Working across borders: HSDC colab

Article / CriticalThinking Exhibiting Artists PeterDeckers Handshake DialogueCollective TempContemp RadiantPavilion

Published: 27.10.2021

Author:: Handshake

Edited by:: Klimt02

Edited at:: Barcelona

Edited on:: 2021

HSDC colab in Melbourne (photo: Aphra Cheesman).

Object makers from Handshake (New Zealand), Dialogue Collective (United Kingdom) and TempContemp (Australia) collaborated to exhibit on the streets of Melbourne (AU) with imagery of their jewellery work provoked by the ideas of containment and restricted freedom.While we continue in our attempts to nail jelly to the wall, it is obvious that COVID has disrupted traditional ways of presenting jewellery. The subsequent uncertainty presents us with the challenge and opportunity to explore the notion of what a jewellery ‘exhibition’ is and what happens when jewellery is ‘uncontained’.

Containment/Uncontained (@hsdc.colab) is the third collaboration between Handshake (Aotearoa NZ) and Dialogue Collective (UK). For Radiant Pavilion 2021 we’re teaming with TempContemp (AU) to present jewellery provoked by ideas of containment and freedom. The project’s trajectory to date embodies the challenges of working across borders and within communities during a global pandemic.

At the end of 2020 New Zealand and Australia, unlike the UK and most of the rest of the world, were living relatively normal lives, unconstrained by masks, lockdowns and constant testing. We were optimistic that Radiant Pavilion would be its usual feast of exhibitions, installations and convivial happenings. For our exhibition we envisaged taking to the streets of Melbourne using TempContemp’s collection of gold-coloured crates as a morphing jewellery transportation and display platform which we’d relocate and reconfigure to performative effect.

However, at the time of writing, New Zealand is in lockdown, the Delta variant is raging in Australia and the UK has passed its ‘freedom day’ and is working out what that means. None of us know how contained or open our lives will be when Radiant Pavilion is scheduled to open in September 2021, and indeed, whether the event will be able to happen at all.

Currently – and we all know how quickly things can change so this plan is necessarily written on sand - our exhibition is formed of a series of A0 posters which will be pasted around the streets of Melbourne while Radiant Pavilion is on. We are also producing this zine, which will be published online and, hopefully in the future, in a physical format.
We are also in negotiation to have a physical exhibition in Wellington, New Zealand at the beginning of 2022, although, given the shapeshifting flux of the times we live in, this plan too is ever-changing.

While we continue in our attempts to nail jelly to the wall, it is obvious that COVID has disrupted traditional ways of presenting jewellery. The resultant uncertainty is presenting us with the challenge and opportunity to explore the notion of what a jewellery ‘exhibition’ is and what happens when jewellery is ‘uncontained’.

Related links with more information:

- CONTAINMENT – UNCONTAINED at Radiant Pavilion, Melbourne
- ZINE
- HSDC COLLAB images and video
- Artworks on locations