The Hawai‘i Triennial: History, Place, Identity • Richard Bell and Zoë de Luca

WEDNESDAY • April 27, 2022
4:15pm PDT | 1:15pm HST
with Richard Bell (HT22 artist) and Zoë de Luca

via Zoom

Richard Bell lives and works in Brisbane. He works across painting, installation, performance, and video. Bell is one of Australia’s most significant artists and his work explores the complex artistic and political problems of Western, colonial and Indigenous art production. He grew out of a generation of Aboriginal activists and has remained committed to the politics of Aboriginal emancipation and self-determination.

Bell is represented in most major Australian national and state collections, and has exhibited in a number of solo exhibitions at important institutions in Australia and the US. In 2023 Bell will be presenting his major work Embassy (2013–ongoing) at Tate Modern, London. In 2021 Bell has a major solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia in Sydney. In 2019 Bell took Embassy to the Venice Biennale as a collateral event. He has presented his work at Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea Milan (2019); Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne (2018); Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (2017); and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2016); the 20th Biennale of Sydney (2016); the Jerusalem Show VIII (2016); Performa 15, New York (2015); 16th Jakarta Biennale (2015); 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane (2015); Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (2014); Sakàhan, the National Gallery of Canada’s largest show of international Indigenous art, Ottawa (2013); and the 5th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2013). In 2003, Bell was the recipient of the Telstra National Aboriginal Art Award.

Zoë de Luca is a settler-coloniser art historian and writer based in Naarm/Melbourne. Recent commissioned publications include a catalogue essay for Richard Bell: You Can Go Now (MCA, Sydney, 2021), and articles for Discipline and Curator: The Museum Journal (with Jonathan Sterne). She is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University, Tio’ia:ke/Montreal, where she has also taught in art history and museum studies. Her doctoral project focuses on the international exhibition of Richard Bell’s Embassy project (2013-ongoing) and the infrastructure of the colonised/art world.