Sites of Communication
Symposium 3
Speakers Day 2
Professor Martin Nakata
Chair of Australian Indigenous Education, Director of Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning, University of Technology, Sydney
The Cultural InterfaceBiography
Professor Martin Nakata is the first Torres Strait Islander to receive a PhD in Australia, and his current research work focuses on higher education curriculum areas, and on Indigenous knowledge and library services. He has presented eighteen plenary and keynote addresses at national as well as international conferences in ten countries, and published over seventy articles on Indigenous Australians and education in various academic journals and books in Australia an abroad. His book, Disciplining the Savages - Savaging the Disciplines, has recently been published by Aboriginal Studies Press.Synopsis
This keynote address will draw together theoretical work Prof N M Nakata has been progressing in the Higher Education sector to highlight complexities of the intersection between Indigenous and non-Indigenous positions. Prof Nakata will use recent preoccupations with Indigenous Knowledge to highlight dimensions of the complex before introducing the Cultural Interface as an alternate framework for understanding and engaging such complexities in the everyday situation of Indigenous learners. He will then propose an Indigenous Standpoint Theory to achieve a better fit to formal education agendas.-
Professor Vijoleta Braach-Maksvytis
Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Innovation & Development), The University of MelbourneKnowledge Transfer: Theory and Practice
Biography
Professor Vijoleta Braach-Maksvytis is the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Innovation and Development) at the University of Melbourne. She is responsible for the Knowledge Transfer strand of the University’s ‘triple-helix’ strategy, Growing Esteem and is an avid speaker on issues relating to future societies, innovation systems, global development, and the nexus between art, science and society.
Synopsis
This presentation examines the role that knowledge organisations can play in breaking down the 'walls' between sectors and opening up creative paths to social innovation. Using case studies from The University of Melbourne, it is the often unexpected connections that reap the richest rewards.
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Lynne Seear
Assistant Director of Curatorial & Collections Development, Queensland Art GalleryDichotomy: Risk & Tradition
Biography
Lynne Seearoversaw the development of the inaugural Collection displays for the opening of GoMA and the refurbished Queensland Art Gallery in late 2006. She has co-edited several major Gallery publications including The 5th Asia–Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (2006) and the two volumes published on the Gallery’s Australian art collection — Brought to Light: Australian Art 1850–1965 (1998) and Brought to Light II: Australian Art 1966–2006 (2007).
Synopsis
This paper explores some of the strategies used by the Queensland Art Gallery in the past few years to build audiences for contemporary art. The Queensland Art Gallery is in a distinctive position as a state institution given that, contrary to expectations about the conservative demographic in Queensland, its primary audience for the past several years has been a large, general audience for contemporary art. This outcome has been driven by the success of the Gallery’s flagship project, the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, and by the innovative programs and exhibitions for children and family audiences that have become a core part of the Gallery’s activities. The paper will deal with the complexities of reaching out to and communicating with a diverse audience and will outline the main principles which underlie QAG’s philosophy as a 21st century art museum.
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Brian Ladd
Head of Public Programs, Art Gallery of New South WalesFacilitator of Case Studies: Partnerships and Collaborations – Value to Community
Biography
Brian Ladd is Head of the Public Programs department at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. He is also the Director of the Brett Whiteley Foundation and also the William Fletcher Foundation and is a member of the curatorial panel for Headland Sculpture Park, Sydney. Brian has a vast experience in art museum education and has presented at numerous conferences for art museum professionals in Australia and internationally. -
No Such Place - Art & Place Based Identity
Biography
Marla Guppy is the director of Guppy & Associates, a Sydney based planning consultancy providing specialist services to Government, arts, community and commercial agencies in cultural planning, civic processes and public art development. Established in 1989, Guppy & Associates have completed a wide range of assignments including community renewal, facilities development, city cultural plans and major art projects. A strong advocate for cultural sustainability in urban Australia Marla received the prestigious Ros Bower Memorial Award from Paul Keating for her work in community cultural development in 1995.
Synopsis
Urban growth has led to a renewed interest in the link between place and cultural identity. This presentation explores the emerging role of cultural projects including public art in recalling place memories. It also asks how this process is changing as new virtual identities challenge geographical and historical connections. -
Let's Shake Project
Biography
Karen Casey is a Melbourne interdisciplinary artist working within both the gallery and public art sectors. She has exhibited widely in Australia and overseas and has developed a number of large scale commissioned artworks. Karen has long been an advocate for social harmony through numerous personal, public and community arts projects. She is artist and facilitator of the Let’s Shake reconciliation handshake project.
Synopsis
Let's Shake is a public participation event encouraging people to extend a hand beyond their comfort zone and make a genuine connection with another person. The process involves casting the inside of a handshake while participants sit opposite each other and make conversation, the resulting forms are then recorded and boxed for inclusion in future public artworks. An installation of the handshakes is to be presented at the Ian Potter Centre, NGV Australia during Reconciliation Week 2008. This paper will elaborate on the Let’s Shake project, while examining the role of the artist as an agent for social change.
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Gina Panebianco
Head of Education and Public Programs, NGVCrossing Boundaries: Akira Isogawa Program
Biography
An art educator for more than 30 years, Gina has undertaken diverse roles in secondary and post compulsory education and museum education. Gina has a Bachelor of Education from the University of Melbourne and has presented at international and Australian education symposia. Gina has worked at the NGV for two decades and over this time has been responsible for the interpretation of the NGV collections and exhibitions through programs and resources for visitors, schools and the wider community – in the last 12 months some 255,000 people have participated in the gallery’s education and public programs.
Synopsis
Bringing art and people together has been a guiding principle for NGV education and public programs in the past 5 years. The search for relevance and meaning for audiences engaging with art in galleries has been inspired by and led to an intense levels of collaboration between diverse and multiple stakeholders. The NGVs Akira Isogawa exhibition of 2005, the related community programs and the international tour is an example of partnerships that have resulted in an unmapped journey through discoveries, learnings, opportunities and tensions that presented risks and challenges with far reaching impact on museum education and communities beyond the NGV. -
Margaret Griffith
Manager, Public Programs, Melbourne MuseumThe Neighbourhood and the Museum: Science Morning Teas
Biography
Margaret Griffith is the Manager of Public Programs at Melbourne Museum, and has a background in adult community education. The Public Programs Department staff are currently reviewing both their Community Engagement Strategy and their Learning Strategy, and the Science Morning Teas project is a good example of how these strategies can come together in a museum/community collaboration.
Synopsis
Science Morning Teas is a national project for family learning in museums. During the first half of 2007, pilot projects have been implemented at Melbourne Museum and Scienceworks in Victoria, and at SciTech in Western Australia. These projects have focussed on families living in the neighbourhood of each of the museums but, for varying reasons, not using its services. Participants have included recently arrived refugee groups and families with young parents (14 - 24 year olds). The project aims to provide these groups with the strategies to access museum services and to see cultural institutions as a place for ongoing family learning and entertainment. Stage Two of this project sees the project staff visiting 10 museums in regional and metropolitan Australia, to deliver training in strategies to engage non-traditional visitors with their local museums. Science Morning Teas is supported by an Adult Literacy Innovation grant from the Department of Education Science and Training.
Summary
Museums and other cultural institutions can move beyond their traditional audiences and engage non-visitors from their local neighbourhood. Museum Victoria is currently working on a national project to involve groups from the local community in meaningful and ongoing museum activities. This program is soon to be delivered as a training package to museums throughout Australia. -
Michael Pearce
Senior Architect, Design IncAn Architecture of Light, Energy and the Museum
Biography
Michael Pearce has been working in Australia, the UK, Zimbabwe and Zambia for 42 years. His experience covers a wide range, from building in remote parts of Central Africa to converting old buildings in North-East England and large-scale city developments in Harare and Chinhoyi, Zimbabwe’, an ecological exhibition centre in Belgium and the CH2 council office block in Melbourne, Australia. Committed to appropriate ecological architecture, Michael Pearce has focused upon the development of buildings that have low maintenance, low capital and running costs and renewable energy systems of environmental control. The most recent work involves an approach to design in which the architecture expression is seen as a balance of the natural, the social and the economic environments in which the project is sited. He uses models from nature, copying natural processes which he studies through the new science of Biomimicry.
Synopsis
My focus will be on some of the possibilities that are opening to architecture in a new age of uncertainty, energy base shifts, and global warming. I was born in central Africa which has seen the earliest consequences of the crises we are all now facing and it was here that this quest began during the late 80’s and ended in the Eastgate building in Harare. In Australia I have been able to explore an architecture, which is locally called sustainable and which is inspired by the sciences of physics, biology, chemistry, psychology, and human physiology. I found when talking to a zookeeper here that he knew more about the animals in his care than I knew about the human animals who have to inhabit my buildings. In this sense architecture is like a third skin. There is skin, cloths and then shelter. This led to the CH2 building here in Melbourne. I will refer to Biomimicry, which means copying the processes we are discovering in nature. I am therefore searching for new connections between the human and nature; connections which produce architectural expressions which are inspired by human constructions of nature. Finally, I will conclude that this quest is more like the classic tradition of architecture as Vitruvius and the Greeks before him saw that architecture was born of fire which gave us light and energy. All of these ideas place architecture far away from pure sculptural forms and the celebration of the machine age embodied in the dictum “the house is a machine for living in”. It maybe more like a living system, modelled on the eco system, because it has to be inhabited by people who can hopefully extend their psyche beyond themselves and into the boundaries of the third skin. I will give examples to explain these ideas with images of building I have designed in Africa and here in Australia during the last 20 years including Eastgate in Harare and CH2 in Melbourne. -
Martyn Hook
Associate Editor, Monument Magazine & Course Leader, RMIT Architecture, RMIT UniversityTyranny of the White Cube or ‘Yes its wonderful, but all I really wanted was a big room with white walls and some decent lighting’
Biography
Martyn is Course Leader of the Architecture Program at RMIT University and a Director of internationally acclaimed architects iredale pedersen hook. He also holds a MA completed at the Bartlett School, University College London, and is currently completing a PhD at RMIT University. He has been Guest Professor at TU Wien, Innsbruck University and Wismar University (Germany) and Visiting Critic at The Bartlett, Mackintosh School of Architecture (Glasgow) and University of Brighton. Martyn has also been the Associate Editor of MONUMENT Magazine for 10 years and has lectured widely about Australian architecture throughout Europe and the US. His curatorial experience is grounded as Co-curator of the Australian presence at the Rotterdam Architecture Biennale in 2003 and again in 2005.
Synopsis
In the design of the contemporary museum the agendas of the architect have often been at odds with the desires of the curators who have to occupy the spaces they create. Architect and academic Martyn Hook will discuss a collection of recent museums around the globe including Kanazawa Museum of Contemporary Art by SANAA, Daniel Libeskind's Denver Art Museum and San Francisco's de Young Museum by Herzog de Meuron. He will explore how the contemporary museum might fulfil many requirements beyond the simple provision of a good exhibition space and why architects might not even get that right. -
Craig Judd
Senior Curator of Art, Tasmanian Museum and Art GalleryFacilitator of Case Studies: Exhibition Design
Biography
Senior Curator of Art at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Craig Judd has curated a range of historical and contemporary exhibitions such as Leigh Hobba: The Space of Presence, Echoes of Classicism, The Flower Show, Register:Tasmanian Artists 2006,Your call is important to us etc. Craig Judd was the Education and Public Programs Manager at the Biennale of Sydney 1999-2005. Recent projects and consultancies include: Museums and Galleries Foundation NSW conference development; curatorial projects for Lake Macquarie City Gallery, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery & MCA partnership. A graduate of the ANU and University of Melbourne, Craig has over twenty years teaching experience in art history and theory, at ANU, College of Fine Arts, UNSW and Sydney College of the Arts Sydney University. Craig Judd has a long involvement with the Art Gallery of New South Wales and continues to participate in lecture and public programs there as well as other institutions around Australia. -
Don Heron
Head of Exhibitions and Display, Queensland Art GalleryInstalling the APT in the new GOMA, Brisbane
Biography
Don Heron is the Head of Exhibitions and Display at the Queensland Art Gallery and Queensland Gallery of Modern Art. He manages the coordination, design and installation of exhibitions and collection displays for the gallery’s two buildings.
Synopsis
This paper will explore the exhibition design of the 5th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT5) with a particular emphasis on how the exhibition was designed for, and installed in the new Gallery of Modern Art building. This will include some discussion of the challenges we faced in presenting the APT as the opening exhibition for the new gallery. -
Emma McRae
Curatorial and Project Coordinator, ExperimentaExperimenta Playground
Biography
Emma McRae is currently the Project and Curatorial Coordinator at Experimenta Media Arts. She has been working with new media and video since 1996. Her video works have been screened and performed at galleries and festivals nationally and internationally including ISEA, Japan; Futuresonic, Manchester, UK; Sound Summit, Newcastle, Australia; Champ Libre, Montreal, Canada; Gwangju Biennale, Korea; and Vooruit, Gent, Belgium. In 2004 Emma was project manager and curatorial assistant for I thought I knew but I was wrong: New Video Art from Australia, an Australian Centre for the Moving Image/Asialink touring exhibition. She co-curated Experimenta’s 2007 and 2005 major exhibitions 'Experimenta Playground' and 'Experimenta Vanishing Point' and in 2006 curated Oz Digital Shorts for the Sydney Film Festival. She was the project manager for the 2006/07 Experimenta Vanishing Point national tour and 2006 Experimenta Under the Radar UK tour.
Synopsis
This presentation will discuss the process of exhibition design for Experimenta Playground, with a focus on the challenges of working within a non-traditional gallery venue for the exhibition of media art. -
Daryl West-Moore
Manager, Design, NGVMelbourne Winter Masterpieces and Guggenheim Collection: 1940s to Now
Biography
Daryl West-Moore has a Bachelor of Industrial Design from RMIT with 20 years experience as an Exhibition Designer. In 1996 Daryl was appointed Chief Exhibition Designer and Redevelopment Design Manager for the NGV focusing on the two significant infra-structure projects; the creation of the Ian Potter Centre NGV Australia at Federation Square and the redevelopment and refurbishment of NGV International. Daryl is responsible for all collection and temporary exhibitions.Synopsis
This presentation will focus on the exhibition design process for the Melbourne Winter Masterpieces series of exhibitions at NGV International. Daryl will discuss some of the practical and aesthetic considerations of this annual transformation of the temporary exhibition galleries.
