Mel O'Callaghan

Mel O’Callaghan: Ensemble

NGV Australia at Federation Square | 17 November 2017 – 12 March 2018

The human body is pushed to its limits in Australian artist Mel O’Callaghan’s powerful seven-minute video work Ensemble. Exploring the idea of resilience in the face of violence, Ensemble features one man pitted against the visceral force of a jet of water. Born in Sydney and currently residing in Paris, O’Callaghan’s diverse and dynamic practice spans painting, film, installation and performance. Prior to its Australian premiere at NGV Australia, this large-scale, silent video installation was shown at the Centre Pompidou, in both Paris and Malaga in 2016, and at the Institut d’Art Contemporain Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes in Lyon, France in 2016. Recently acquired by the NGV, the work is an expansive two channel video and is projected over a 10- metre-wide space. Using two frames, O’Callaghan isolates her subject in one and his opponents in the another. As her subject begins to walk towards the uniformed men holding the fire hose, O’Callaghan suggests that he will cross this physical and symbolic break between the frames. Through this act of struggle, triumph and then retreat, O’Callaghan encourages her audience to consider how they too may overcome their own obstacles. Tony Ellwood, Director, NGV said, ‘Ensemble is a representation of strength, adversity and persistence. It encourages a personal contemplation of social and political contexts through imagery that will stay with visitors long after they’ve left the Gallery.’ Mel O’Callaghan: Ensemble is one of five solo exhibitions by leading Australian artists for NGV Australia’s 2017-18 summer program. Ensemble will be on display at the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia at Federation

Square, Melbourne from 17 November 2017 – 12 March 2018. Entry is free. Further information is available

at NGV.MELBOURNE.

Centre of the Centre, Mel O'Callaghan's new exhibition, traces the origins of life and its regenerative forces. The catalyst for this new body of work is one small mineral given to the artist by her grandfather, renowned mineralogist Albert Chapman. The mineral contains a small pocket of water, possibly millions of years old, which holds traces of the elemental forces responsible for all life on Earth. Inspired by the geophysical conditions and potentialities held within this primordial liquid, the artist invites the audience into a total experience.

The film, sculptures and performance capture the circulatory motion of breath in response to extreme environments. During a three week mission in the Pacific, Mel O’Callaghan filmed hydrothermal vents in the depths of the ocean using the submersible Alvin with the support of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Using trance-induction techniques, performers also engage in cyclical breathing, potentially triggering altered states of consciousness including ecstasy. Investigating the elemental template of life on Earth, the exhibition is a celebration of collective strength through resilience.

Mel O’Callaghan’s Centre of the Centre is co-commissioned by Artspace, Sydney; The University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane; and Le Confort Moderne, Poitiers.

The exhibition explores spaces that seem unknowable: speculative and alluring spaces that summon nature, science, and the human psyche. Constructed through contemporary installations of works that question notions of perception, intuition, and empirical knowledge, What Lies Within: Center of the Center, encapsulate the unique practices of the four artists included in the exhibition: Mel O’Callaghan (Australia), Laurent Grasso (France), Suzanne Treister (United Kingdom) and Pamela Rosenkranz (Switzerland). With works that encompass all manner of inquiry and examination of contemporary life, the exhibition confronts visitors with propositions, offering not answers, but visceral presentations of probabilities and truths about the contemporary world.

Responding to the initial split of the first cell billions of years ago, Mel O’Callaghan’s major new exhibition, All is Life, encompasses sculpture, performance, sound and film to explore the relationship between life and nonlife. Starting with the singular impulse of the primordial cell that led to the whole of life on earth, All is Life looks at the individual’s connection to the collective.

Co-curated by Peta Rake and Shauna Thompson.

Pulse of the Planet is a major solo exhibition by Paris/Sydney-based artist Mel O’Callaghan that synthesizes several years of collaborations and ways of knowing. For the last twenty years of her practice, O’Callaghan has explored resonant objects, spaces, and tools—namely how they affect, codify, and connect bodies. By working alongside experts in other fields, O’Callaghan seeks to pose new questions through her artistic practice, to highlight the natural synergies between disciplines, as well as to focus attention on how highly curious researchers reciprocally approach complex questions about our more-than-human existence.

The works in this exhibition convene transdisciplinary creative research—from oceanographers, physicists, microbial ecologists, psychologists, and musicologists, among others—that converges around the most urgent problems of our time, including planetary shifts, the viral age, climate futures, interspecies living, and which lifeworlds we must be attentive to and why. Drawing on our innate impulse to connect with one another and to Earth’s inexplicable forces, Pulse of the Planet sees all bodies—human and non-human—as sites of revelation and connection.

The exhibition brings together a chorus of works that begin at the planet’s very depths; at a site from which all life is said to have emerged kilometres below the surface of the ocean. O’Callaghan’s collaborators recently made a hydrophone recording at the Axial Central Caldera, East Pacific Rise—a site on the floor of the Pacific Ocean at the boundary of diverging tectonic plates—which captured vibrations beneath the planet’s surface, a phenomenon often referred to as the Earth’s heartbeat. Previously, these vibrations were emitted at a constant low frequency of 7.83 hertz, but in recent years scientists have witnessed an increase to 8 hertz. This acceleration reinforces the complex planetary changes that are currently afoot. We might understand this shifting, pulsing vibration as a bodily connection with all life, both on a microbial and an immensely geologic scale, that underscores a universal resonance that transgresses global borders.

Films presented here chart the minute and the planetary, and our own fallibility and survival in this shifting system. These works give tone and form to sites as far afield as the Termite Fields near Orrtipa Thurra (Bonya), Eastern Arrente Country; the cliffs of Baie de Singes, Calanques; and the quicksand tidal island of Mont-Saint-Michel, Normandy. The frames of these films pan across and below landscapes and surfaces, submerging the viewer to both a termite-eye-view, and across great distances. O’Callaghan also contributes a series of new paintings, poured and rendered on-site to the hertz of the tuning forks; the colours of each painting chosen to optically resonate in the space.

At the centre of the exhibition is a durational performance featuring two large-scale tuning forks installed on a resonant chamber. When played, the tuning forks emit a fundamental note that creates a sympathetic call and response, which on a cellular level is in solidarity with the heartbeat of the Earth. During a series of performances performers and audience members become conduits for sympathetic sound and are called into awareness of their own somatic rhythms—such as a calm nervous system, including pulse, breath, and movement—and to consider the notion, championed in many of the planet’s knowledge systems, that the Earth, too, is a living organism.