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.
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)