Repertoires of Contention
Tony Garifalakis and Joaquín Segura

Gertrude Contemporary was pleased to present Tony Garifalakis and Joaquín Segura: Repertoires of Contention, curated by Ivan Muñiz Reed.

The exhibition presented newly commissioned and recent works by Mexico City-based artist Joaquín Segura and Melbourne-based artist Tony Garifalakis. Having first connected while in residence at the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York in 2008, the artists share a strong interest in global structures of power, the ideologies that uphold them and the consequential forces that resist them.

Spanning textile, video, installation, photographic and intervention works, this focused two-person exhibition provided the opportunity to reveal the conceptual and material ties between their practices that occur in spite of the different cultural, political and economic contexts within which they live and work.

The exhibition borrows its title from a term used in social theory to describe the range of tools that organized groups can deploy to mobilise and to further a collective agenda. Distinct but at the same time intimately connected, the exhibition proposed the work of Garifalakis and Segura as a repertoire of collective action responding to a multiplicity of forms of power, either hidden or glaringly violent, that continue to reign our everyday.