Les Misérables ‘18
Liam Benson x Cassandra Bird, Dean Cross, Beth Dillon, Heidi Lefebvre, Daniel Mudie Cunningham, Luke O'Connor x George Haddad, Katy B Plummer, Em Size, Marcia Swaby, Alexander Tanazefti, Athena Thebus, Amanda Wolf and Zoe Wong.Curated by Heidi Lefebvre x Katy B Plummer and Luke Létourneau
Exhibition runs: 4 - 21 July 2018
Exhibition opening: 3 July 2018, 5 – 8pm
Artist Talk: 21 July 2018, 2 - 4pm
The central concern of Les Misérables '18 is how we consume narratives. It understands that history is being forged not by reasonable adults building a considered future, but by passionate individuals tangling on a gut level. The exhibition asks us to reconsider our perceptions of history and its figures—and the uncanny ways pantomime reflects how our culture actually remembers.
While the curators draw inspiration from the many adaptations of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables (and particularly Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil's 1980 megamusical), it’s going to be really helpful if you recognise that the works in this exhibition are, by and large, uninterested in that story. The sensibility of Les Misérables is what the curators were drawn to; it re-focuses the story of revolutionary Paris as a sprawling bombastic series of stories. It embraces camp and high drama, sure, but all as a method to subvert and rewrite narratives anew.
Image credit: Katy B Plummer
Images courtesy of the artists and Kudos Gallery. Photos: Nicholas Aloisio-Shearer
