West Space presents a project at the Living Museum of the West – The Museum is the Region, the Region is the Museum

Artists: Avni Dauti, Lisa Radford and Kim Munro and Sam George, Susan Jacobs, Mikhail Karikis & Uriel Orlow, Kerrie Poliness, Geoff Robinson. Curated by Danny Lacy, Liang Luscombe & Patrice Sharkey

Exhibition Dates: Sunday 7 September – Sunday 5 October 2020 (12-5pm Friday, Saturday and Sunday)
Location: The Living Museum of the West is located at Pipemakers Park, Van Ness Avenue, Maribyrnong. Melway Map 28 B10. See the Westpace website for more detail directions and a map.
Exhibition opening: Saturday 6 September 2014, 2-4pm.

The exhibition will be opened by Councillor Grant Miles (Mayor, City of Maribyrnong).

About the Exhibition
The exhibition 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 this exhibition features newly commissioned work by a range of local and international artists. Each work responds 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.

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 Fleming 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 that poses the question ‘What’s missing?’ in relation to how the community-focused Living Museum of the West came into existence in 1984 and the museum’s current position in the community thirty years on.

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.