Library – Articles
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melbourne then, melbourne now, and melbourne’s future
Rebecca Coates, Broadsheet, No. 43.2, Adelaide, pp. 49-52, June 2014
Thus endeth the first lesson. As Melbourne Now drew to a close, we the public were able to reflect on what had been the largest, most ambitious, and most extensive exhibition of contemporary art that the National Gallery of Victoria has ever presented. Running for four months over summer, from November 2013 to March 2014, while not technically a biennale, it had biennale ambitions in its breadth, scale and reach. -
Polixeni Papapetrou – A Performative Paradox
Dan Rule, Raven, Published 12 July 2013
To most, the name Polixeni Papapetrou conjures theatrical negotiations of costume, symbolism, childhood and various strains of art history. Hybridised, masked and otherwise mutated characters – often half-animal, half-human – have come to imbue the celebrated Melbourne photo-artist’s recent practice with an intoxicating sense of wonder and intrigue. -
Polixeni Papapetrou
Marcus Costello, Artichoke Magazine, Sydney, Issue No. 35, 2011, pp. 96-97
From playful wonderlands to otherworldly filmic scenarios, Australian artist Polexeni Papapetrou’s photographs are filled with symbology, dreamscapes and the imaginary. -
Image and Imagination: Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal
Anna Carlevaris, Magazine CIEL VARIABLE, Montreal, Issue 70, Winter 2006, pp. 35-36
The subject of sexual violence underscores Deacon’s work and that of fellow Australian Tracey Moffatt in her exquisitely produced reveries of seduction. It is also in After Alice, a two-person show about children and predatory fantasy that includes the Australian Polixeni Papapetrou. The subject of sexual relations appears again most apparently in Karen Brett’s tightly framed, large-scale photographs of older couples’ blushing bodies, and even in Michael Snow’s colossal curtain-piece Powers of Two. -
The Line Between Us: The Maternal Relation in Contemporary Photography
Melissa Miles, Eyeline Contemporary Visual Arts, Brisbane, No. 56, Summer 2004/05, pp. 50-51
At a time when the mainstream media is constantly reminding us of the declining national birth rate and the increasingly cynical approach to motherhood that supposedly characterises 'women today', it is refreshing to see a more multifaceted and sophisticated account of the psychological and physical complexities that characterise the maternal relation. In a recent exhibition at the Monash University Museum of Art, 'The Line Between Us: The Maternal Relation in Contemporary Photography', such clichés and essentialist stereotypes about motherhood are eloquently refuted. Curated by Kyla McFarlane, this beautiful and often unsettling collection of photographs by Donna Bailey, Pat Brassington, Anne Ferran, Anne Noble and Polixeni Papapetrou speaks to the tense, intimate, emotional and highly negotiated relationships between mothers and their children. -
Photography’s phantasmagorias
Marielle Juchau, Real Time, Sydney, June–July 03, No. 55, p. 14
Also haunting and otherworldly but far less ethereally so, is Polixeni Papapetrou’s bold series Phantomwise at Stills Gallery. On first glance these one metre square, unframed prints, tacked poster-style on the walls, seem to depict lifeless dolls, in quaintly cliched scenarios. These character ‘types’: The Last Pharoah, Gatsby Girl, Pilgrim Quilting, Turkish Pasha, Gypsy Queen were inspired by a set of Victorian masks that Papapetrou purchased before the birth of her daughter, Olympia.