| National Gallery of Victoria | FREE | Call venue for more details
 |
Saturday 10 January 2009. 10:00 AM
Sunday 11 January 2009. 10:00 AM
Monday 12 January 2009. 10:00 AM
Tuesday 13 January 2009. 10:00 AM
Wednesday 14 January 2009. 10:00 AM
Thursday 15 January 2009. 10:00 AM
Friday 16 January 2009. 10:00 AM
Click here to see all dates
The enduring connection between archives and photography will be explored in a fascinating exhibition opening at the National Gallery of Victoria on 18 October.
Due to its ability to record and organise images, photography has a natural association with archives. As both collections of records and repositories of data, archives contain elements of truth and error.
Archives are able to shape history and memory depending on how, when and by whom the records are assessed. They contain public and private documents, unique and reproduced information and their vastness allows for multiple interpretations.
Order and disorder: Archives and photography presents the work of 11 artists including Bernd and Hilla Becher, Candida Höfer, Simon Obarzanek, Robert Rooney, Ed Ruscha, Charles Green and Lyndell Brown, Patrick Pound, Linda Judge, and Penelope Davis.
Largely drawn from the NGV Collection, several of the artists in this exhibition act as archivists, collecting and ordering unique bodies of images as part of their art work, while others create disorder by critiquing the ideas and systems of archives.
A highlight of the exhibition will be the display of recently acquired photograms by Penelope Davis, from her enigmatic Fiction-Non-Fiction series.
Davis casts resin moulds of the spines of books, which are then laid directly onto the photographic paper and exposed to colored lights. Stripped of context and disconnected from their original functions, the ethereal books hover on the page like phantom texts that exist somewhere between what is known and what is imagined.
Maggie Finch, Assistant Curator of Photography, NGV said that the works in Order and disorder help us to consider the impulse to collect and order the world around us.