You and everything that is not you (Art Gallery of New South Wales)

The meeting point between artistic process and social context is a central theme in Agatha Gothe-Snape's work, which adopts many forms.

Over the six-year duration of The National, Gothe-Snape will create 'The Fatal Sure/The National Doubt' (2016–21), a film that captures the economic, cultural and psychological moods that shape the exhibition. The work takes its cue from the Australian art critic Robert Hughes' canonical documentary series The shock of the new (1980), in particular his claim that artists are responsible for ‘mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world’. Through interviews and observational footage, Gothe-Snape's response will consider how today's artists reconcile the aesthetic and social urgencies of our time with those of the past.

The billboard-scale text work 'You and everything that is not you (Art Gallery of New South Wales)' quotes an excerpt from Hughes’ closing monologue in The shock of the new. Gothe-Snape presents this as an open-ended proposition that speaks to art's transformative potential. It announces the beginning of her film project and frames the curatorial approach to the 2017 edition of The National at the Gallery.