Sydney based multidisciplinary artist born in 1972. Begg’s artwork includes a wide range of visual production including video, illustration, installation, photography, painting and performance. She has co-curated several exhibitions, published art criticisms and lectured part-time in art history and theory at the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales (COFA, UNSW).
Born and raised in Melbourne, Begg moved to Brisbane in 1997 to study Fine Art, completing a Bachelor of Fine Art at Griffith University (2000). Having moved to Sydney in 1999, she undertook an Honours year at the COFA in 2003, before enrolling in a PhD at COFA in 2004.
Begg has a long standing interest in politics. In 1990, at the age of seventeen, she represented the youth of Australia at the Montreal Protocol for Climate Change, where she spoke to the United Nations summit of the effect its decisions would have on future generations. This political interest is seen in her artwork, which often deals with globalisation, climate change and cultures or, in her own words, “both the architecture of space and the social relationships which construct it” (artist’s website, accessed 2009).
You Are Here is a collective established by Begg and fellow artist Keg de Souza. The collective’s If You See Something, Say Something (2007) commented on efforts by governments to instill fear in the community following the 9/11 Twin Tower disaster of 2001. Other collaborative works include What Would It Mean To Win? (2008) with relational aesthetisist Oliver Ressler; Electrification of Consumer Brains ( 2007) with Dmitry Vilensky; and Cities Without Maps – Tanpa Kota Peta ( 2008), developed with Keg de Souza, and produced in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. In 2009 Begg and de Souza co-curated 'There Goes The Neighbourhood’ at Performance Space, Sydney, an exhibition which dealt with the gentrification of the inner Sydney suburb of Redfern.
Begg’s wall drawing A World of Proximities was exhibited in the 2008 Taipei Biennal, 'One World Where Many Worlds Fit’. Her video piece Treat (or Trick) (2008) was shown at the 2009 Istanbul Biennale.
In 2006 Begg was awarded an Australia China Council residency in Hong Kong, and in 2008 an Asialink Residency in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, as well as a Performance Space Residency in Sydney. Begg has also received grants for her work, including a Marrickville Council art grant and a National Association for the Visual Arts marketing grant, both in 2007, and a projects – inter-arts grant from the Australia Council for the Arts in 2009.
