Last word: Accidental Encounters with Esther Anatolitis – Executive Director of NAVA

JUNE 2020

Esther Anatolitis

‘Looking back on this dislocated year, what I’ve missed the very most is the invigoration and the joy that comes from accidental encounters .’

Wandering together, wandering alone. Wandering without a plan.

Aimless adventures of that delicious kind – the kind that end up at a gallery you’ve never visited, or unexpectedly lost in contemplating a work, or following studio visit with studio visit as one introduction leads to another.

The way your body opens itself to the new. The way your mind animates with each new encounter. Unexpected encounter is what’s unique about the contemporary art experience.

Because visiting a gallery is a radically different proposition to going to the theatre, for example, where your ticket buys you an experience of fixed duration with a plot you likely already know.

Step into an artist’s studio and you’re entering their mind as well as visiting their workplace. As your gaze wanders and conversation flows, what you’re encountering is the full complexity of what makes that work possible.

A work of art can seize you, transport you, reconfigure you. It reclaims your time and focus from passive consumption. It shifts your expectations and reprograms your day.

Art displaces us from a set of programmed experiences and offers an object, a process, an experiment that demands our full attention. We’ve just spent months with our every hour predictably located and programmed. Whenever it’s been possible to encounter something unexpected, it’s been flattened into the experience of the screen – the same interface that many of us have relied on to keep being able to do our jobs Sometimes, when a friend has suggested a Zoom drink, even though we’ve longed to catch up, we’ve found ourselves exhausted by having all of our experiences tened into that one screen.

And so, as we start to venture out, we’ll need to be sensitive to ourselves and to one another. Making that transition is going to have an impact on our social confidence and social anxiety, both as individuals and as a community.

Galleries, museums and artist-run spaces are doing their best to decipher the direction of state and federal governments, and industry organisations are presenting helpful resources to make that advice clear.

So while visiting galleries may already be possible, it will be a while before we’re gathering in numbers for opening drinks and floor talks. We’ll find different ways to welcome new collectors, greet new audiences, and craft new seams between our digital and non-digital experiences.

To fill my home with the voice of the artist, I’ve also been listening back on NAVA’s podcasts, doing my best to delight in the slow and the reflective.

Contemporary art is of the here and now, but the here and now has a long tail – and an open future.

As we re-embrace the unexpected and wander anew, the work we encounter will have undergone quite the journey to reach us. And so will we. Let’s create that new world together.

- Esther Anatolitis