forebears.
The first striking thing about Zootopia is the exhibition design. The walls are boldly painted black and red, and the posters are scattered along the walls from waist height to well above head height, recreating their actual positioning in their original locations. This adventurous presentation draws attention away from the posters’ location in an art gallery and manages to energise the space, decentring conventional expectations of art gallery exhibitions. Likewise, the hang, not chronological or artist-based but vaguely grouped according to social issue, the works appear in conceptual clumps that take vastly different aesthetic forms depending on the time and place of their creation. A media lounge and projection space on one wall further engage the viewer with historical and contemporary manifestations of the same kinds of concerns exhibited by the posters. From footage