The IMA is pleased to present a talk by American artist, Matt Mullican. The lecture will focus on the concepts and motivations of Mullican’s practice, engaging specifically with his current body of work.

Since the 1970s, Mullican’s performances, drawings, photographs, sculptures and video works have had a significant effect on our understanding of postmodern culture. His practice investigates our relationship with the world of images, questioning how we establish meaning and how symbols serve as representations of identity. Since his first performance under hypnosis at the Kitchen in 1978, Mullican has worked with hypnosis as a way to explore processes of personification and psychological projection. Transforming into a character he refers to as ‘That Person,’ Mullican’s performances appear at once as feigned and as genuine spiritual possessions, recurrently enacting behaviour such as singing, crying and drawing, as if embodied by an old and unstable friend. Mullican will discuss this important aspect of his practice and its place in his overall oeuvre, which is celebrated for its blending of architectural, symbolist and expressionist concerns.

Mullican is visiting Australia for Speech Acts – an exhibition curated by Wes Hill at the UTS Gallery Sydney. He lives between Berlin and New York, and works as a professor at the Hamburg Hochschule für Bildende Kunst, Hamburg, Germany.