ACMI & Ian Potter Cultural Trust award $60,000 worth of artist development grants

The Ian Potter Cultural Trust (IPCT) and ACMI revealed today that they will support three Ian Potter Moving Image Commission 2022 runner-up artists with $60,000 in the form of a six-month Creative Development and Mentorship Program. The IPMIC 2022 judging panel was so impressed with the new moving image works of these three Australian artists, that The Ian Potter Cultural Trust (IPCT) and ACMI created this initiative.

The grants have been awarded to Pilar Mata Dupont for her proposed work La Piedra, Roberta Joy Rich for her proposed work traced. and Nicholas Mangan for his proposed work Core Coralations.

Demonstrating the organisations’ joint commitment to supporting moving image art practice in Australia, each artist will receive $20,000 while ACMI staff will provide their expertise and support to help with development of their proposed artworks.

“ACMI is proud to be partnering with The Ian Potter Cultural Trust to deliver $60,000 in artist development grants during this vital time in the recovery of the arts sector,” said ACMI Director & CEO Katrina Sedgwick OAM.

“The Ian Potter Cultural Trust is delighted to support three talented Australian artists, whose proposals were met with such strong and unanimous enthusiasm from the IPMIC 2022 judging panel. It is particularly pleasing to offer this additional support as part of the final commission in the series,” said Lady Potter AC.

This Creative Development and Mentorship Program supporting these three Australian artists follows the recent announcement of the final recipient in a decade-long series of $100,000 Ian Potter Moving Image Commissions (IPMIC), Angela Tiatia. The Sydney-based paint, sculpture, video installation and performance artist was awarded the prestigious commission for her proposed video work, Liminal Persuasions (working title), which will have its world premiere at ACMI in 2022 and enter the ACMI Collection.

About the artists and proposed works

Pilar Mata Dupont

Pilar Mata Dupont is a Latinx visual artist and filmmaker living and working between Rotterdam, Netherlands, and Boorloo (Perth), Australia. Her work spans video, performance, and photography and delves into the fallibility of structures of history, gender, and memory. Using highly theatrical and cinematic methods, Mata Dupont reimagines histories and texts, creating alternative readings that question the conditions of the construction of dominant narratives that shape Western society. Her Argentinean background and upbringing in Australia, Argentina, and Brunei – all settler states or former colonies – feed into her practice through the themes she explores.

Mata Dupont has shown work in spaces and festivals such as Secession, Vienna; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei; Mediacity Seoul at the Seoul Museum of Art; Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart; TENT, Rotterdam; New Zealand Festival through Te Papa; MONA FOMA; Akademie der Künste Hanseatenweg, Berlin; PICA, Perth; Biennale of Sydney 2010; The Box at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, USA; and Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Gaîté Lyrique, Paris. In 2015, she won the Plymouth Contemporary Open, UK, and a residency prize at the 19th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil in São Paulo, Brazil. In 2010, with Tarryn Gill, she won the Basil Sellers Art Prize. A new film, ‘La Maruja’, will premiere in 2021 with experimental online platform, Prototype. Mata Dupont is represented by MOORE CONTEMPORARY in Australia.

La Piedra by Pilar Mata Dupont

La Piedra (The Stone) is a new video work in development that builds upon the moving image work of Mata Dupont’s practice to date, drawing upon an archive of interviews and documentary footage of women in her family she has been creating since 2013. Functioning as a magic realist, auto-narrative drama, the proposed project looks at intergenerational trauma, the politics of motherhood, migration, memory, alienation, illness, and the lived body outside of Cartesian modes.

The non-linear narrative of the work concentrates on the relationship between two characters: Satu and Cris, her mother. These characters are an amalgam of various women in Mata Dupont’s family including herself. A generation of people who purposefully forgot and those who need to remember. Weaving through the affect of the collective trauma of the volatile 20th Century in Argentina, how it is passed through generations through the filter of an immigration story to a land with its own history of trauma and displacement, is where Mata Dupont wishes to situate La Piedra. We find ourselves at the end of the story at the beginning of it; the main plot has already taken place and the protagonists are picking up the pieces.

Roberta Joy Rich

Roberta Joy Rich is a multi-disciplinary artist who responds to and reframes constructions of African identity and histories, often referencing her own diaspora southern African identity and experiences. Utilising language, archives, and sometimes satire in her video, performance, installation and mixed-media projects, Rich draws from various sociopolitical, historical and popular culture epistemologies to engage with notions of 'authentic' identity construction, while seeking to ascertain empowering forms of self-determination via her arts practice.

Since completing her Master of Fine Arts at Monash University, Rich has exhibited projects in Melbourne, interstate and across Johannesburg and Cape Town. Recent exhibitions include, Deny/Denial/Denied; Blak Dot Gallery, Melbourne (2017), One Colour at a Time: Contemporary Screen Prints; Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg (2017), M/other Land; Arts House (2018), Transmissions; Gallery MOMO Cape Town, (2018), The Fairest Cape? An account of a Coloured; Bus Projects, Melbourne (2018), Firstdraft, Sydney (2019), WE KOPPEL, WE DALA; Metro Arts, Brisbane, Incinerator Art Award; Incinerator Gallery (2020), and Stimulus Package as part of Darebin City Council’s FUSE Festival (2020). An alumni of FCAC’s Emerging Cultural Leaders Program (2017), her residencies in South Africa were supported by NAVA’s Freedman Foundation Travelling Scholarship, and she is the 2020 recipient of the Australia Council for the Arts Debra Porch Award for an upcoming residency at the Cemeti Institution for Art and Society, Yogyakarta, Indonesia (postponed).

traced. By Roberta Joy Rich

traced. is an immersive multi-channel moving image installation that reimagines an African presence within the colonial-settler-nation context of Australia. traced. seeks to explore the experience of being between places through the speculative walking journeys of southern African settler convicts “Rachel of the Cape” and “Black Peter”. Witness to their navigation and traversing of place, traced. reframes tracking as an experience towards tracing memory and connection to place and how this informs an understanding between place and self-identity. Inspired by the resistance and survival of their ontologies, some as mere footnotes found in the depths of colonial archives, are fragments of banished indigenous southern African peoples, forcibly sent to Australia and coerced as trackers alongside Aboriginal men. traced. imagines shared semiotics of dis/placement, transporting us between time and place and what it means to exist between places, while positioning its viewer simultaneously as the tracker.

Nicholas Mangan

Born 1979, Geelong, Victoria, Mangan lives and works Melbourne, Victoria. Nicholas Mangan works at the intersection of sculpture and film. His practice explores the unstable relationship between culture and nature, broadly in relation to the Asia Pacific. Mangan’s recent projects have focused on Australia's geopolitical implication within the region, and its broader economic and ethical place within a global ecology. In order to excavate the contested histories surrounding specific sites and events, his practice incorporates extensive archival research, fieldwork and collaboration across disciplines. He is represented by galleries Sutton Gallery in Melbourne and LABOR in Mexico City.

Core Coralations by Nicholas Mangan

Mangan's project Core Coralations explores the mass bleaching events at the Great Barrier Reef and ice core samples from Antartica explores air circulation and scientific investigations to restore our fragile ecosystem in our climate emergency using thermal imaging of a feedback loop between electric domestic air conditioning units and atmospheric heat gain. In addition to this material Core Coralations will include interviews and archive combined with a soundscape in multi-screen work using the screen language of materialist, structuralist film and expanded cinema.

About ACMI

ACMI is your national museum of screen culture. Navigate the universe of film, TV, videogames and art with us online and in the museum. ACMI celebrates the past, present and future of the moving image with a vibrant calendar of exhibitions, screenings, commissions, festivals, and industry and education programs. More at acmi.net.au

About the Ian Potter Moving Image Commission (IPMIC)

The IPMIC is Australia’s most significant long-term commissioning program of new contemporary moving image art by Australian artists. A joint initiative of The Ian Potter Cultural Trust and ACMI, this award represents a commitment to this exciting art form. The IPMIC is designed to enable a mid-career artist to produce an ambitious new moving image work that demonstrates a major development or shift in their practice. Through the commission partners, the award provides two levels of support to the successful artist: $100,000 from The Ian Potter Cultural Trust, as well as highly specialised curatorial, production and presentation expertise provided by ACMI. More at: movingimagecommission.org.au

About the Ian Potter Cultural Trust (IPCT)

The Ian Potter Cultural Trust was established in 1993 by The Ian Potter Foundation to encourage and support diversity and excellence among emerging Australian artists. The Trust’s funding is governed by a commitment to excellence: it seeks to support individuals who are passionate about their work and have the potential to be outstanding in their field. The Trust’s main funding stream offers grants to assist early career artists of exceptional talent to undertake professional development, usually overseas. To date more than 1,600 artists have received grants totalling over $8 million. The Ian Potter Arts Commissions represent the Trust’s flagship award, complementing the main ongoing program of grants for individual artists. The Ian Potter Moving Image Commissions are the Trust’s third major commissions program, following Music (composition) and Sculpture.