The Space Between Seeing and Being: Tschabalala Self at ACCA
Image credit: Skin Tight, installation view, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2025. Photograph: Andrew Curtis.
So, you know your body? Or at least, you think you do. But how do you really understand the way you move through the world? Do you see yourself clearly, or are you just living inside a version reflected by others?
This is where Tschabalala Self’s first Australian solo exhibition, Skin Tight, at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) takes you. The show fills ACCA’s vast galleries with large-scale paintings, works on paper, and a three-channel video installation. It’s immersive, restless, and intensely alive.
Self, born in Harlem in 1990 and now working from the Hudson Valley, has built an international reputation for pushing figurative painting into new terrain. Her practice fuses collage, fabric, paint, and experimental printing into exuberant, sometimes chaotic characters that resist being pinned down as portraits of any one person. They are collages of memory, reference, and lived experience.
Image credit: Tschabalala Self, The Bigger Picture, 2024, installation view, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2025. Courtesy the artist, Pilar Corrias, London, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich / Vienna and Petzel Gallery, New York. Photograph: Andrew Curtis.
The energy comes from everywhere: her ancestral and familial ties to New Orleans, the Harlem Renaissance, jazz, dance, and performance. It all feeds into the work, figures charged with psychological intensity, bodies that are both personal and mythological, private and universal.
At ACCA, the exhibition lands with a kind of force. The first room throws you into the deep end: seven works in one glance. No careful transition, no gentle easing in. It feels like stepping into a party mid-conversation. At first, it’s overwhelming, but slowly you start to notice the details: the stitching, the layering of fabrics, the way the bodies seem both life-sized and larger than life.
The scale matters. The figures often hover close to human height, yet the way they’re staged under ACCA’s towering ceilings gives them an air of grandeur. You catch yourself assigning them authority they haven’t asked for - then realise that’s the point. Self makes you aware of how quickly we place value on bodies, and how much of that judgment has little to do with the figure itself. Spend time with them and something shifts: these aren’t monumental icons, just people moving through the world, their presence no bigger or smaller than the stories you project onto them.
Image credit: Skin Tight, installation view, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2025. Photograph: Andrew Curtis.
This tension runs throughout Skin Tight. Self distorts and augments bodies, pulling them away from Western ideals of beauty without shouting about it. The protest isn’t loud; it’s in the subtle shifts, the way a curve is exaggerated, or a torso abstracted, or an organ transformed into a bejewelled object. She suggests that the figure, so central to the history of art, doesn’t need to be the measure of worth.
There’s also humour and play. Her cut-outs and wall drawings guide your movement, pulling you into her world. Her materials are tactile and bold: faux leather, stitched patterns, layered surfaces that carry their own energy. The longer you spend with them, the more they reveal.
The video installation brings another layer. At first, it reads like performance art, but it quickly becomes something else: intimate, vulnerable, and strange in ways that sidestep the clichés of theatre. Dreamers drift through the screen, their closeness and touch charged not by romance or overt sexuality, but by something rawer: the complicated ways we live inside our own bodies and negotiate them with others.
Self’s work challenges you to strip back your habits as a viewer. She resists the museum rhythm of stand, observe, interpret. Instead, you’re inside it, a participant, forced to confront the messy interplay of self-perception, social gaze, and imagination.
Image credit:Tschabalala Self, Dreamers (diptych) 2021, installationview, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2025. Courtesy the artist, Pilar Corrias, London, Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich / Vienna and Petzel Gallery, New York. Photograph: Andrew Curtis.
Curated by Dr Shelley McSpedden and Myles Russell-Cook, the show also feels like a turning point for ACCA. For Russell-Cook, it’s his first as curator since joining from NGV, and you can sense the ambition. The design is sharp and confident, pushing ACCA into a new register — one that feels international in scale while deeply grounded in storytelling and experimentation. It’s a sign of what ACCA can be: a place for contemporary art to stretch itself, to take risks, to demand more of us as viewers.
And that’s precisely what Skin Tight does. It doesn’t let you stay comfortable. It asks you to rethink how you see bodies, how you read images, and how you place value. It shows you figures that look monumental and mythic - until you take a breath, look again, and realise they’re just bodies, stitched together from memory, fabric, and imagination.
Self has exhibited everywhere from the Brooklyn Museum to the Barbican in London and Haus der Kunst in Munich, but here in Melbourne, the work feels newly charged. Maybe it’s ACCA’s cavernous space, maybe it’s the curatorial framing, but there’s a sense of both intimacy and scale that sticks with you long after you leave.
In the end, Skin Tight is not just about seeing. It’s about unseeing the frameworks we take for granted. Self asks you to strip back the filters, to notice how much of what we think we know about bodies and identities is just projection. The exhibition isn’t about answers - it’s about the space that opens up when you start to ask better questions.
Tschabalala Self: Skin Tight is running until November 23, 2025, at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Naarm/Melbourne.
