Acts I-VII: A Visual Meditation on Seven Modes of Being (Co-curated with Oculi) (2022)

Co-curated with Oculi members Aishah Kenton, Abigail Varney, Alana Holmberg, Tajette O’Halloran, and Rachel Mounsey.
Benalla Gallery, Benalla, Australia

Acts I-VII was an official exhibition of PHOTO 2022 International Festival of Photography, a major biennial of new photography and ideas taking place from 29 April to 22 May in Melbourne and regional Victoria, responding to the theme ‘Being Human’. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. This project was made possible by the Australian Government’s Regional Arts Fund, which supports the arts in regional and remote Australia.

Oculi presents ACTS I-VII, a visual meditation on seven modes of being. Reformulating the Seven Year Life Stages, a concept of human development introduced by philosopher Rudolph Steiner in 1907, this exhibition explores seven universal experiences that lie at the heart of our existence: love and fear, trauma and grief, freedom and oppression, control and uncertainty, belonging and exclusion, science and spirit, life and death.

Featuring new and existing work from its members — some unseen, some revisited and some in collaboration with the Benalla community — ACTS I-VII marks Oculi’s third decade as a photography collective. The presented projects, interwoven with reflections from the artists about their work and process, reveal a group considering their roles, responsibilities, archives and desires amidst two years of social and environmental upheaval.


ACTS I-VII is intended as a prompt for contemplation and a reminder of what connects us. With photographs spilling from the gallery walls out into the neighbouring gardens, we’re asked to consider the world and what it means to be an individual who is part of a collective, community or environment? How does it feel to make, share, treasure and consume images, or to be photographed? Do the old rules still apply, or has the moment to rethink arrived?

Reformulating the Seven Year Life Stages, a concept of human development introduced by Rudolph Steiner in 1907, this exhibition explores seven universal experiences that lie at the heart of our existence: love and fear, trauma and grief, freedom and oppression, control and uncertainty, belonging and exclusion, science and spirit, life and death.



In 2022 I was invited by Oculi, a collective of award winning photographers offering a visual narrative of contemporary life in Australia and beyond, to co-curate an exhibition that brings together their work and practice as a collective. My task was to work as a facilitator of operations and themes within the exhibition space alongside a broader curatorial team, developing a content that would bring together different authorial signatures and practices.

We conceived ACTS I-VII as a transformative space – a laboratory of stories, practices and relations that would encourage the members of the collective to reflect upon their place in this world both as photography’s practitioners and humans. This has turned the exhibition into an exploration of the vulnerability, empathy, frustrations and potential for joined creation that often lie well disguised behind polished visual storytelling.


This project has been a turning point for Oculi but also for me, and the thread of contents to come after now: a come-back to the exhibition space after two years that I have been voluntarily away; a crash test of my own writings and ideas on curatorial practices and realities and above all a testing of our capacity to be together, to hang on, under very adverse circumstances, and to produce a content that can lead to an affective space of conversation on where we stand, what represents us and where to go from here on as individuals and as a community..