Edited by Sharon Flynn, and designed by Narelle Brewer, Dredging up the Past follows on from Gertrude’s previous twenty-year history, A Short Ride in a Fast Machine (2005), edited by Charlotte Day.

“ … Apparently, after almost two decades of rebranding itself as a contemporary art space, Gertrude, like the rest of the Melbourne art world, had seemingly neglected to address the lived intersections and encounters of race, class, and gender that should have accompanied any basic contemporary awareness of the publics and politics of the time: think September 11, the ‘children overboard’ scandal, off-shore detention centres, the Cronulla race riots, Kevin Rudd’s Apology, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, Trump’s first presidency and on and on and on. Contemporary art, especially contemporary art in Naarm Melbourne, according to Cai and Butler, seems to reproduce utopias or ‘safe spaces’ for white middle-class people to comfortably find respite and be kept at a safe distance from the uncomfortable and complicated social boundaries erupting in the rest of the world. [ ‍ ‍‍ ‍                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   .] Artists are deterred and censored from engagement with the genocidal reality of the current moment across a broad range of institutions.

While I was a Studio Artist at Gertrude, I observed some real improvement in the diversity of the staff and audiences, perhaps through a stronger awareness and deliberate organisational willingness to stretch the Gertrude curatorial, exhibition, and studio programs. However, despite these changes, there continued to be controversies, which, coming up to three decades of being 'contemporary’, should have been better anticipated …”