WORKS

Bela Lugosi and the Plot’s Twist

Bela Lugosi and the Plot’s Twist @ One Star Lounge and Gallery

May 22 - June 1st 2025

Bela Lugosi and the Plot’s Twist is an exhibition spawned at the collapse of certainty and dread, reflecting on the inevitability of mortality and the ways we mythologise death and absence as omni-present.

Central to the exhibition is the haunting figure of Bela Lugosi, whose portrayal of Dracula on the stage and film became inseparable from his identity, culminating in his famous wish to be buried in his Dracula cape. Bauhaus's 1982 goth rock anthem Bela Lugosi’s Dead is the soundtrack for this exhibition’s theme of death, longing, and the blurred lines between an artist’s identity and the speculative myths surrounding an artists death, defined oeuvre and subsequent value. While examining death as an end, the end, the exhibition also examines death as a state of emotional and psychological suspension, capturing the interplay of history, memory, dread, humour, sublimation, desire, and the unknown.

Bram Stoker’s 1897 gothic horror classic Dracula conveys its story through a dossier of documents, a compilation of accounts sourced from multiple narrators including observant diary entries, business and personal letters, real estate transactions, commercial receipts, public records, and newspaper clippings reporting on strange events. This exhibition borrows this epistolary structure where the artworks can be story-telling artefacts, where the viewer is an investigator, and the One Star Lounge Gallery is the setting for unexpected plot twists. Assembled the artworks' amass historical visual and material references with a lens on death as an unpredictable narrative we all face in our own lives.

Organised by Elvis Richardson
Lisa Young
Edward Parritt
Sarah Goffman
Ev Morris
Stephen Jones
Zamara Zamara
Mark Hislop
Toni Louise
Siying Zhou
Phuong Ngo
Angela Brennan
Claire Lambe
Beau Emmett
Ronnie Van Hout
Chunxiao Qu
Samantha Vawdrey
Lucy Griggs
Julie Davies
Elvis Richardson
Michael Needham
Benjamin T. Alfred
Piers Greville
Sadie Chandler

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