PERTH.- AGWA unveils a major exhibition celebrating six decades of experimental practice by Tim Burns.

Tim Burns – The Kinetic Moments, is the first-ever solo exhibition in an Australian state art institution dedicated to Western Australian multimedia artist and filmmaker Tim Burns. The exhibition recognises one of Australia’s most radical, inventive, and persistently relevant creative forces.

Across 60 years, Burns has carved out a singular position in the worlds of film, conceptual art, performance, and political intervention. Born in Cunderdin in 1947 and known to many as Tim “3rd Degree” Burns, he has exhibited internationally at MoMA PS1 in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, Tokyo Film Festival, Sydney Biennale, Melbourne International Film Festival, San Francisco Film Festival, and London.

Yet despite this extraordinary global footprint, Burns has never been honoured with a solo exhibition in an Australian state art institution, until now.

The Kinetic Moments introduces Burns to a new generation of artists, filmmakers, students, and the wider public. His work is described as provocative, darkly humorous, and often explosive.

“Tim Burns’s practice feels startlingly current. The Kinetic Moments gives us an opportunity to re assess his legacy in a political climate that has caught up to the questions he was asking 30 and 40 years ago,” said AGWA Director Colin Walker.

In the 1970s and 80s, Burns was exploring surveillance, direct action and protest, terrorism, the impacts of mining and extraction industries, and the reach of the military industrial complex long before these issues became part of everyday public discourse.

“His work is not only historically significant; it speaks directly to the anxieties and debates shaping contemporary Australia. This exhibition is a chance to recognise Burns’s prescience, to celebrate his contribution to experimental art, and to introduce his ideas to new audiences who are now living inside the very conditions he was interrogating decades ago.” said Walker.

Burns’s practice spans film, performance, pyrotechnics, and conceptual interventions and offers a powerful lens through which to reconsider these issues today.

Some of the most widely discussed moments in Tim Burns’s career occurred in 1972 when the artist was arrested for indecent language, following a protest outside the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

In 1973, Burns staged another performance intervention that blurred the lines between art and life, a hallmark of his practice. Titled A Change of Plan, the work’s performer, Barry Prothero, was arrested by authorities, who interpreted the work as a public disturbance rather than an artistic statement. The arrest, though short lived, generated significant media interest and cemented Burns’s reputation as an artist willing to test the limits of civil space, public tolerance, and the boundaries of direct action. A Change of Plan is discussed in the exhibition catalogue in a new essay by Edward Colless. The publication also features an original essay with new research by exhibition curator Aimee Dodds contextualising Burns’s remarkable, restless, innovative career.

Tim Burns has immersed himself in a wide range of creative communities, from university teaching and mentorship to collaborations with filmmakers, performers, and experimental artists in Perth, Melbourne, Sydney and New York. His work has been encountered by audiences in many different contexts: through his film projects, his explosive sculptural works, his appearances in Cottesloe’s Sculpture by the Sea, his protest driven performances, and his long engagement with art students and emerging practitioners. The Kinetic Moments brings these threads together, offering a renewed opportunity for the public to engage with a practice that has shaped and challenged generations of creative thinkers.

Tim Burns was born in 1947 in the wheatbelt town of Cunderdin, Western Australia. Burns was expelled from high school, where Robert Juniper was his art teacher, but went onto study an associateship in painting and sculpture at the Western Australian Institute of Technology (WAIT, now Curtin University) from 1966-1969. Burns moved to Sydney in the early 1970s and then to New York City in 1976, where he became part of the underground No Wave super-8 filmmaking scene and artist collectives like Colab. He produced his first two super-8 feature films, Why Cars? CARnage! (1977) and Political Transmission (1978) in New York, remaining there on-and-off, working in performance, theatre and video for the next 20 years. He returned to Australia in the mid-1990s with his first painting exhibition in two decades and commenced a PhD in film and media at Murdoch University. From the mid-2000s, he has resided in the regional town of York, Western Australia, where he lives ‘off-grid’.

Burns’s works have been displayed at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Boston, the Hirschorn Museum, Washington, MoMA PS1, Franklin Film Furnace New York, the Art Gallery of South Australia and the Sydney Biennale.

His work is represented in almost every state and territory in Australia; including the National Gallery of Victoria, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, the National Film and Sound Archive, Araluen Arts Centre, the Australian Centre for the Moving Image and the National Gallery of Australia. Overseas, his works are in the Franklin Film Furnace, Anthology Film Archives, and The Filmmaker’s Cooperative, as well as in numerous private collections.