PERTH.- PICA’s program of exhibitions for November to January includes the group exhibition Refracted Reality by Guest Curator Anna Louise Richardson, a solo presentation by leading West Australian artist Olga Cironis, and Brook Andrew’s video SMASH IT.

Presenting the work of ten artists and collectives, Refracted Reality launched on Saturday night at the Salon Vernissage, Perth’s signature art event. Artworks were available for sale to PICA donors, with proceeds going directly to artists.

Curated by Western Australian artist and curator Anna Louise Richardson, Refracted Reality features works in a variety of mediums, including painting, photography, video and sculpture, by artists whose practices address a range of increasingly urgent issues from mediated truth and personal sovereignty to environmental upheavals. Taking the window as a motif and metaphor, the works in the exhibition act as a medium through which ideas pass and bend and, ultimately, are cast into dramatic relief.

Artists include Hoda Afshar (VIC), Bruno Booth (WA), Helen Britton (WA/GER), Max Pam (WA), Karrabing Film Collective (NT), Bruce and Nicole Slatter (WA), Valerie Sparks (VIC), Angela Tiatia (NSW), James Walker (WA) and Ian Williams (WA).




Forest of Voices is the much-anticipated solo exhibition by leading West Australian artist Olga Cironis, presented in the form of an immersive sound installation in the First Floor Gallery. The act of seeking and collecting mementos of human exchange is central to Cironis’ practice. To create Forest of Voices, Cironis invited people from diverse communities to anonymously share their personal experiences and stories of love. Forest of Voices presents a timely reflection on shared vulnerability and the possibilities contained in social acts.

Cironis says, “Forest of Voices is about listening to the ‘other’ as fragments of private intimate conversations that play all at the same time through small, suspended speakers. There will be whisperings of desires, love, pain, loss and fear. Together with recordings of the four elements, they create a delicate chorus of voices, a sound that from a distance is similar to the wind through branches.”

The PICA Screen Space features SMASH IT (2018) by Brook Andrew, Wiradjuri interdisciplinary artist and Artistic Director of NIRIN, Sydney Biennial. ​SMASH IT draws its title from ​the artist’s practice of ​agitating colonial archives in order to subvert and rewrite dominant narratives of the past. Drawing on a range of footage and archival materials from both the artist’s own private collection and the collections of the Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC., image, sound, and text overlap and enter into a frenzied tension with one another ​to reveal and unravel power relations between coloniser and colonised, visible and invisible.

From Tuesday 3 November to Sunday 10 January Refracted Reality runs in the Ground Floor Galleries, with Olga Cironis’ new work Forest of Voices in the First Floor Gallery, and Brook Andrew’s video ​SMASH IT in the Screen Space.

The exhibitions can be viewed during PICA’s gallery opening hours 10 am to 5pm from Tuesday to Sunday, and until 8pm during a return season of PICA After Dark. PICA After Dark sees the galleries open late on Saturday 7 November and Thursday to Saturday from 19 November to 5 December. PICA will also be open over the New Year break until 10 January, excluding public holidays.

Public programs, artist and curator talks continue through November and December.