Alison Kubler

Justene Williams’s @justenewilliams Once We Were Mudskippers is open now at @qagoma and it’s like the artist herself writ large - unruly, funny, strange, alive, joyful and much more. 🦄🦄🦄. Spanning 20 years of work, alongside a wealth of new pieces, the exhibition moves between video, sculpture, sound and installation, bringing together the many threads of her expansive practice.

Like the mudskipper, her work seems to exist between worlds: between the physical and virtual, beauty and grotesque, art history and contemporary life, ritual and the everyday.

I particularly loved the costumes from her imagining of the Russian Futurists Victory over the Sun, an opera that was part revolutionary manifesto, part proto-science-fiction saga, populated by time-travelling revolutionaries. The set and costume designs were created by Ukrainian-born artist Kazimir Malevich and included an early iteration of his now-iconic Black Square (1915), which she references.

There’s this great kind of DIY sensibility – there are a lot of synergies with the Henson show at QAGOMA, the stitching, sewing, suspension of disbelief. Plus humour alongside questions about our bodies, our ambitions, consumer culture, mortality and how we make sense of the strange world we inhabit.