Tuesday Night Lecture Series: Annette Wagner

As part of the Tuesday Night Lecture Series (TNLS) BU College of Fine Arts School of Visual Arts presents a lecture with artist Annette Wagner, organized by MFA Print Media and Photography.

Annette Wagner is an artist who grew up along the Murray–Barka (Darling) rivers, Australia’s largest and most complex river system, and understands water is a social medium as much as it is a biological necessity. Her interdisciplinary practice is situated in contemporary arts exploring concepts of memory and water ecology. Seeking to reveal new understandings of our connection with water she records memories and conducts spatial investigations to map social assemblages of consumption, sustainability and ecology.

A social engagement practice deconstructs psychological distance using water as both subject and medium. Regularly conducting interviews to build an archive of recordings she reveals our diverse knowledge systems of both fact and fiction and our social and political memories of water. Symbolically for the artist, she considers humanities outer space exploration for the life giving resource as curiously absurdist, revealing the duality in our nature, joy and hope, fear and despair. Her own site based absurdist performances, documented by both moving and still images, consider place across diverse bodies of water and explore the tension of an individual within the Anthropocene.

Both practices coalesce into abstracted sound, light and site installations which seek to reveal our collective understanding of water and act to provoke the audience’s attention to consider water’s critical currency. She does this to reveal and highlight our emotive interdependence with water as she argues, we are part of the fragile ecosystem itself.

Wagner lives and works in Naarm (Melbourne) Australia, on unceded lands of the Kulin Nation.

When 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm on 11 February 2025
Building FLR, 410/11, 808 Commonwealth Ave