Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Sunday 28 October
2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Location
17th to 18th Century European Paintings Gallery, Level 2, NGV International
180 St Kilda Road Melbourne Victoria 3000
Get directions
The legend of Cleopatra has everything: opulence, power, seduction and celebrity.
The audacious power plays and tumultuous love affairs of the last queen of Egypt have captivated artists, musicians, filmmakers and writers for more than 2000 years.
The Banquet of Cleopatra (1743-44) by Giambattista Tiepolo is a prized painting in the NGV Permanent Collection. Discover the provenance and meaning of Tiepolo’s scene of outrageous extravagance across three Sundays in October, with talks and performances each week hosted by senior curator Ted Gott.
Both Antony and Cleopatra are light-skinned and shown in incongruous 16th-century costume in Tiepolo’s vision of The Banquet of Cleopatra. Join us as we explore race, representation and the Renaissance in the last talk of the series.
This event is presented in partnership with NGV.
Featuring
Ted Gott
Ted Gott is Senior Curator of International Art at the National Gallery of Victoria. After studying at the University of Melbourne, the British Museum, Northwestern University and the Art Institute of Chicago, he previously worked at the Robert Holmes-à-Court Collection, Heide Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Australia.
He has curated and co-curated more than 25 exhibitions, including The Impressionists: Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay (2004), Kiss of the Beast: From Paris Salon to King Kong (2005), Modern Britain 1900-1960 (2007), Salvador Dalí: Liquid Desire (2009), Napoleon: Revolution to Empire (2012), Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great (2015), Degas: A New Vision (2016) and Van Gogh and the Seasons (2017).
He has published widely on Australian, British and French art, and in 2013 co-authored a cultural history of the gorilla in 19th and 20th Century art, literature, scientific discourse and cinema (Gorilla, Reaktion Press, London).
Odette Kelada
Odette Kelada is a Lecturer in Creative Writing in the School of Culture and Communication. She has a PhD in literature researching the lives of Australian women writers.
Her writing focuses on marginalised voices, gender and racial literacy, and has appeared in numerous publications including the Australian Cultural History Journal, Outskirts, Postcolonial Studies and the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature. Her novel, Drawing Sybylla, won the Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript in 2017.
Abdul Abdullah
Abdul Abdullah is an artist from Perth, currently based in Sydney, who works across painting, photography, video, installation and performance. As a self described ‘outsider amongst outsiders’, his practice is primarily concerned with the experience of the ‘other’ in society. Abdullah’s projects have engaged with different marginalised minority groups and he is particularly interested in the experience of young Muslims in the contemporary multicultural Australian context. Through these processes and explorations Abdullah extrapolates this outlook to an examination of universal aspects of human nature.
His works are included in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, The Art Gallery of Western Australia, The Gallery of Modern Art, Artbank, the University of Western Australia, Murdoch University, The Islamic Museum of Australia and The Bendigo Art Gallery. In 2015 Abdul exhibited at Primavera at the Museum of Contemporary Art, and at the Asia Pacific Triennial at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, in 2016 he exhibited at the Australian Centre of Contemporary Art and in 2017 he showed at PATAKA Art Museum in New Zealand and with Yavuz Gallery at Art Basel Hong Kong and the Asia Now Art Fair in Paris.
Most recently Abdul exhibited at MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum in Chiangmai, The National Gallery of Australia as part of Infinite Conversations, and was shortlisted along with his brother Abdul-Rahman Abdullah to represent Australia in the 2019 Venice Biennale.