04/12/06 – Panel Discussion: Working through history

Speakers:

Julie Evoington (Head of Australian Art)
Justine Cooper
eX de Medici
Jitish Kallat

History is a hot topic.
e.g history of Australia (the Indigenous community)
Important thing to note: must always think of History as a multiple -> Histories


Justin Cooper:

• Extensively exhibited in the past 15 years
• See Science as part of the culture
• Interested in the Museum’s storage area and how they change over time
­ Managed to look at 20+ - 30 million collection that are part of private collection
• Interested in how the collection represented the art at the time of collection
­ Wonder if the museum does it for to gain more knowledge on the collection or out of curiosity
• Multiple history e.g. history of Museum, the collection etc.
­ Justin Cooper feels that her chance of being able to look at the private collections, gave her a chance to use her ‘modern eyes’ to see what had been collected/done, many years ago
­ The collections are in higher demand now as their monetary value has increase. The Museum therefore has to collect more to save them.
• There are 3 kinds of photos the she took:
1. the cabinet shots
2. a contradiction of the collection
e.g. millions of insects versus 1 lonely lion head in a picture
3. the anthropology collection

Jitish Kallat:

• direct and straightforward works which shows where we stand now
• interested in the pop culture
• text based work
• his works mainly focus on a period of 10 years of India (1992-2002)
­ e.g. in 1991, there is only 1 TV channel but in 1992, there are over 90 TV channels
­ because of the opening up of technology, there are many major changes in India within 1 year

Qn: How the works are addressed to the history of our time?

eX de Medici:

• she is a left wing person
• Her first large water colour painting is blue and its theme is on family history and the return of the folk
• She likes to place skull on flesh to act as great paradox
• She had done a series work for 10 years and would continue doing it until the present government in gone
­ She is actually quite sick of them now and hopes to stop doing them by next year!
• Her 3rd image (pearly capital) focus on the shift of values in present society and thet “made people’s head spin”
• Her green work is a pun (Its mainly about environmental issues)
• Her black work symbolize a ‘crash’

****Conclusion:
People are conflicting and contradicting themselves. They try to preserve histories so as to ‘keep’ them but somehow destroy them in the process.