Across 2025 Gertrude Contemporary hosted Past is Prologue: Four Decades of Gertrude, a year long series of four externally curated exhibitions that each chronicled a decade of the organisation's history.

The following roundtable hosted by previous Gertrude director Samantha Comte with Helen Hughes, Spiros Panigirakis and Masato Takasaka explores the second exhibition in the series, 1964, 1969, 1977, 1995, 2000, 2005, 2025, curated by Hughes and Panigirakis that looked to the decade 1995-2005.

Samantha Comte (SC): Your exhibition 1964, 1969, 1977, 1995, 2000, 2005, 2025 is part of a year of programming at Gertrude Contemporary titled Past is Prologue: Four Decades of Gertrude. Your exhibition relates to the period 1995 to 2005. To start, I’m interested to hear your reflections on the role of anniversary exhibitions and why it's important to look back on a period in an organisation’s history?

Helen Hughes (HH): One of the first things to say is that Gertude's exhibition series was conceived by the organisation to reflect on their own history, and then they invited different curators to come in and do their take on a different decade. We didn’t come to the project with a view to do historical work for them but were responding to the brief.

One of the things that Spiros and I discovered after working through the archives of the ten-year period (1995 to 2005) was the number of retrospective exhibitions Gertrude had made about its own history, even within that short amount of time. There was a comic impulse to do a retrospective show of retrospective shows, which would be a very Masato move. The excess of self-historicizing can be myopic, and so I like the way that across the four exhibitions, people have tried to escape the parameters of Gertrude itself.

Spiros Panigirakis (SP): My response is broader and not specific to our own experience. By rethinking art history, we are redrawing it and making a comment about the gaps, asking what should we reaffirm and what should we reconsider, that might have been forgotten? I think that's a particular impulse that also makes a comment about our current moment, in that it contrasts what was happening then and what's happening now.

SC: Time is so critical to what you're exploring. The idea of looping and non-linear time has been central to how you approached the notion of an anniversary show.

HH: Well, one approach would have been to look at the period and draw out all the artists or people who've gone on to become very important, an approach that was present in the first exhibition in the series (A Fictional Retrospective: Gertrude’s First Decade 1985-1995). But we worked with a range of artists who had different career trajectories and artists who were comparatively overlooked. With any kind of invitation to create you have to develop a model or a logic. The logic of retrospection was just offered to us and that's why we looked at artists who were already doing that in their work to scaffold our curatorial framework.

SC: Masato, How do you feel about the notion of an anniversary show?

Masato Takasaka (MT): In my dual roles as artist and educator in a tertiary institution I think there's something about a reflection of the past that introduces particular artworks and artists to a new generation. Helen and Spiros’s iteration of the exhibition was interesting because this generation of artists that came through Gertrude are also current colleagues, peers and former alumni. Not only that, but the wider public, and particularly students, get to see a history and genealogy of artists, and the type of work that came out of a period.

Reflecting on the fact that I was a studio artist in the in the early 2000s and part of the exhibition program at that time, as well as the decade after, I feel it was an interesting kind of meta-reflection, that looked back at the institution’s curatorial capacity. From within my own work, the idea of an artist’s practice as always-already-made is something I've been thinking through for a while now. It was certainly interesting to work in a capacity that takes the way I work as a curatorial prompt.

SC: Yes, looping back to your specific role in the curatorial logic. The exhibition had a complex, layered curatorial methodology. At the core were three artists, Mutlu Çerkez, Damiano Bertoli and Masato Takasaka. How are these artists practices integral to the curatorial framework?

SP: As a starting point the artists methodology led the curatorial framework, so it was artist-led in a way. This informed how we thought about temporality. What links these artists is their experiment with time. Mutlu's work has dual coding, one in the present, one in the future; Damiano’s was a split or overlay; and Masato is a frenzy of time that looks at simultaneity. These temporal methods informed how we thought about time.

HH: And space as well. The three artists were not just connecting two moments in time but frequently two different moments in space. It's worth acknowledging that the three different models embedded in those practises are all utterly unique, we're not trying to flatten them out and say they're all doing the same thing. Rather that there was this moment when the three artists we identified were playing with time as a medium in different ways.

Another way of answering your question, is how can you put artists in the show without simply putting their work in the show? We worked with each of the three artists in quite different ways. Masato was literally in the show with his own room; it was the brain of the exhibition. Mutlu by contrast was always a bit of an outsider to Gertrude who only participated in tangential and distanced ways. We did toy around with the idea of including work by him, but ultimately, he's present as a reference in the curatorial logic. Similarly, with Damiano. We worked a lot with his brother Adrian and wondered whether we should put in a sketch of the iceberg (Continuous Moment, 2003) or is it more resonant for it to be absent and think about it as absent? Especially given the work isn’t in any collection and doesn’t exist.

By centring the curatorial method on those three artists, it's three extra artists who are in the shows not as makers, but as thinkers who offer us a logic that is a really tangible thing to think with beyond just an artwork that we can chuck in a show.

SC: That leads us to the eight artists who were selected for the exhibition. With this type of show, it is very hard to select a group of artists from the many who were involved in the program, so I’m interested in why you selected these artists, and then also how you worked with them to realise artworks for the exhibition?

SP:  We were cognisant that you can't have a comprehensive overview, especially in the contained space of Gertrude Preston. So, our starting point was that it wasn't going to be comprehensive. In a way, and you can disagree Helen, over the last couple of projects that we've done, our curatorial process has been a relay of ideas and decisions. We developed this project over time as well.

For this show we started with two projects, Clinton Naina’s Heritage Colours (2000/2025) and Raquel Ormella’s Living in Other People’s Houses (2002). The two projects spoke to Gertrude's move from Fitzroy to Preston, which was underpinned by gentrification, resonant in both of their projects. From there, we asked ourselves, what does the show require next? It was a relay, thinking about the next artist that might be included. If there was a thematic generalisation it begun with gentrification then led to an underpinning of Indigenous Country and also a feminist critique, which is present in many of the works.

HH: One of the things that we did was work consciously with installation as a medium, which felt very different to a lot of the wall-based work that was in the first show, and that index the moment we were given to work with as well.

But how did we work with the artists? With each artist it was a very different relationship and method. So, for example, Raquel discovered every single item in her studio was flat packed and neatly wrapped. It was shipped to us, we put it in place and she came and tidied it up. Whereas for Clinton we had to build the fence and source this clean fill, we had to reprint the colours, he has got the plastics collection that he used. The whole thing was constructed from scratch. It had to be reconceptualised because there was no fence in the original and we needed something to hold the soil in the space. So, it was really one by one, and ranged from simply re-presenting something already existing to completely remanufacturing, and at times completely reconceptualising projects.

SC: A number of the artworks in the exhibition were originally site-specific installations or ephemeral artworks. What are the challenges of re-staging, re-presenting site-specific works outside of their original contexts? for example Clinton Naina's Heritage Colours, which was made in the context of Fitzroy.

HH: Clinton’s work is one of several dislocations in the exhibition. They had to reconceptualise the work when we remade it. The whole logic of rebuilding the floor plan and the elevations from the original Gertrude was to signal that displacement, as opposed to pretend that there isn't some rupture that has occurred. And I think with Clinton, two things; one the original work is about displacement and so the fact that Gertrude was a gentrifying force on Gertrude St and then got itself pushed out to Preston is a theme that's already latent in Clinton’s work through colonial history as well. Secondly, Clinton projected these really beautiful photographs of Fitzroy from about 1990. This dossier of photographs projected onto the fence showed that distance from the geographic site then to the one we are in now. Clinton particularly wanted the projector not keystoned so that the images would be really warped. And again, that's thematising the distance and mismatch of the space.

SP: I loved how Clinton decided not to use the exhibition structure and he made that explicit. It's like 'I don't need the new built walls. I will build my own fence and the fence is the new part of the work’. I thought it was a fantastic part of the politics of Clinton's work.

SC: What I really enjoyed about the exhibition was that it demonstrated how Gertrude is both a site of exhibition and production. At its heart, it's about artists. 

Another work re-staged in the exhibtion was by Linda's (Erceg)—this work speaks to a very particular time in the early 2000’s. 

SP: Linda's work (Vox Virtua, 2004) resonates very strongly for me. Between 1995 and 2005 social collaborative practices were so paramount. But looking back at Gertrude's history, Linda’s work does stand out. I think we felt it important to include even though her rsvp.com dating work couldn't be replicated. Now most people are dating online but back then, it was a real outlier. It speaks to our moment, the way we meet our partner and/or partners in any sense of the word.

Similarly, I think Lane’s (Cormick) inclusion also speaks to the space of making and production in the studios at Gertrude. We included the set for one of his video works. It was interesting because Lane didn't see it as his practise in a way, because the performance video is the work. What we exhibited is a historical artefact of the practice.

HH: We also liked it because Gertrude is not just the site of production and presentation, but also a deeply social site. It's a stage set with a record player and bottles of alcohol and glasses and cigarettes, and so Lane's work has the aura of hanging out, which is a big part of Gertrude.

SC: Can you also speak about Peta Clancy's work in the exhibition?

HH: Peta’s was really fascinating. As we were saying, different artists had different attitudes towards their previous work. Peta wasn’t sure if she liked that work (Dust 5/9/2016-24/2/2025, 2025) anymore and didn't want to really show the original, as she no longer identified with that way of making. Her practice now addresses a different set of themes. We wanted to put the old work on the back wall with the new on the other, with both being two sides of the same structure. Then we felt, and she saw it too, that even though the content has changed quite a lot, some structural concerns have carried over. The earlier work is an aggregation of dust over many years, it's an effort to register the accumulation of passing time in a single photo. Peta does something related in her ripped Country works where she registers and folds two moments of time into the one picture plane. So, while she felt quite different about that earlier work there were ways to read the two together.

SC: I think Peta’s works looped beautifully back into the broader idea around time and the three artists that are working around those concepts. Even though she was initially resistant, and I can imagine a number of artists were, it seems like a unique opportunity to rethink parts of a practice. The other artist is Katherine (Huang) who was also trying to recall an earlier work.

SP: Katherine had a number of exhibitions at Gertrude to go through. The project that we responded to was a group exhibition with Damiano in the show (Same as it Ever Was, 1999). Damiano had the column work again, but this was his first column work and Katherine's work was a massive aggregate of bits and pieces with lots of (almost) folders, boxes, documents collated together, interspersed with photographs, objects and projections. Because her work is in many pieces, part of the logic is the meticulous archiving of all the parts.

She included some parts from the original work so it was like one work leading into another. The old work is in one part of the installation, and as you move around the newly built space, it explodes into a new iteration and response.

HH: I want to add, that Damiano wrote on Katherine’s past work a bit, which was very beautiful, but Katherine and Damiano also had a spatial proximity in that first show. When Kath was installing, she brought in this tiny little kaleidoscope or looking glass. And she was going to put it in the installation amongst all the other little objects. She said, ‘this is actually something Damiano gave me.’ At the last minute she didn't include it because she didn't want it to get nicked.

SC: We've touched on this a little, but I’m interested in place and memory as a key concern within this exhibition. In particular, the building of 200 Gertrude St and its location. Fitzroy in the 1990s and early 2000s was unique. So, I was interested in your decision to construct the scale replica of the ground floor of the original Gertrude. Do you have a sense of how people experienced that as they came in? I was fortunate enough for you to walk me through it. Because I spent so much time in the original building I got it, and I loved it. Why did you decide to put that framework into the new Gertrude and how do you think it played out within the exhibition?

SP: I think we both decided on this exhibition design. It continued a type of thinking that played out in our 3CR show (If People Powered Radio: 40 Years of 3CR, 2016). For that I rebuilt the 3CR meeting room as part of the curatorial logic or exhibition design, which was a history of 3CR radio station. I feel like you encouraged this…

HH: We had a lot of discussions about what the structure would be because it wasn't always going to be this. At first we were just going to do the column and then you (Spiros) said we should double it. And then Spiros came up with this idea that was very Masato inspired in a way. We work together and our offices are next door to each other. Given Masato, Damiano and Mutlu all draw on aspects of their own history and subjectivity as a rigid conceptual device, Spiros was like ‘we could rebuild our offices’. But then we thought that might become a joke that very few people would get.

MT: Like a curatorial careless whisper.

SP: If you think about these three practices, the self is very present but in a way that’s obliquely referenced. For Damiano it's the year of his birth, with Mutlu’s work, his heritage and subjectivity does come through, he's a huge Led Zeppelin fan, for instance. But we thought that using our own offices as the exhibition design would become too illegible.

MT: Maybe the exhibition design has something to do with Sam’s earlier question about the curatorial premise, temporality and how these are linked in a bleak or literal way. I remember reading an article in Like Magazine by Robin McKenzie where Mutlu talks about time as a piece of string that sometimes you can just step over. So this idea that a line as a piece of string that represents time that just loops over itself was a really interesting way that artists conceptualised time. I recall Damiano's ideas about using the medium of collage as a form of time travel. In his PhD he also wrote about the studio as a time machine. So I think you know, this idea of temporalities and how Mutlu and Damiano foregrounded their own subjectivity through either references to autobiography, popular culture or art history created a space that I also inhabit where times overlap and intersect.

SC: Yes, this layering, also feels a part of the curatorial premise. There are layers upon layers upon layers, and then you've got the layer of the old Gertrude into the new Gertrude, which changes the way you navigate space.

HH: The most exciting moments in the build were when really weird intersections of the old and new converge. There's one part of the wall that was on such a tight angle. We were wondering, ‘how's the carpenter going to even manufacture that angle?’ But in terms of that model that Masato was sketching, the artists and the build are not just describing two moments in time but two spatial things being brought together to touch. In a way it's a motif of doubling that is present in some of Damiano’s two channel video works, whether of the Manson family or Miami Vice, where two versions of the same thing play out side-by-side. This was a reference for us.

Secondly, I worked at Gertrude for a period of time in the old building, so I had knowledge of the space but all the university group tours I was doing with students who have absolutely no relationship to the old site wouldn't have even picked up that it was a footprint at all. For them it just became a weird maze to navigate.

SC: Obviously we come with the whole understanding of what it is and understand that and miss the old space as well. But for someone else it's a very different experience.

SP: It becomes a dislocating abstraction in its own right. In a sense this show was thinking about installation, and the build demarcated the gallery in a way that gave people their own little space-within-the-space without actually making cubicles, but it sort of did make cubicles where you can see through one work to another.

SC: Masato, your part of the exhibition has been described by the curators as the brain of the show and your 2012 solo exhibition at Gertrude inspired the title of this exhibition. Can you tell us about the work you made for this exhibition?

MT: What an incredible description, inhabiting the cortical real-estate of the show…

It's interesting, Spiros brought up Clinton’s work before and how it’s outside the structure. I was thinking about the overlay of the old Gertrude on the new Gertrude as a curatorial conceit. For people like Sam who worked at the old space and me, who was a part of the previous space for many years, there was this idea of walking through and saying ‘this is where the office was, this is Gallery Two and this is the column’ and all those things. But I think there is also this idea that people wouldn't necessarily know what was going on even if they were in the know, but you know.

Going back to Clinton’s work being installed in the window space and exempt from the “exhibition”, I thought my work operated in a similar way.  A friend and colleague said to me, ‘you know, it's kind of like curatorial indemnity being part of the show but also not being part of the show’. The work was not free from this completely, but I guess it was literally outside of the curatorial framework. I was also aware that Damiano and Mutlu were not part of the show as participating artists in terms of their work being included. I'm the only living artist out of the three of us and was very cognisant of that. In some ways I wanted to show the work in what is usually the education space, which Sue (Cramer) and Emma (Nixon) used as the archive room for their curated exhibition of the prior decade. I guess because my work is also an archive of the self, but also, thinking about a kind of a nostalgia within self-historicisation, it always looks back while always looking forward or within the present at the same time. Those multiple time frames are the only way I can think through the work, about how it operates as a conceptual device for myself to keep making.

I was also drawing on Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas as a kind of memory map. I thought about the limitation of the curatorial time frame, 1995 to 2005. Then I was thinking about the work that I had made at art school because I had already included that in past projects and then I was thinking about the installation I made that preceded my studio artist residency at Gertrude, which was just out of art school. So, I wanted to remake that work and then bring back elements of the work that I made when I was invited by Alexi Glass (Kantor) to present a solo exhibition in 2012, which references the time frame afterwards.

In a way this idea of curatorial indemnity, which is something Lou Hubbard said to me, was an interesting way to think about the curatorial premise of the show. Rather than rely on the material aspect of the artists’ practices, as Helen was saying at the beginning, it more so acted (particularly in terms of Mutlu and Damiano's work, which aren’t materially present) as the conceptual premise. Those practices are in relation to mine, in a very meta way I was able to incorporate a tribute or homage to the other two artists in the exhibition. Including a curatorial Easter egg, a Marshall amplifier that I purchased in 2005 was a nod to Mutlu and the time I was at architecture school living the dream playing in rock bands.

I was introduced to Mutlu's brother at the opening by Helen and he was saying ‘I don't know the art world or many people in the art world, but I know he was a very respected artist’. And then he noted the Mutlu reference in terms of the amplifier, which I put in for people who know the reference to Mutlu’s work, a stack of Marshall amplifiers. He commented that ‘he didn't understand his work’ and I said, ‘well, if you understand that reference, you understand his work already’. He acknowledged this and we both laughed. I think that was a particular reference in my install that without art world knowledge still created a common ground.

SC: I think that speaks to the connections that surround Gertrude, and what was mentioned about Lane’s work too. Artists lives were being lived in those studios beyond a straight arts practice.

The exhibition asks artists and audiences to reengage with artwork and an artistic context from twenty plus years ago. In reflection now, how does the passage of time affect both the artist relationship to their own work and the audiences interpretation of it?

SP: We came to Eliza Hutchinson, one of the artists in the exhibition, who was also coincidentally rethinking her very early work from ‘95 that we were interested in. She wanted to rethink it and reassert the politics of it. She made the initial work just a year after honours at the Sydney College of the Arts, which was 30 years ago. Returning to it Eliza wanted to acknowledge the time and also think about its feminist politics and theory that underpin the initial work. It's a complex piece which thinks about a still life in relation to a maid and the voyeurism of a maid in a hotel. The way she responds to these aspects is with a very academic text that she wrote as part of her honours thesis. The remake includes some documentation of the initial work but AI reads the text. It encompasses discourse and literature about violence against women that she feels needs to be reasserted with new images of the production of a sex doll inserted into the video. In the ‘95 version, the violence is cool and detached but I think in the contemporary re-evaluation that violence is more present.

SC: It is.

SP: For her it was a very rewarding studio process, and it created a completely new work, really.

HH: One of the pieces of feedback that I really liked was from a colleague of ours, Lauren Burrow. On the opening night we talked about how Damiano’s most significant work was the iceberg that he made. That was certainly when Adrian, his brother, realised he's a real artist.

Lauren and I spoke about how Damiano’s incredibly significant work for himself and the decade ended up in the tip because it's so big and no collection at the time had the foresight to invest in a complex installation work. We were reflecting on the loss of that artwork, and I liked how Lauren thought about the aesthetic of the tip or the dumpster. The big difference between Emma and Sue’s show, which was retrieving existing work out of collections and putting them on the wall, was that our show was saying you can't simply retrieve things from the past, you can only reconstruct them, whether completely or not at all. So there was a different sensibility about memory between the shows.

This is a bit of a segue, but I really appreciated Masato’s response, talking about the space you were in as neither inside nor outside the show. It made me think that your show within the show is parallel to the exhibition, as opposed to in or out. It was like if Mutlu has the time, you've stepped over it and you're on some other plane. You know, your show, or your section, was like the model or the logic for us, which can't exist in the same plane as the thing that it's describing if that makes sense? So I thought that description was good.

MT: Lisa, in parenthesis, Radford, wouldn't mind me saying there are certain cues that she also shares and has affinities with that came out in the curatorial premise of her exhibition (Of Stadiums and Construction Sites (Ne change rien pour que tout soit different, 2025). Lisa included a mass photographic assemblage of images, a geometry of the past and present en masse.

Going back to Damiano's iceberg work, I think the bootleg catalogue poster that Warren Taylor designed was also a pivotal part of the exhibition. Even if it wasn't an official “Gertrude Publication” or exhibition paraphernalia. I think it was interesting that Warren was also able to partly channel Mutlu’s practise in terms of the bootleg and Led Zeppelin cover, which he appropriates, and also superimposes Damiano's lost iceberg as a kind of collage. I thought that was a really poetic way that the exhibition exists…

HH: It's a bootleg of the catalogue in a way. One of the most annoying/best things was that we printed it, it literally arrived an hour before the opening and we got it into the space and were like phew. Then Mark Feary emailed us and was like ‘do you want to explain why one of the dates is wrong on the cover of the poster?’. The error was kind of perfect, because the bootleg is always a…

SC: And that's what makes it special.

We have touched on a number of artworks in the exhibition but one that we didn't mention are the collages that you made...

MT: Yes that's right, they are a nod to Damiano's practice. I had been making these collage or montages whenever I feel kind of depressed or a bit deflated after having a show. When feeling like that I tend to Google myself to see what comes up. Then I started going through the image search of previous artworks that have been documented from my oeuvre. I had this idea of placing one image installation over another one and then feeding it through the home printer. It was kind of a discount shop David Noonan. I was interested in superimposing one time over another in a representational sense, referencing that kind of early twentieth century constructivist montage. It began as a curatorial signifier. This became a part of the installation and superimposed works from 2005 with works from earlier on and so on.

HH: It's an example of how, you know, Masato has a related but different method of thinking about moments in time to Mutlu and Damiano and in the curatorial gesture. We are also superimposing two gallery spaces on top of another, it's not the same and we're not trying to rip you off, but it's how we formed our logic...

MT: I made it to the canon, the curatorial canon, if only I could monetise it.