ECHOES by Lumina Collective

Through perceptions of presence and absence, LUMINA Collective’s new exhibition Echoes explores the ways in which photographic image-making in Australia is inherently linked to questions of identity and place and to generational stories of translocation. Echoes is the latest exhibition project of LUMINA Collective. Over the three summer months of 2018/2019, ECHOES occupied five major exhibition spaces within the Art Gallery of Ballarat, Australia’s oldest and largest regional gallery. LUMINA artists explore eight stories, their themes evoked through individual photographic installations, each member showing work in an intimate space. By embracing long-form deeply embedded personal practices, Echoes investigates ideas of identity through explorations of family history, trauma and loss, migration, notions of home as well as the formulation of social and cultural Australian identities. In her 2011 article Photography and Place, writer and prominent Australian curator Judy Annear suggests that “in this photography of place and residue, (there is) an implicit acknowledgement of the role of the photographer as a mediator and a storyteller, and the story is not at all straightforward. It is not picture-postcard perfect.” Founded in 2017, LUMINA comprises eight leading female Australian photographers who seek to engage viewers with these ideas, through modes of documentary methodologies that extend beyond linear visual storytelling processes through the unique voice and vision of each artist.