Dream Factory

UPDATE 21 MAY:

Please note that this event has changed venue to the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, in the Veolia Lecture Theatre.

This event is currently booked out, but limited seats will be available on the door.

Featuring 19th Biennale artists: Henry Coombes, Daniel McKewen and Sonia Leber and David Chesworth

Dream Factory is a half-day program consisting of a keynote address by Professor Russell Ferguson, followed by a panel discussion of 19th Biennale artists.

Sigmund Freud once stated that dreams dramatise ideas; in this dramatisation process, thoughts are turned into a sensorial situation. Freud’s writings mark a turning point for philosophers, artists and sociologists alike, who have become increasingly aware of the relationship between dreams and film. From the spectatorial condition to the postmodern narrative, the two make a likely pair. Not surprisingly, these conditions also appear in art, whose purpose – arguably – is also to articulate, suggest or dramatise ideas, thoughts and feelings.

As part of the 19th Biennale of Sydney, Dream Factory looks at the influence of film on the practice of contemporary artists with respect to the formal, perceptive and psychological qualities of this medium.

Keynote address: ‘A Beginning, a Middle, and an End’

Presented by Russell Ferguson, Professor of Art at UCLA, A Beginning, a Middle, and an End will deal with the question of narrative in art and mainstream film and the relationship between them.

Currently Professor of Art at the University of California Los Angeles, Professor Russell Ferguson is a curator, academic, writer and editor. From 2001, he was Deputy Director for Exhibitions and Programs, and Chief Curator, at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, where he remains an adjunct curator. From 1991 to 2001, he was at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, first as Editor, then as Associate Curator. He has curated solo shows for 19th Biennale artists Douglas Gordon and Mathias Poledna, and extensively covered their work in lectures, catalogue essays, periodicals and the book, Douglas Gordon, which was published by Cambridge: MIT Press in 2001.

Ferguson is also the editor of two collections of critical writing: Discourses: Conversations in
Postmodern Art and Culture, and Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, both
published by the MIT Press. He has written about the work of many contemporary artists, including
Thomas Eggerer, Olafur Eliasson, Tony Feher, Rodney Graham, Cristina Iglesias, Damian Ortega, Laura Owens and Gillian Wearing.

This program was made possible with generous assistance from the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, with assistance from the U.S. Consulate General, Sydney