Melbourne’s Museum of Australian Photography (MAPh) will exhibit new work by prize-winning artist Amos Gebhardt from 23 November 2024 to 16 February 2025.
Amos Gebhardt, Mångata (2024), courtesy of the artist and Tolarno Galleries (Melbourne).
Description from MAPh website:
Drawing on the Moon as a symbol of illumination, Amos Gebhardt’s Mångata weaves sound and moving image with photographic portraits lit entirely by moonlight. Mångata is a Swedish term describing a pathway towards the horizon created by the Moon’s reflection on water – a metaphorical road into the unknown. Interlinked with lunar studies, the series features visionaries in their fields who imagine liberated and collective futures in these dystopian times.
Working across themes of climate justice, abolition, storytelling, anti-oppression practice, and cultural theory, participants include Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Alexis Wright, Anjali Sharma, Aseel Tayah, Debbie Kilroy, Leah Manaema Avene and Nevo Zisin. Reflected in the participants’ eyes are tracings of the moon itself created through subtle movement of the human body in dialogue with Earth’s rotation.
As Earth’s closest celestial companion, the Moon in its eternal cycling promises an end to every beginning and a new beginning to every end. The moonlit figures in Mångata are harbingers of change, reflecting the visionary and interconnected labour of liberatory praxis that signals the undoing of the times we live in.
‘Alexis with Moon’, from the series Mångata, was the winning work in this year’s National Photographic Portrait Prize, and its subject Alexis Wright won both the Miles Franklin Literary Award and Stella Prize in 2024 for her novel Praiseworthy. MAPh is honoured to have commissioned this series and to acquire the diptych into its collection.
