The National 2017: New Australian Art

Agatha Gothe-Snape has been commissioned for The National: New Australian Art, the new biennial exhibition co-hosted by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Carriageworks and the Museum of Contemporary Art (all Sydney), to create a work that links the three venues over three iterations in 2017, 2019 and 2021.

Taking as a starting point the reluctant prognostication art critic Robert Hughes made at the close of his documentary series, The Shock of the New, 1980 – the year of the artist’s birth – Agatha Gothe-Snape, through the unfamiliar lens of the video camera and form of the documentary, will explore whether Hughes’ withering forecasts for the future of art still hold much sway. Collecting artists' interviews and footage throughout the six-year duration of the three iterations of The National, Gothe-Snape will create The Fatal Sure/The National Doubt, a long-form production that provides some interpersonal account of ‘each person mediating, in some way, between a sense of history and an experience of the world’.