From the other side features a range of historical and contemporary works alongside key new commissions that highlight horror’s capacity to transgress and destabilise forms of power and subjugation. Centring on the fear of the Monstrous-Feminine, the exhibition questions the often-harmful representation of female monsters — the witch, the hag, the monstrous mother, the shapeshifter, the possessed woman — and how she has been reclaimed by female storytellers in recent years. The Monstrous-Feminine resists the prototypical role of women in horror, as either victims or final girls; instead she performs the dual roles of temptress and castrator — alluring yet repulsive, contaminating yet pure.
Highlights include:
- The full series of Maria Kozic’s 1999 Calendar Girls, featuring pulpy depictions of archetypal ‘final girls’. The women in these portraits are survivors of various unspoken horrors inflicted upon them, but stand defiant. This will be the first time the full series will be shown since they were first exhibited in 1999.
- Tracey Moffat’s large-scale projection A Haunting 2021-23 will set an unnerving backdrop to the exhibition. First presented at the 2023 Sharjah Biennale, the film features an abandoned house lit with pulsing red lights in a desolate landscape, an indicative warning about the precarity of our times.
- Three important historical prints from Louise Bourgeois that make explicit the relationships and contradictions of the body, psyche and womanhood. Bourgeois creates tension through the opposing forces of horror and pleasure. Her presentation includes her iconic print Spider 1995, a motif that represents both monstrosity and protection.
- A new work from Mia Boe referencing two Australian classic films made in the same year – Wake in Fright (1971) and Walkabout (1971). Boe intertwines Indigenous and settler perspectives, fighting for survival in and on the landscape.
Curators Elyse Goldfinch and Dr Jessica Clark said the exhibition highlights the horror genre’s ability to create a language with which to be scared and to respond to challenges that might be beyond our control.
“Horror often speaks to the collective anxieties and fears of our times, from sexual liberation to new technologies, racial tension to gender subversion. This fear proliferates across shared cultural imaginaries to lay bare our innermost desires, tendencies for self-destruction and the conflicting impulses to confront and exorcise our darkest fantasies,” they said.
“The exhibition crosses the artificial parameters of horror in the everyday, as something that exists as part of society but also from outside of it. Culminating in a potent synthesis of dread, camp, humour and catharsis, From the other side presents the work of female, trans and non-binary artists who challenge traditional narratives and assumed boundaries of the body, gender, the self and the ‘other’.”
From the other side will be accompanied by a publication featuring curatorial texts and an introduction to her theory on the Monstrous-Feminine by Barbara Creed; essay by Canadian film writer Kier-La Janisse, author of the cult classic, House of Psychotic Women, 2012; a short story by Lisa Fuller, a Murri woman and author of the novel Ghost Bird, 2021; and a text by UK-based author and film maker Alison Peirse, editor of the Women Make Horror anthology, 2021.
A program of films and talks will take place in February 2024 at ACCA and offsite, co-curated by Goldfinch, Clark, and Jessica Balanzategui, Senior Lecturer in Media at RMIT. More details to come.
From the other side
9 December 2023 – 3 March 2024
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA)
Curators: Elyse Goldfinch and Dr Jessica Clark
Artists: Naomi Blacklock, Mia Boe, Louise Bourgeois, Cybele Cox, Karla Dickens, Lonnie Hutchinson, Naomi Kantjuriny, Minyoung Kim, Maria Kozic, Jemima Lucas, Clare Milledge, Tracey Moffatt, SJ Norman, Julia Robinson, Marianna Simnett, Heather B Swann, Suzan Pitt, Kellie Wells, and Zamara Zamara
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art
111 Sturt Street, Southbank VIC 3006
Melbourne, Australia
Opening hours: Tuesday – Friday 10am–5pm, Weekends 11am–5pm, Free entry
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