Zoe Leonard’s Al río / To the River opens this weekend at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA Australia), the first major exhibition of the internationally renowned artist’s work in the Southern Hemisphere. Leonard has been in Sydney to install the exhibition and will participate in the opening week program.
Al río / To the River is a large-scale photographic work which takes as its subject the Rio Grande, as it is named in the United States, or Río Bravo, as it is named in Mexico. Over a period of five years, beginning in 2016, Leonard photographed the 2,000 km stretch where the Rio Grande/Río Bravo is used to demarcate the international boundary between the two countries, following the river from the border cities of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico and El Paso, Texas, to the Gulf of Mexico.
Epic in scale, Al río / To the River results from close observation of both the natural and built environments shaped by and surrounding the river. Structured in passages, Al río / To the River follows the geography of the river as it flows downstream. As Leonard points out: “The shifting nature of a river – which floods periodically, changes course and carves new channels – is at odds with the political task it is asked to perform.”
While anchored to the geographic, social, economic and political realities of this extended region of the Americas, Leonard’s visual meditation on the river resonates with the urgent subjects of borders and migration around the world. Al río / To the River engages with conversations happening in Australia and elsewhere about the impact of human industry and commerce on the natural world, climate change and colonialism on First Nations communities.
Composed in three parts: the major body of Al río / To the River comprises over 400 black and white silver gelatin prints presented as a flow of passages that are both temporal and geographically anchored. Leonard engages with multiple photographic languages that reference the history of the medium, from abstraction to documentary and digital surveillance imagery. In doing so, the artist considers how various histories of representation shape how we see and form our view of the world.
Working with photography, sculpture and site-specific installation, Zoe Leonard (b. 1961, Liberty, USA) is one of today’s most influential and highly regarded artists. Migration and displacement, gender and sexuality, mourning and loss, cultural history and tensions between the natural world and human-built environments are recurring themes across her four-decade long practice.
The exhibition is curated by Suzanne Cotter, Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia and MCA Australia Curator Megan Robson. Designer Marcos Corrales Lantero, a long-time collaborator of the artist, was commissioned to create the exhibition design.
Suzanne Cotter, who worked closely with the artist in the development and presentation of the exhibition and publication said, “Zoe Leonard’s work is widely admired by artists and a broader public around the world for its ambition, its visual and conceptual clarity and its humanity. Al río / To the River is one of the emblematic art works of our time, drawing our attention to the impossibility of binary thinking in a world defined by complexity and in need of empathy. Following on from lauded presentations in Paris and Luxembourg, the MCA Australia is delighted to be presenting this important new work by Zoe Leonard to audiences in Australia.
Publication
The exhibition Al río / To the River is accompanied by a two-volume publication designed by Joseph Logan. Presented in their own slipcase, the first volume features Zoe Leonard’s photographs, while the second, edited by Tim Johnson, with a preface by Museum of Contemporary Art Australia Director Suzanne Cotter and Fabrice Hergott, Director of the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, brings together written contributions from 25 international artists, journalists, poets and scholars.
Available at the MCA Store and online store.mca.com.au (Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean / Hatje Cantz, Berlin, 2021).
Public program
The exhibition is accompanied by a program of talks, events and screenings that engage in wider conversations around rivers, colonialism, borders, language, migration, photography and storytelling.
Artist in conversation: Zoe Leonard and Suzanne Cotter
Zoe Leonard discusses her work Al río / To the River with MCA Director, Suzanne Cotter.
MCA Lecture Theatre
Ticketed Saturday
12 August 2023, 2-3pm
Film screenings and discussion: Karrabing Film Collective
Presenting members of the Karrabing Film Collective in discussion, alongside screenings of a selection of their short films. The Karrabing Film Collective is a grassroots, Indigenous-based media group for whom filmmaking provides a means of self-organisation and social analysis. Their medium is a form of survivance – a refusal to relinquish their Country and a means of investigating contemporary social conditions of inequality.
MCA Lecture Theatre
Ticketed
Friday 8 September, 6-8pm
Contemporary photography: process, practice and place
A conversation with Peta Clancy, Simryn Gill, Brett Neilson and Amanda Williams. This panel will consider how contemporary artists engage with photography’s troubled relationship to land, place and Country, and how they use photographic technologies and practices to envision different relationships between people and places.
MCA Lecture Theatre
Ticketed
Friday 22 September, 6-7.30pm
Co-presented by MCA Australia and the Power Institute
Discussion and performance: Poetry and translation
An evening of conversations with Tim Johnson, poet and editor; Ethan Bell, Wallabalooa poet and producer; Nicole Smede, multidisciplinary artist and cultural producer of Worimi and European descent; and special guests; alongside spoken word performances by a diverse program of poets and writers.
MCA Lecture Theatre
Ticketed
Friday 13 October, 6-8pm
