“The Museum is the Region, the Region is the Museum”
Avni Dauti, Lisa Radford, Kim Munro, Sam George, Susan Jacobs, Mikhail Karikis, Uriel Orlow, Kerrie Poliness and Geoff Robinson
7 Sept → 5 Oct 2014

The Museum is the Region, the Region is the Museum has been envisaged as a way to re-establish West Space’s connection with the western suburbs of Melbourne, where West Space was founded in 1993. Presented off-site at the Living Museum of the West—and drawing upon the rich history of the western suburbs, as documented in the Living Museum’s own archive—this exhibition will feature newly commissioned work by a range of local artists that each respond to the geography and built heritage of this unique site. The Museum is the Region, the Region is the Museum brings together the stories of the many communities of the western suburbs through the Living Museum of the West’s unique and extensive archive of oral histories, photographic and video archives.

This is a West Space Project presented at the Living Museum of the West, curated by Danny Lacy, Liang Luscombe and Patrice Sharkey and featuring Avni Dauti, Lisa Radford, Kim Munro, Sam George, Susan Jacobs, Kerrie Poliness, Geoff Robinson, Mikhail Karikis and Uriel Orlow.

The exhibition will include Geoff Robinson’s new installation which draws on the Living Museum of the West’s unique audio archive of interviews with western suburb residents, in particular, the rich descriptions of two residents whom lived by the Maribyrnong River in the 1930’s to map this site within the Living Museum of the West’s bluestone building.

Having worked at the Living Museum of the West for the past 20 years, Kerrie Poliness will re-present a number of past artistic projects that she completed at the Living Museum; this will include The Pipestacks Sculpture, a configuration of pipes that act as a monument to the sites’ previous use as a concrete pipe factory, Hume Pipes.

Also working with the history of Humes Pipes and it broader site of local industry that much of the Living Museum’s history is based on, Avni Dauti will present a video work that ties together the history of the local industry with the narrative of the James Fleming’s diaries, written when Flemming was aboard Charles Grimes’ survey of Port Phillip. This journal arguably contains the first few sentences in the story of the European settlement of Melbourne.

Alongside these works will be a collaborative video work produced by Lisa Radford and Kim Munro and Sam George in which a number of actors individually respond to the artist's provocation, filmed at the Living Museum of the West site.

Other works presented as part of this exhibition include Sounds from Beneath (2010-12), a video by UK-based artists Mikhail Karikis & Uriel Orlow, depicting old Kentish coal miners singing sounds of former mining activity set on a desolate post-industrial landscape while Susan Jacobs will reconfigure her 2012 work Frontier, a collection of found and constructed objects, rich in material and form, across a large floor-based platform.