Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Friday 12 March
6:30 PM - 7:30 PM
Across March we’ll be Reading the City; shining a light on the many ways we understand and talk about Melbourne itself. From the city as an abstract concept to the physical landscape in all its permutations, we’ll be hearing from visual artists and architects, policy makers and designers, novelists and historians. The City of Literature becomes the focus, and you’ll never read it the same way again.
Art on the City
Chaired by Chris McAuliffe, Harriet Edquist, David Hansen, Cat Poljski and Jan Senbergs discuss how artists go about interpreting the city. What are the challenges of depicting Melbourne through art? How do they see the city as an imaginative space?
Featuring
Chris McAuliffe
Dr Chris McAuliffe is Director of the Ian Potter Museum of Art at The University of Melbourne. Prior to that he was for ten years a lecturer in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne.
Dr McAuliffe has researched and written extensively in the area of contemporary art, and is the author of Art and Suburbia, 1996, Linda Marrinon: let her try, 2007, and Jon Cattapan: possible histories, 2008.
He is a regular media commentator on the arts and currently appears on ABC TV’s ‘Sunday Arts’ programme.
A graduate of the University of Melbourne and of Harvard University, Dr McAuliffe is currently researching the interaction of art and popular music.
Jan Senbergs
Jan Senbergs is an artist who lives in Melbourne and has held regular one-man exhibitions since the early 1960s.
His work is displayed in galleries around the world from the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, to the National Gallery in Washington DC. He has exhibited extensively in Europe, Japan, America and Australia.
Senbergs was born in Latvia in 1939 and his family emigrated to Australia when he was 11 years old.
Jan was a teacher from 1967 until 1980, when he gave up teaching to concentrate on painting.
Cat Poljski
Cat Poljski is a printmaker who works from her studio on Lygon Street and has just returned from New York City where she continues to “Trace Space”.
Her recent exhibition at Jenny Port Gallery in Richmond reflected the urban encounters experienced in Melbourne and Beijing, after a residency with the Red Gate Gallery.
Poljski is currently completing her Masters of Fine Art at Monash University.
She was born and raised in Melbourne.
Harriet Edquist
Harriet Edquist is Professor of Architectural History in the School of Architecture and Design at RMIT University.
She has published extensively on Australian architecture, art and design with a particular focus on the 20th century and has pioneered studies on émigré architects in Melbourne and the Australian Arts and Crafts movement.
Her most recent books are Pioneers of Modernism: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Australia (2008) and George Baldessin: Paradox and Persuasion (2009).
David Hansen
David Hansen has worked as a regional gallery director, a State museum curator and an art auction house researcher and specialist; in 2014 he was appointed Associate Professor at the Centre for Art History and Art Theory at the Australian National University.
With over 35 years’ experience in the visual arts and museums sector, Dr Hansen has curated more than 80 exhibitions, while his writings on art have been widely published in newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals, exhibition catalogues and books. The catalogue of his 2017 National Portrait Gallery exhibition Dempsey’s People won the 2018 William M.B. Berger Prize for British Art History.