Sophie Knezic

Sophie Knezic is a writer, scholar and visual artist, who works between practice and theory. Sophie’s writing has been published in Broadsheet Journal, Evental Aesthetics, Memo Review, Art + Australia and Art Monthly Australasia, and she is a regular contributor to Frieze and Australian Book Review. Sophie currently lectures in Critical and Theoretical Studies at VCA, University of Melbourne and in Art History, Theory + Cultures in the School of Art at RMIT University.

TarraWarra Biennial 2018: From Will to Form

ABR Arts • 13 August 2018

Curated by Emily Cormack, the 2018 TarraWarra Biennial positions itself as a paean to the liveliness of artistic gesture. The exhibition’s curatorial frame invokes the notion of ‘will’, derived from Friedrich Nietzsche’s infamous notion of the will to power; although less the idea of an ambition to mastery – as troublingly appropriated by German fascism – than the philosopher’s conce ... (read more)

Hilarie Mais (TarraWarra Museum of Art)

ABR Arts • 05 March 2018

In a seminal essay titled ‘Grids’ (1978), the American art theorist Rosalind Krauss argued that, as a structure, the grid was emblematic of modernist ambition, encapsulating modernism’s streamlining project through the expunging of forms and conventions extraneous to it. The grid embodied a kind of will to silence, as well as an obvious antipathy to figuration and narrative in its pure recti ... (read more)

Del Kathryn Barton, Louise Paramor, Helen Maudsley, and Gareth Sansom (NGV Australia)

ABR Arts • 04 December 2017

The four solo survey exhibitions currently staged at NGV Australia as its Summer 2017–18 program emphatically delineate the institution’s position on contemporary art. While the juxtaposition is headily abrasive, the aggregate speaks of certain attributes that it is keen to foreground. Contemporary art, embodied by this ensemble, is spectacular and behemothic, vivid and kaleidoscopic. The work ... (read more)

Sophie Knezic reviews 'Biennials, Triennials, and documenta: The exhibitions that created contemporary art' by Charles Green and Anthony Gardner

June-July 2017, no. 392 • 31 May 2017

Charles Green and Anthony Gardner’s Biennials, Triennials, and Documenta: The exhibitions that created contemporary art represents an apposite study of the biennials and triennials – also known as mega-exhibitions – that are proliferating around the world. Apposite since, with the exception of Bruce Altshuler’s two-volume account from 1863 to 2002, no art-historical text has offered a scho ... (read more)

Philippe Parreno: Thenabouts (ACMI)

ABR Arts • 08 February 2017

Some may be puzzled by an exhibition titling itself ‘Thenabouts’. As a portmanteau, the word seems confusingly to displace time onto space. The term was in fact neologised by James Joyce in Finnegans Wake (1939), where a character asks, ‘Where are we at all? and whenabouts in the name of space?’ Joyce coined such seemingly nonsensical terms as ‘thenabouts’ and ‘anywhen’ to conflate ... (read more)

Life inside an Image (MUMA)

ABR Arts • 11 November 2016

The birth of cinema is conventionally linked to the Lumière Brothers’ inaugural public screening of their first film at the Salon Indien du Grand Café in Paris in December 1895: a forty-six second sequence showing Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory. But a compatriot inventor, Louis le Prince, had been experimenting with developing stereoscopic cinematographic cameras in the years 1888–90, ... (read more)