Lara Chamas, In French; pomegranate is grenade. The French mandate for Syria and Lebanon 1920 – 1943, 2023. Wax, 8 x 9cm diameter approx. Courtesy: the artist and FUTURES, Melbourne.

FUTURES presents never together, the second exhibition in a series by curator Victoria Wynne-Jones entitled Resources of the Social Imagination, which looks at ways in which narrative pleasure might engage with contemporary art. An attempt is made to realise a space for imagining and to evoke the feeling one has when one has spent the whole day reading a novel and then goes out in the evening to an exhibition opening, still buzzing with its words.

never together unfolds in relation to Helen Garner’s short story In Paris, a fictive episode that lays bare contrasting approaches to the way in which one cares for oneself and for others, through the acts of labour of preparing and cooking food. In the process, it investigates the banality of daily life, the vicissitudes of intense inter-personal relationships, concepts of nourishment and vegetal perspectives.

Exhibited artists include Lara Chamas, Matilda Davis, Christopher Duncan, Evangeline Riddiford-Graham and Fiona Williams.