Ritual Eternal: quick links
Melbourne’s Project8 Gallery is unique in that it’s curated by two Associate Professors of the Victorian College of the Arts, a duo who go under the pseudonym Cūrā8. Their exhibitions have thematic roots in academia, as if each show is a thesis topic, in which the artists ‘discuss’ through their art.
The current exhibition, Ritual Eternal, discusses the zone between the physical world and spiritual/religious realms, and ways that different cultures have attempted to link them, or at least to experience and express the space between them. This is sometimes called the ‘liminal space’, a transitional place between two worlds or realities, a place where rituals often happen and to quote the exhibition guide, where people ‘engage with ways of knowing, perceiving and experiencing the world that sit outside’ language.
Ritual Eternal: diverse mediums
The guide states that the show draws from ‘sacred, secular, ancestral and subcultural’ traditions, and it does so using admirably diverse mediums, including photography, scrolls, gourds, bull kelp, limestone, video projection and on opening night, a performance within Veronika Hauer and Katie Lee’s instillation piece Unfathomable Alphabets.
This artwork consists of two squares of blue material on the floor, hidden from each other by a dividing sheet from the ceiling. The performers interact with artworks scattered over the floor, such as bones and a deck of cards. The symbolism is fairly straightforward – two awarenesses in two universes trying to make sense of where and what they are and occasionall, trying to communicate with each other by sliding or offering objects to the other side. To this reviewer, this artwork exactly embodies a ‘liminal space’.
Fu Xiaodong’s Cosmic Trees I – VIII has a large scale yet subtle subject matter. Alica King’s We Cannot See the Universe captures static explosions of iron, the only artwork this writer has ever seen which lists ‘gravity; as one of its materials.
Karina Utomo and Cūrā8 give a video projection of a close up of Utomo’s mouth, which fills the room with primal, tribal hisses and controlled screeches. The video is short, simple, but, like seemingly everything Utomo does, difficult to ignore (her vocal art in Project8 back in 2022 was featured in Dark Mofo this year as Mortal Voice).
From afar, Tristan Liao’s intensely detailed Heart of the Mother looks like it’s full of recognisable human figures, like a Hieronymus Bosch crowd squashed into a small space and turned monochrome, but on closer inspection, his subjects are biological. If you can find something human in there, it might just be a coincidence.
Ritual Eternal: disparate artists discussing single topic
Noriko Nakamura’s four pieces are extremely different yet thematically united, and Treahna Hamm’s Yorta Yorta Bush Medicine First Aid Kit is a marvellous marriage of knowledge and aesthetics.
But, importantly, does the exhibition achieve its lofty academic goals? Getting a group of disparate artists to discuss a single topic is always a tightrope act. Sometimes a show can collapse under its own theoretical weight, while other times, like SOL gallery’s 2023 group show Bare, the only way the artists could go wrong would be to keep their clothes on.
This is a tightrope which Project8 always walks on, and the success of Ritual Eternal is, naturally, subjective. Having said that, if the artists were asked to visually describe a liminal space, or different planes of reality, or, to again quote the guide, how ‘knowledge is passed on through gesture, sound, materiality and embodied practice rather than through written word’, then this show is a spectacular, culturally eclectic visual essay which does indeed discuss these themes with passionate artistic fluency. In fact, it probably becomes more conceptually cohesive the more you look at it.
Read: Janet Dawson: Far Away, So Close review: a well-earned retrospective
However, if you don’t care about the theory and just want to enjoy some high quality art, the show delivers there too.
Ritual Eternal Group show is now on display at the Project8 Gallery until 13 September 2025.
