Past is Prologue is a year-spanning program marking and reflecting on forty years of Gertrude. Across four interrelated exhibitions, contributing curators will chart the history of this organisation and its community, and commission new works by leading Australian visual artists.
Bureaucracy of Feelings curated by Diego Ramírez, from the cycle of Gertrude's exhibitions Past is Prologue, contextualises the last decade of Gertrude Contemporary by gathering artists that congregated at a different organisation: a smaller artist run space that neighboured Gertrude for 17 years, until the latter relocated to its current address. This anthology is situated in the time period 2018-2023, when the curator directed the aforementioned space. Bureaucracy of Feelings builds on this premise to chart artists that were actively building, shaping and resisting frameworks that directly or indirectly supported Gertrude Contemporary’s activities over the last decade. By operating as arts administrators, Board members, advisory panels, and volunteers in the broader artist led sector in tandem with their artistic practice.
Taking this curatorial premise as a departure point, Bureaucracy of Feelings considers the role that administrative language–KPIs, statements, policy, metrics, appointments, protocols–played in structural critiques of the past decade. Bureaucracy of Feelings believes this managerialism was a common and increasing response to social issues over the last ten years. Pondering whether this style, position or strategy has achieved its aims or simply increased the volume of rules, procedures, HR speech, forms and social media activity that engulfs our everyday life. This query becomes a site of poetic and artistic production, scraping lyrical residue from this corporate excess to reconfigure its homogeneity.
