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The Stan Perron Treasures Gallery
The Stan Perron Treasures Gallery
History
Location
Hackett Hall, Western Australian Museum - Boola BardipStart date
2020-11-20Language
EnglishNotes
This exhibition, in the Hackett Hall of the Western Australian Museum is part of a suite of new permanent exhibitions in the redeveloped Western Australian Museum known as Boola Bardip. As such it does not have an end date. The Collecting the West team was responsible for a long showcase that anchored the entire exhibition in this gallery. Other smaller showcases extended the treasures on display but used the same approach to interpretation. The team included the two co-leaders of the ARC project, Alistair Paterson and Andrea Witcomb, the Research Associate Baige Zylstra and one of the Partner Investigators from the Museum, Corioli Souter. The exhibition was embedded within the redelopment of the Museum as a whole and so had designers, installers and project managers managing the larger project. Here we have recognsied the curatorial team responsible for object selection, label text and images for both the physical display and the digital interactives that accompany it.Research statement
Background Realised for the 'Collecting the West: Reimagining Western Australia from its collections' ARC Linkage project (LP160100078), this permanent exhibition in the new WA State Museum, Boola Bardip Hackett Hall Gallery sought to give one answer to the project’s research question – what work do collections do? Alongside showcasing some of the earliest objects in the Museum's collection, the exhibition aimed to explain how early collectors, collecting institutions and collecting practices in WA were integral to the process of colonisation. The exhibition sought to do this within a decolonial approach (Mignolo 2009) to exhibition making. Contribution We worked with Museum staff to co-curate a large section of this exhibition in ways that enabled the institutional aim of showcasing 'treasures' while also revealing the ways in which early collecting practices were embedded within western epistemologies and colonisation processes. Under the themes of collectors, collecting institutions & collecting, the heart of the exhibition challenged the idea of ‘treasure’. We did this by revealing the frames within which objects are conventionally understood, exposing disciplinary lenses, relations between objects across disciplinary categories and by linking their collecting histories through practices of exchange. Significance This exhibition was funded as part of an ARC Linkage project with the Western Australian Museum, The State Library of Western Australia and the Art Gallery of Western Australia, all of whom had objects in this exhibition as well as the British Museum. The exhibition's significance is thus framed by the peer review that accompanies the award of a successful ARC Linkage, the collaboration of major State collecting institutions and its location in a permanent gallery of the new WA Museum. Elements of the research that underpins the exhibition is published in Paterson, A. Witcomb, A & Shellam, T. (2020), and Paterson, A. & Witcomb, A. (2021).Editor/Contributor(s)
Paterson A, Souter C, Zylstra BEvent
Stan Perron Treasures GalleryPublisher
Western Australia MuseumPlace of publication
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