Fiona Clark, Ana Iti & Zac Langdon-Pole in ‘All The World’s Memories’ at UNSW Galleries, Sydney, NSW

All the World’s Memories brings together 10 artists from Australia and Aotearoa whose practices consider how memory can be seen and understood.

Fiona Clark
J Davies
Nick FitzPatrick
Matthew Harris
Pat Hoffie
Ana Iti
Zac Langdon-Pole
Lillian O’Neil
Grant Stevens
Desmond Woodforde

The exhibition’s title references Toute la mémoire du monde 1956, Alain Resnais’s short film on the ambition (and ultimate impossibility) of preserving human knowledge. Following a book through the Bibliothèque nationale de France, from classification to storage and circulation, the film presents the library as a site where memories are abstracted from lived experience and rendered only legible through institutional authority.

Artists have long sought to unsettle this desire to determine what is visible and knowable from our past, and what is rendered marginal or expendable within the systems and institutions that influence humanity’s cultural memory. In All the World’s Memories, artists don’t entertain the fantasy of archiving everything. Instead, they express forms of remembering that remind us how memory might instead resist containment altogether. Here, memory is treated as something embodied—alive in the languages, bodies, and lands from which it emerges.

Accompanying the exhibition is a free reader featuring new writing by Judy Annear, DJCS, Micheal Do, Katie Dyer, James Gatt, Djon Mundine OAM, Sarah Rose, Lisa Slade, Tim Riley Walsh, and Catherine Woolley.

— Curated by José Da Silva

Fiona Clark and Zac Langdon Pole are represented in Aotearoa New Zealand by Michael Lett.

To find more exhibitions around the world by New Zealand artists, visit ArtNow.NZ