For the first time in Sydney, the latest iteration of Daniel Mudie Cunningham’s Proud Mary, brings together works which capture the aging process through a deeply personal lens.
The video and artworks will be on display at Manly Art Gallery & Museum from 21 February - 14 April 2024, and the exhibition is part of the 2024 Festival: Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.
Chosen as his funeral song, Proud Mary is a 4-channel video projection capturing the artist’s lip-syncing rendition of the iconic Tina Turner’s version of the Creedence Clearwater Revival song Proud Mary which he has vowed to perform and document every five years until his death.
Since his original performance in 2007, the routine has been enacted three times – in an abandoned car park in 2012 and then in 2017 in an empty Tasmanian swimming pool. His most recent performance in a Port Kembla field of concrete tetrahedrons in 2022 will be shown publicly to Sydney audiences for the first time.
In his artwork, Funeral Songs, Daniel asked his friends to name the songs they would each like to have played at their funerals. The selected songs run the gamut from playful to somber, together representing an archive of how people wish to be remembered at their last hurrah. Visitors to the gallery will be given the opportunity to add their requested funeral song to an ever-growing archive collected by the artist.
Proud Mary and Funeral Songs are signature works that signal the enduring role memory, mortality and memorialisation play in Daniel’s lifelong practice of queer self-portraiture. Encompassing video, performance and installation, his work employs enactment and reenactment to capture and relay the developing psychological and sociopolitical dimensions of identity.
Proud Mary collapses more than fifteen years of Cunningham’s life into a video loop that memorialises the life of a queer optimist, a “proud Mary,” adamant that he’ll “keep on burning” and “rolling on the river.”
Funeral Songs and Proud Mary were initiated to remember and acknowledge the funeral song his brother Trevor Alec Mudie (1980–2001) identified before his untimely death but was forgotten amid the family’s grief. Recalled later, his song – along with Daniel’s and many others – has become a soundtrack you can live or die to. Daniel’s next rendition is due in 2027.
Daniel Mudie Cunningham: Proud Mary
21 February – 14 April 2023
Manly Art Gallery & Museum
West Esplanade Reserve, Manly NSW 2095
Open Tue – Sun, 10am – 5pm (closed Mondays & Public Holidays)
Free entry
Exhibition Opening
Fri 1 March, 6 – 8pm
To be opened by Victoria Spence, performance artist and death doula
Friends of MAG&M and Volunteers’ Preview
Fri 1 March, 10 - 11am
Meet the Artist and Book Discussion
Sat 16 March, 3 – 4pm
Daniel Mudie Cunningham talks about the ideas in Proud Mary at this informal opportunity to meet and engage with the artist, and to hear about his new monograph.