Monica Rani Rudhar’s mother always denied naming her after her beloved childhood cow. For Rudhar, sharing her name with a cow used to be something that embarrassed her. But these days, she says she takes comfort in imagining a time in which she, like Monica the cow, helped her mother through a painful childhood.
“I learned more about my mother’s upbringing in Romania, which was quite challenging,” Rudhar tells RUSSH. “Monica became her companion. She would take the cow to the grass to graze, and take her homework with her. As the second youngest she got the shitty jobs, and so she would cry and be really disheartened. She told me this beautiful story about a time when she was crying and the cow licked her tears.”
We Were Connected in a More Complicated Way Than Either of Us Could Even Begin to Understand (2023), Rudhar’s video work, is featured in Primavera 2024: Young Australian Artists, MCA Australia’s annual annual exhibition featuring the works of Australian artists aged 35 and under.
Rudhar narrates the five-minute story as though she is the cow — “I licked her tears when she cried and it was my milk that nourished her bones and stomach,” she says. “I created a kind of mythology around reincarnation, that this cow was reincarnated into a human who happened to be me, as my mother's daughter. I looked at how we use mythologies in different cultures and stories, whether it be family fables or familial law to reckon with our past, or explain the past in a way that brings healing or understanding.”
Rudhar is one of five artists whose work has been selected for the exhibition, now in its 33rd year. Primavera is a vital platform for early-career artists and curators, and has highlighted the work of more than 250 artists and over 30 curators, playing a crucial role in advancing the careers of many of Australia’s most prominent artists. Curator Lucy Latella said this year’s artists’ “diverse works highlight that culture isn't simply inherited but formed in the present.”
“I think for all of us, it's a dream come true — to be in that building, alongside artists like Esme Timbery and Brook Andrew,” Teresa Busuttil says. Her work, sinners grotto, a salvaged fishing boat encrusted with seashells, is a shrine in front of which viewers can sit and reflect. The work references Busuttil's late father’s work as a fisherman, and his voyage from Malta to Australia. “It has been a funny week of reflecting on art making through my whole life, and then coming to this point of feeling really proud… It’s more than a dream to be included in a museum like the MCA. Especially alongside these four other artists who have diverse but similar experiences of art making and connection to culture.”
For Aidan Hartshorn, a Walgalu (Wolgalu, Wolgal) Wiradjuri man whose ancestral lands encompass parts of the Snowy Mountains in Kosciuszko National Park and the Riverina region of NSW, his cross-disciplinary practice examines and challenges settler-colonial histories embedded in his Aboriginal and European heritage. For his work Yiramir Mayiny (River People) (2024) Hartshorn confronts the ongoing environmental and cultural impact of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme using industrial aluminium to craft four large Rorschach-like diamond shields that call on Wiradjuri and Walgalu designs.
Sarah Ujmaia, a first-generation Chaldean Australian from a family that migrated from northern Iraq, explores the impacts of forced displacement through her material-led practice. Her work And thank you to my baba for laying the timber floor (2024) features nearly 4,000 pavers made from fired and unfired shell grit. The individually hand-cast pavers wobble and rattle underfoot, referencing the town squares of her parents' hometown, Ankawa, and honouring her father’s labour, and migrant journey.
In her installation Long Distance Call 長途電話 (2024), Melbourne-based interdisciplinary artist, singer and music producer Chun Yin Rainbow Chan (陳雋然) recalls the long distance phone calls between her mother and late aunt after her family emigrated from Hong Kong in the late nineties.
“My mum and aunt spoke the Weitou dialect,” Chan tells RUSSH. “It’s a dialect that is fading… Not many people speak it nowadays. These phone calls were a rare chance for me to hear my mom speak in her mother tongue.”
Chan’s work fuses silk painting, animation, and a nine-minute soundscape that samples a telephone ringing, digitally manipulated to create a meditative, trance-like ambient track interwoven with fragments of conversation between her mother and aunt. Also part of the soundscape is a lament Chan wrote in English and translated to the Weitou dialect in collaboration with ChatGPT.
Chan has been travelling back to Hong Kong since 2017 to learn from elderly Weitou elders who are the last holders of the cultural knowledge of women's songs. After learning the rhyming scheme and melody, she transferred the knowledge to ChatGPT to translate the lament which she had written in English.
"After a series of edits I conducted a test where I sent the lyrics to my mom without any context. She immediately said, 'Oh, the Weitou lady who wrote this is very clever.' When I revealed the source, it was quite funny. This experience reflects my broader interest in challenging notions of authenticity and origins. As someone who's grown up in the diaspora I’ve often felt that I'm not quite Australian enough, and I'm not quite Hong Kong enough. For me, subverting these ideas around authenticity is an engaging process. It opens up conversations and dialogues about belonging."
Primavera 2024: Young Australian Artists is a free exhibition on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Level 2 Galleries, until Monday 27 January 2025.
