Australian galleries featured in Art Basel’s Online Viewing Rooms

Melbourne’s THIS IS NO FANTASY and Brisbane’s Jan Murphy Gallery have been selected to participate in Art Basel’s 2021 Online Viewing Rooms (OVR: 2021), connecting a global network of collectors with 59 galleries from 21 countries and territories. OVR:2021 features work created in 2021, reflecting on the artistic production over another challenging year.

Marc Spiegler, Global Director of Art Basel, says: “2021 was a disrupted and disruptive year and many of the works in OVR:2021 bear witness to that. We see that in the topics recurring across the rooms, in the ever-widening range of perspectives from which the artists are creating, and in the galleries newly arriving on the international scene.”

THIS IS NO FANTASY, Melbourne, presents work by renowned photomedia and performance artist Jill Orr. Falling and Flight Reclaimed (2021) depicts Orr wading through oozing black clay across the salt flats of Mitre Lake, Wotjobaluk Country, Victoria. The reflective, salt-encrusted surface of the lake amplifies the pressing issues of environmental destruction and Aboriginal land rights, and speaks to an earlier series To Bear and Behold, also photographed at Mitre Lake. You can read more about Orr’s series in Art Basel’s article: Seven artists redefining photography.

Jan Murphy Gallery, Brisbane, will show work by artists Sylvia Ken, Tjungkara Ken and Iluwanti Ken, along with a key work by the Ken Sisters Collaborative (Tjungkara Ken, Yaritji Young, Freda Brady, Maringka Tunkin and Sandra Ken). These award-winning Indigenous artists are from Tjala Arts, in the remote Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands of South Australia.

The Online Viewing Rooms will be available to access from 9 to 12 February via the Art Basel website, as well as on the Art Basel app on mobile.