(Un)conditional III: Ayesha Green & Cushla Donaldson

Media release – 2 August, 2018

(Un)conditional III

Ayesha Green & Cushla Donaldson Melbourne Art Fair Project Rooms

Project runs: Thursday 2 August – Sunday 5 August 2018

Image: Kurawaka, Ayesha Green, 2018.

(Un)conditional III includes new work by Ayesha Green (Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Kahungunu) and Cushla Donaldson. This exhibition in the Melbourne Art Fair Project Rooms is part of The Physics Room’s itinerant operating model for 2018 and draws on the ideas of reciprocity, trade and exchange, hosting and guesting. This iteration of the (Un)conditional series, taking place outside of Aotearoa, explores human and cultural movement across oceans.

Green’s research-based painting practice attempts to relocate and redefine the power relationships of, and within, Māori representation. Kurawaka is a new work comprising of four large-scale paintings completed on full sheets of plywood. Depicting two generations of Green’s maternal whānau, as well as the illustrated record of New Zealand flora from

Joseph Banks’ Florilegium, Kurawaka traces living connections of lineage and displacement over expansive distances.

Cushla Donaldson’s new work 501s foregrounds the historical instrumentalisation of glamour and soft power. Donaldson has created a gigantic moving image work referencing a legendary event at the Carnival of Venice in the 1600s in which a giant glass slipper was put in a public square and filled with wine. Donaldson has built a mechanism into the work that allows participants outside the fair to text in and disrupt the seductively spinning crystal shoe to speak back to the present and prevailing power structures.

The Physics Room, Ayesha, and Cushla would like to thank and acknowledge Jan Warburton's generous support of this project.

Image: 501s (still), Cushla Donaldson, 2018.

Ayesha Green (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāi Tahu) is an artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau. She graduated with a Master of Fine Arts from Elam in 2013 and completed a Graduate Diploma in Museums and Cultural Heritage in 2016. Recent exhibitions include Alma Venus, Corbans Estate Art Centre (2018), Summa Pete, Papakura Art Gallery (2017), Spirit of the Thing Given (Māori), RM Gallery (2017), Biographies of Transition, To Busy to Think, ARTSPACE (2017).

Cushla Donaldson is an artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau. Her practice seeks to identify, expose, and act upon schisms in the heated environment of late capitalism. Her writing has come to include fiction alongside essays on art, politics and film theory. She graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts before gaining her MFA from Goldsmiths College, University of London, as a recipient of the Anne Reid Scholarship. She has exhibited in New Zealand, Europe and Japan. She has participated in residencies in Estonia and in the Manawatū, New Zealand and has taught Art and Film Theory at Auckland University and Unitech, Auckland.

© Scoop Media