ACCA Podcast · ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art)

Maria Kozic Artist Talk

February 26, 2024·48 min·3 clips

Maria says she was "ready to jump off the bridge" before a TV history of horror pulled her out of it.

The room is there from the start. Jessica Clark welcomes the audience to ACCA, names herself as a proud Palawa woman, and gives acknowledgements to Wurundjeri, Bunurong, and neighbouring mob. The event keeps that ceremonial, close-up feeling. Clark introduces Maria Kozik with Elise Goldfinch, placing the exhibition inside horror, release, and the charge images can hold. Horror is not a gimmick here. It is a tool. Maria talks about watching horror and science fiction with an artist's eye, then chasing strange inventions back into scientific writing and real science stuff. She keeps looking things up. Old titles, antimatter, and the giant claw become material she can work with, not trivia to be admired from a distance. Then the talk gets more personal. Maria links one body of work to a period when a televised history of horror broke into a frightening inner spiral. The screen gave her a little room to breathe. That interruption steadied her enough to make work, and the work let her move some of that distress outward, where someone else might recognise it. Her wording stays tentative, which suits the subject. She comes back to wanting contact with people who may have carried similar feelings, even when the works say that in different ways. The episode does not smooth any of this into neat recovery language. Its horror premise stays tied to emotional release, not spectacle or easy genre love. Near the end, Clark points to Barbara Creed's launch of Return of the Monstrous Feminine and the move from films made mostly by men toward women telling these stories themselves. Maria's work sits inside that turn. The conversation closes with thanks, warmth from the institution, and a sense of art held between private need and women taking charge of the story.

As heard by us

Horror and art-making meet in a live talk shaped by lived experience.

Maria Kozic's artist talk is framed by Jessica Clark and Elise Goldfinch, who open with a Wurundjeri-country acknowledgement and position the exhibition around horror as a needed, cathartic release.

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Why you'd press play

For a grounded gallery talk where horror becomes a way to make, cope, and keep going.

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