Academic literature on the topic 'Archives Australia Exhibitions'

Abstract In this roundtable, four curators of exhibitions showcasing sexual archives and histories—with a particular focus on queer and trans experiences—were asked to reflect on their experiences working as scholars and artists across a range of museum and gallery formats. The exhibitions referred to below were Bring Your Own Body: Transgender between Archives and Aesthetics, curated by Jeanne Vaccaro (discussant) with Stamatina Gregory at The Cooper Union, New York, in 2015 and Haverford College, Pennsylvania, in 2016; Odarodle: An imaginary their_story of naturepeoples, 1535–2017, curated by Ashkan Sepahvand (discussant) at the Schwules Museum (Gay Museum) in Berlin, Germany, in 2017; Queer, curated by Ted Gott, Angela Hesson, Myles Russell-Cook, Meg Slater (discussant), and Pip Wallis at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia, in 2022; and TransTrans: Transatlantic Transgender Histories, curated by Alex Bakker, Rainer Herrn, Michael Thomas Taylor, and Annette F. Timm (discussant) at the Schwules Museum in Berlin, Germany, in 2019–20, adapting an earlier exhibition shown at the University of Calgary, Canada, in 2016.

Abstract This article presents an overview of the ARC Linkage Project “Archiving Australian Media Arts: Towards a method and a national collection,” which addresses the challenges of preserving digital media artworks that are stored on obsolete media and that require legacy computer environments to access. It lays out the challenges facing digital media arts, articulates the significance of the deposit of local media art organisation archives into the custody of major, jurisdictionally-appropriate cultural institutions, and details the selection of case studies for research from these organisations’ archives and other existing digital media art collections in our partner organisations’ custody. Case studies consist of the ANAT archive (formerly the Australian Network for Art and Technology), floppy disks from the Stan Ostoja-Kotkowski archive, Experimenta Media Art’s exhibition “Virtualities” (1995), dLux media art’s exhibition “Matinaze 97” (1997), and the Griffith University Art Museum’s collection of interactive CD-ROMs. The article reports on progress to date against two of the project’s aims, outlines the collective benefits to partners and to researchers of artworks and other materials from these archives being available, and indicates that access to born digital materials should improve in the near future with digital emulation infrastructure set to be built.

[Re:]Entanglements: Colonial Collections in Decolonial Times, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge (22 June 2021 to 20 April 2022)Greenwood Rising Center, Tulsa, OklahomaFirst Americans: Tribute to Indigenous Strength and Creativity, Volkenkunde, Leiden, the Netherlands (May 2020 to August 2023)Kirchner and Nolde: Up for Discussion, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (April–August 2021)Australians & Hollywood, National Film and Sound Archive, CanberraFree/State: The 2022 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (4 March–5 June 2022)Te Aho Tapu Hou: The New Sacred Thread, Waikato Museum Te Whare Taonga o Waikato (7 August 2021 to 9 January 2022)West Encounters East: A Cultural Conversation between Chinese and European Ceramics, Shanghai Museum (28 October 2021 to 16 January 2022)The Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum’s Permanent Exhibition, ShanghaiThe Way of Nourishment: Health-preserving Culture in Traditional Chinese Medicine, The Chengdu Museum, Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China (29 June–31 October 2021)

Other Spaces is a collaborative creative arts exhibition project that explores visual and material expressions of cultural identity with a particular focus on museum collections. This project aims to provide a rich examination – visual, emotional and intellectual – of the multiple cultural narratives that contribute to the social fabric of Australia through a unique marriage of contemporary photomedia and creative writing practice. This project explores the ways that migrants and refugees have found to express their cultural identity through the material objects they have brought with them to Australia. Many of these objects are not only of great personal value but often of cultural, historical and religious significance. Some are very ordinary everyday objects but they can be highly evocative and symbolic of the relationship between culture and identity, and between the places of origin and an individual's present home in Australia. This article, through a combination of photography, creative text and scholarly discussion, will focus specifically on Italo-Australian migrants and on some of the material objects that they have donated to museum collections, and use these objects to explore notions of cultural belonging and identity.

AbstractThe Yolŋu elder and academic Joseph Neparrŋa Gumbula curated the exhibition, Makarr-garma: Aboriginal Collections from a Yolŋu Perspective (Makarr-garma), staged at the University of Sydney’s Macleay Museum from 29 November 2009 to 15 May 2010. This article describes this exhibition’s development and curatorial rationale. A product of his 2007 Australian Research Council (ARC) Indigenous Research Fellowship at the University, Makarr-garma reflected Gumbula’s Yolŋu philosophies as applied to collections in the Gallery, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) sector. Employing artworks, cultural objects, historic photographs, natural history specimens and his own manikay (songs), he framed this show as a garma (open) ceremonial performance that spanned an archetypal Yolŋu day. The exhibition was immersive and “culturally resonant” (Gilchrist, Indigenising), and provides intellectual and practical insights for the GLAM sector’s representation and management of Indigenous collections.

When the Transforming Tindale exhibition opened at the State Library of Queensland in September 2012, there was much excitement and goodwill. This landmark exhibition was curated by Michael Aird and featured Ah Kee’s drawings and enlarged prints of anthropologist Norman Tindale’s photographs of 1938-1940, as well as extensive archival information and stories from the subjects themselves and their relatives. The transformations of the exhibition’s title refer to the way Tindale’s ‘data’ was given both new physical form, as well as engendering and renewing social meanings. Scholars such as Elizabeth Edwards have argued that we should explore the materiality of images and the diverse forms they assume, attending to the ways their form and vitality shape us as much as we imbue them with meaning. Digitisation constitutes a major transformation of photographs’ historical accumulation of materiality. It also enables the return of historical archives from European museums to Indigenous relatives in Australia. In this article I explore the relations and narratives that emerge from this process, focusing on their Indigenous significance, and using the example of an enigmatic cardboard panel held by the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford on which are mounted thirteen photographs from South Australia. For Indigenous descendants of the people recorded in these photographs, their physical form is less important than the way they embody missing relatives, lost through invasion and assimilation. This process is slow and often awkward, but the rewards are great, in challenging foundational national histories, re-connecting family networks, and telling the truth of Indigenous experience.

The Dance Collection at Arts Centre Melbourne traces the history of dance in Australia from the late nineteenth century to today. The collection encompasses the work of many of Australia's major dance companies and individual performers whilst spanning a range of genres, from contemporary dance and ballet, to theatrical, modern, folk and social dance styles. The Dance Collection is part of the broader Australian Performing Arts Collection, which covers the five key areas of circus, dance, opera, music and theatre. In my overview of Arts Centre Melbourne's (ACM) Dance Collection, I will outline how the collection has grown and highlight the strengths and weaknesses associated with different methods of collecting. I will also identify major gaps in the archive and how we aim to fill these gaps and create a well-balanced and dynamic view of Australian dance history. Material relating to international touring artists and companies including Lola Montez, Adeline Genée, Anna Pavlova and the Ballet Russes de Monte Carlo provide an understanding of how early trends in dance performance have influenced our own traditions. Scrapbooks, photographs and items of costume provide glimpses into performances of some of the world's most famous dance performers and productions. As many of these scrapbooks were compiled by enthusiastic and appreciative audience members, they also record the emerging audience for dance, which placed Australia firmly on the touring schedule of many international performers in the early decades of the 20th century. The personal stories and early ambitions that led to the formation of our national companies are captured in collections relating to the history of the Borovansky Ballet, Ballet Guild, Bodenwieser Ballet, and the National Theatre Ballet. Costume and design are a predominant strength of these collections. Through them, we discover and appreciate the colour, texture and creative industry behind pivotal works that were among the first to explore Australian narratives through dance. These collections also tell stories of migration and reveal the diverse cultural roots that have helped shape the training of Australian dancers, choreographers and designers in both classical and contemporary dance styles. The development of an Australian repertoire and the role this has played in the growth of our dance culture is particularly well documented in collections assembled collaboratively with companies such as The Australian Ballet, Sydney Dance Company, and Chunky Move. These companies are at the forefront of dance in Australia and as they evolve and mature under respective artistic directors, we work closely with them to capture each era and the body of work that best illustrates their output through costumes, designs, photographs, programmes, posters and flyers. The stories that link these large, professional companies to a thriving local, contemporary dance community of small to medium professional artists here in Melbourne will also be told. In order to develop a well-balanced and dynamic view of Australian dance history, we are building the archive through meaningful collecting relationships with contemporary choreographers, dancers, designers, costume makers and audiences. I will conclude my overview with a discussion of the challenges of active collecting with limited physical storage and digital space and the difficulties we face when making this archive accessible through exhibitions and online in a dynamic, immersive and theatrical way.

Abstract The article explores a series of blockbuster exhibitions of DreamWorks Animation developed by the Australian Centre of the Moving Image (ACMI) in collaboration with one of the largest Hollywood producers. Curated by ACMI, this blockbuster exhibition was designed to provide a behind-the-scenes look into collaborative processes involved in DreamWorks animations. This exhibition travelled across the Asia-Pacific in 2015-2017 and was hosted by a number of museums, such as the ArtScience Museum in Singapore, the Te Papa Museum in New Zealand, the Seoul Museum of Art in South Korea, and the National Taiwan Science and Education Centre in Taiwan. It displayed over 400 unique objects from the studio’s archive ‘of rare and never before displayed material’, such as drawings, models, maps, photographs, posters, and other artworks. The article explores the highly favourable reception to the DreamWorks Animation blockbuster in different cities in Asia. It employs a geo-visualization of Asian engagement with the blockbuster exhibit to reveal and explain local and global mechanisms of ‘attraction’ power, generated by DreamWorks in different Asian countries. Contributing to the special issue, this article engages with two aspects of it: the form, cultural digital mapping; and the content, the nature of media pop culture exemplified through the traveling blockbuster.

In 1959, the longest recorded specimen of fulgurite in Victoria was discovered in the sandhills of Karnak in Western Victoria, Australia. Measuring 1.5 metres in vertical length, the specimen was formed by a discharge of lightning penetrating and fusing the quartz sand along its path. Considering the high number of cloud-to-ground lightning strikes, it has been estimated that up to ten fulgurites may be formed globally per second Pasek and Block 2009. Despite this, fulgurites are a rare find, particularly ones of significant length. The amorphous glass tubes created by lightning discharge are notoriously brittle and thin walled. Unequal contraction of the glass upon cooling produces fine cracks which weather over time, often resulting in the specimen breaking into segments. The Karnak fulgurite was systematically extracted from the ground segment by segment and reassembled for display in the museum, where it remained on exhibition from the early 1960s until 1990 Beasley 1964. When removed from display, the Karnak fulgurite was accidentally fractured into hundreds of pieces. For nearly 30 years it has remained fragmented and spread across multiple vials in the collection. The level of detail provided in field notes, still images and archives from the time of its collection provide a complete record of its appearance prior to the damage. The conservation and mineralogy departments of the museum collaborated on a project to return the fulgurite to its original form. This poster will track the journey of its reassembly, including mapping the original shape and dimensions of the specimen, analysis and removal of aged adhesives, and designing a mounting system for future display and storage.