Climate change, activism rule in GOMA’s opening Children’s Art Centre exhibition
Students will sing protest songs and design protest T-shirts as part of a new children’s art exhibition promoting environmental activism at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art.
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KIDS will be encouraged to speak up about climate change and design protest t-shirts, in a new children’s art exhibition promoting environmental activism.
The Gallery of Modern Art - and it’s Children’s Art Centre - will reopen tomorrow, with an interactive exhibition on climate change by artist Raquel Ormella titled ‘Now is The Time’.
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Ormella’s exhibition includes two videos made in collaboration with Junction Park State School, in which students perform protest songs and share their views about climate action.
In the exhibition space, children from 3 to 12 will be able to design a protest t-shirt and watch their message come to life in an animated protest scene, while listening to a playlist of protest music.
GOMA has rejected the suggestion that the exhibition will teach young people how to protest. And Ormella says parents should be relaxed about the exhibition, saying she tested the material with students at Junction Park State School in Brisbane last year.
“I interviewed children about their relationship to the children’s march for climate change,” Ormella says.
“We are so focused on another catastrophe but we still need to think about the catastrophic results of climate change.”
The Canberra-based artist says anyone who doesn’t feel comfortable with that doesn’t have to attend but she hopes people will keep an open mind.
Ormella is known for using textile, video and drawing to make art about environmental and social issues. Her artworks often resemble protest materials with banners and slogans. She is particularly concerned about climate change and its effect on young people and that inspired Now Is The Time.
QAGOMA director Chris Saines says he doesn’t think Ormella’s work will spark any controversy.
“Raquel is not teaching young people how to protest,” he says.
“What she’s doing is reflecting on the fact that children are finding a voice. I think it’s great that children are becoming civicly engaged rather than remaining silent or voiceless. This is something that children are doing and the exhibition is driven by children not by an adult seeking to get a child to adopt a certain point of view.”
And if anyone thinks that’s edgy, well, GOMA has shown time and time again that it’s keen to engage in the issues of the day.
Having GOMA open again is good news on a number of fronts and it means that the gallery’s summer blockbuster, The Motorcycle is on track (pardon the pun) to open on November 28 according to QAGOMA director Chris Saines.
“The Motorcycle will feature more than 100 motorcycles from the 1870s to the present day across GOMA’s entire ground floor,” Saines says.
“The exhibition will appeal not only to bike and motorsport enthusiasts but to anyone with an interest in social history, popular culture, design and technology.”
In the meantime limited numbers of children can attend the Children’s Art Centre for Now Is The Time and while some areas of GOMA are off limit as The Motorcycle begins to take shape there are other free exhibitions on including Cut it: Collage to Meme which contemplates our voracious consumption of imagery in a variety of mediums. It looks at the way artists reimagine the iconography we consume as part of a larger effort to rethink social structures.
GOMA’s older sister, the Queensland Art Gallery, reopened a couple of weeks ago.
Another exhibition, I, Object, looks at the many complex relationships Indigenous Australian artists have to objects from the histories informing their creation to the social and cultural consequences of their collection.
Welcome to Colour Television, celebrates a powerful selection of Indigenous Australian video art featuring work by Richard Bell, Destiny Deacon, Vernon Ah Khee, Christian Thompson, Genevieve Grieves and Douglas Watkin.
Visitors should book their free, entry-timed tickets at qagoma.qld.gov.au/visit/plan-your-visit.