Walking into ACCA (The Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, South Melbourne) is like venturing into a hall of mirrors, once you've got past the rusty hulk of the building itself. Definitely an otherworld, set aside from the 'normal' world outside. Is this what is quite intended? - never mind, it's exciting architecture that compliments Juliana Engberg's exciting programme of exhibitions. There's usually something of extreme interest on show.
So with Gillian Wearing's retrospective, Living Proof. One of the so-called YBAs ("Young British Artists" - Charles Saatchi's marketing phrase) she shows here that her work has real depth and feeling, simultaneously appealing and appalling us. As Ms Engberg said on Sunday, her work is more like photographic and video records of performances, rather than photography or video as art medium itself. And her performers are real people, interacting with her and with us, confessing and revealing too much of themselves and thus revealing our own lives to ourselves too.
Of her clever, technically precise and yet deeply felt work, I particularly liked 'Snapshots', a remarkably convincing "living photograph album" that gently but persistently questions personal and social histories and viewpoints. A revelatory exhibition.
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