Read about the recipe and process in Greater Melbourne Milk Champagne [pdf]
The Melbourne Milk Champagne first made for the exhibition A Time Like This in 2008. It’s an alcoholic fermented milk and honey beverage based on the foregone recipes of melikratos or kumis which had historically been drunk in Soviet sanatoriums as a cure-all to improve immunity and aid against consumption.
While researching the champagne production, advice and ingredients came from inner city children’s farms, apiarists associations, and veterinary clinics, amongst a range of other sources. The cow’s milk and whey were procured in Greater Melbourne city zone and the honey came via an urban bee keeper who keeps a network hives dotted across Western Melbourne in a 10km radius of the city centre — a stone’s throw from Melbourne’s oil refineries.
Staged as a milk bar within the gallery, visitors could try the spritzy milk and follow the map of relations leading to the work: the making-of the milk champagne including the processes and whereabouts of collection and preparation.
A Time Like This
//media release//
Working closely with four pre-eminent curators, contemporary artists Louisa Bufardeci, Bindi Cole, Lorraine Connelly-Northey, Eliza Hutchison, Wietske Maas, Kate Smith, Salote Tawale and Annie Wu created ambitious new projects exploring Feminism in the 21st century – and what it might look like within art practice, and beyond.
Embracing sculpture, photography, performance, video, installation and relational practices, the works developed for this exhibition explore the subsumed histories of Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian women, as well as addressing the current situation. A Time Like This aims to provide a context for and promote dialogue around some of the issues women face today – such as the status of women within human rights, equal opportunities and employment, health, migration, education and communication.
A Time Like This is accompanied by a major publication with contributions by Helen McDonald, Catherine Deveney, Julia Zemiro, Fiona Hile and many others. Together with a series of talks by artists and curators, the project aims to provide an Australian perspective on the global discourse around Feminism and to look in some depth at the complex ways women artists are thinking and working today.
Catalogue essay by curator Kate Rhodes ‘You’ve come a long way. baby‘ [pdf]