Specialist Tour: Justine Varga

Australian artist Justine Varga discusses selected works in the show in relation to her own practice, focusing on the idea of the final print—the photograph seen by a viewer—as the result of an interactive relationship between the architectures of photography.

Varga creates photographic works from an intimate exchange between a strip of film and the world that comes to be inscribed on it. Employing analogue techniques, sometimes using a camera and sometimes not, her exposures capture instantaneous moments or distill lengthy durational periods. Her working process complicates both the act of looking and the experience of time. The photographs that result are therefore documents of transformation and remembering, being simultaneously situational and autobiographical.

Justine Varga graduated with Honours from the National Art School in 2007. In 2016, her work featured in Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph, curated by Geoffrey Batchen, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Zealand, and in New Matter: Recent Forms of Photography at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Varga was also nominated for the 2016 Shpilman International Prize for Excellence in Photography. In 2015, her work featured in Australian Art: Now, National Gallery of Australia and was also showcased at Paris Photo. Varga was awarded the Josephine Ulrick & Win Shubert Foundation for the Arts Photography Award, in 2013 and 2016. In 2014, she was awarded the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia Primavera Veolia Acquisitive Prize. In 2012, her work was selected for Primavera: Young Australian Artists, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. Portfolios of her work have featured in Photofile and Art Monthly Australasia, and she has had an essay published in Loose Associations, issued by The Photographers’ Gallery in London. In 2017, she will mount solo exhibitions at the Australian Centre for Photography and Sydney Contemporary. Her work will also feature in a survey of Australian photography at the Heide Museum of Modern Art in Melbourne. She is currently undertaking the Acme Associate Residencies Programme in London. Her work has been acquired for the collections of the National Gallery Australia, Art Gallery of New South Wales, and Art Gallery of South Australia, among others.

FREE, booking recommended.