Hayley Millar Baker, CAO Yu and Dana Claxton Challenge the Systems That Shape How We See

This October, Artspace brings together four leading contemporary artists in the third and final suite of exhibitions and special projects for 2026. Featuring Hayley Millar Baker, Dana Claxton and CAO Yu across our exhibition and presentation platforms, alongside Daniel Boyd as the inaugural artist for our new annual fundraising initiative, the season examines the systems through which people are taught to see, understand and categorise one another.

Across their projects, the artists interrogate the ideological and ethical structures that determine what becomes visible, whose knowledge is granted authority, how bodies become socially legible, and under what conditions dignity and protection are afforded. Together, they move from questions of knowledge, to representation, to judgement, revealing the often invisible frameworks that shape how individuals, histories and communities are understood.

Hayley Millar Baker

With No Spectacular Soul, Hayley Millar Baker, a Gunditjmara and Djab Wurrung artist, turns the question of external judgment towards an explicitly ethical concern: what happens when recognition becomes a prerequisite for dignity? Presented as a major solo commission in Artspace’s Main Galleries, the multi-screen video installation examines the conditions through which dignity, protection and recognition are granted or withheld, asking why a person must appear innocent, sympathetic or morally legible before their suffering is recognised as deserving of protection. Together with the works of Daniel Boyd, Dana Claxton and CAO Yu, the project examines the politics of recognisability — the often invisible criteria through which societies determine what can be known, seen and valued.

CAO Yu

Presenting Just Because: CAO Yu 曹雨, Artspace’s Ideas Platform features works by Beijing-based CAO Yu that examine gendered expectations, patriarchal structures and idealised notions of female beauty. Across works including Everything is Left Behind (2012–ongoing), Dragon Head (2020) and Piss-Take a Look at Yourself (2023), CAO Yu uses her own body, image and lived experience to explore the social expectations placed upon women, shifting between vulnerability and provocation, subtlety and excess. Through dark humour and abjection, she destabilises ideas of beauty, vanity, self-image and desire, turning the body into both a site of social constraint and a means of refusing it.

More than expose invisible structures, each of these artists also proposes a form of refusal. Daniel Boyd challenges the apparent completeness of official history; Dana Claxton refuses the colonial monopoly on looking; CAO Yu rejects demands for the body to behave or signify correctly; and Hayley Millar Baker challenges the proposition that dignity, justice or survival should have to be earned through an acceptable performance of humanity.

Dana Claxton

Artspace is proud to present Hunkpapa Lakota artist Dana Claxton for the Banner Series, marking the series’ first commission by an international First Nations artist. Claxton’s work challenges the ways Indigenous people have been seen and represented, interrogating systems through which Indigenous identities have been constructed, classified and erased while asserting sovereignty, cultural continuity and self-representation. Bringing together Headdress – Shadae and her Girlz (2023) and AIM (2010), the presentation reveals competing forms of looking: one grounded in regalia, adornment, kinship and cultural inheritance; the other in the bureaucratic language of state surveillance. Together, the works expose the tension between Indigenous self-representation and colonial systems of classification and control, asking who has the authority to look, record and define Indigenous experience.

Daniel Boyd

A recurring source for Daniel Boyd's work is The Australian Children’s Pictorial Social Studies, a series of mid-century educational publications that introduced generations of Australian schoolchildren to a carefully constructed vision of the nation. First published in 1958, the series illustrated the colonial project by transforming invasion into exploration, dispossession into progress and Indigenous presence into a prelude to the Australian nation. Boyd reinterprets this imagery to expose the ways visual culture participates in the production of historical consciousness.

This work forms the basis of an exciting new annual fundraising initiative from Artspace, with more details to be announced soon. The initiative will offer audiences new ways to engage with artists’ practices while directly supporting Artspace’s work with artists, from exhibitions and commissions to residencies, public programs and opportunities to develop ambitious new work.

Dates:
23 October – 7 February
Opening night 22 October, 6–9pm
Register here

For media enquiries please contact:
Florence McGlynn
communications@artspace.org.au