Auditions for an unwritten opera

July 14 – October 8, 2023

“… I began to title each of my works with a date from the future that would fall during my possible lifetime. I would undertake to repeat each work in some way on its particular date. Every work would reappear at some later point during my life’s work. My work would not evolve, or at least the gradient of its evolution would be flat. It is a system where I can consciously fool myself that all my works are mature works. And working within this system I would, in fact, objectively use my own life’s work as its own subject matter.”

*Mutlu Çerkez

Borrowing its title from a key piece by British-born Australian-Turkish Cypriot Mutlu Çerkez (1964-2005), this exhibition is inspired by the uniqueness of Çerkez’ approach to titling. Often giving his works not a standard title but one based on a future date on which they would be remade, he proposed for them a new form of life, veering conceptually from their narration, production, or materiality.

Through conversations with Charlotte Day, Marco Fusinato and other colleagues of Çerkez, with generous support from Monash University Museum of Art and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne (Australia), his oeuvre has been guiding the exhibition process, appearing alongside works from a new wave of queer, critical, and radical practices that pose questions about the acts of rehearsal, living documents, and artist life as a biography of transition.

With

Mutlu Çerkez, Juliet Carpenter, Jesse Darling, Pedro Gómez-Egaña, Léuli Eshrāghi, Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt, Hanne Lippard, Serkan Özkaya, Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt and others.

Curated by Misal Adnan Yıldız