MUMA – Saturday 8 July, 3-5pm
A celebratory closing event will be held for Renee So: Provenance, inspired by UK poet Emily Berry’s 2017, ‘Drunken Bellarmine’, an ekphrastic poem written in response to So’s darkly comical knitted work of the same title.
So’s artworks are the provocation for a range of responses to be written and read by five invited writers; these new written works will be available as a free broadsheet during the exhibition and at the event.
Hosted and curated by Bella Li, contributors include: Lisa Gorton, Bella Li, Leah Muddle, Ling Toong and Saaro Umar.
Lisa Gorton is a poet and novelist, essayist and reviewer. She is the author of three award-winning poetry collections: Press Release, 2007, Hotel Hyperion, 2013 and Empirical, 2019. Her novel The Life of Houses, 2015, received the NSW Premier’s People’s Choice Award for Fiction, and the Prime Minister’s Award for Fiction (shared).
Bella Li is the author of Argosy, 2017, which won the 2018 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry and the 2018 NSW Premier’s Literary Award for Poetry. Li’s other publications include Lost Lake, 2018 and Theory of Colours, 2021. Li is the associate publisher at Cordite Books and the managing editor at Scribe Publications.
Leah Muddle is an artist, poet and maker of things. Her recent writing has been published by Overland, Peripheries and The Slow Canoe.
Ling Toong‘s poems have appeared in Dash Literary Journal, the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore and Paradise Anthology. She was a recipient of the 2018 Felix Meyer Scholarship in Literature.
Saaro Umar is an Oromo-Australian artist and poet. Her work has featured in Australian Poetry, Demos, Overland, Scum, Voiceworks, Woroni and elsewhere.
Renee So: Provenance opens 27 April – 8 July 2023 at Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA), Ground Floor, Building F, Monash University, Caulfield Campus, 900 Dandenong Road, Caulfield East. monash.edu/muma
Feature Image: Renee So, Drunken Bellarmine II 2023. Installation view, Renee So: Provenance, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2023. Photo: Andrew Curtis
