Robert Cook, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, has kindly given permission to quote from his characteristically long, loping and excellent opening speech:

In Karin Gottschalk’s seminal series A Poverty of Desire at over a hundred incredible images, arguably the most significant photo-series on the City of Perth ever produced – the body pitches itself against shadows – of buildings and buses, and other people. The multiple figure – whom Gottschalk has dubbed, brilliantly, the cardiganed flaneur – lurches from bus stop to bus stop amidst a slo-mo chaos of city movement, seen from close and mid-range, the camera obeying the haptic logic of the Terrace following and mirroring the shifts of the moving body as it encounters the hard-arsed big-lettered Capital City itself.

The whole speech itself is worthy reading and I encourage Robert to have it published somewhere! For example, the following is another extract:

So, obviously, the work in Transient States is a complicated mix, and equally obviously, also more than a photo show as it deals with what and how it means to live in a place full of hidden conflictions and clefts and, by way of closing, it is worth noting that all of this is produced under the domain of the heightened Perth gaze, the new panoptical ultra-visibility, a world of lock-down and curfew as authorities seek to quell the rioting on the streets, the uproar of the hoons and, most of all, the young bearded anti-structuralists throwing fire bombs down Murray Street mall, chucking passengers off the South Perth ferry and calling for The Thousandth Plateau as they ride the train to Mandurah.