Parallel is an Australian Research Council Linkage project developed in collaboration with artists, writers and researchers based at UNSW Art & Design (University of New South Wales), the Institute for Culture and Society (Western Sydney University) and Sydney College of the Arts (University of Sydney), working in partnership with the Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA).
The project embraces the potential of the ‘parallel’ or the ‘para’ as a way of being adjacent to, beyond or distinct from the structural formations that are typically the case in Australian art institutions.
Our research project builds on the 2018 Diversity Arts Australia report, Shifting the Balance, which found that, at a structural level, Australian cultural institutions, including art galleries and museums, had low levels of representation of art workers from so called Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CaLD) backgrounds. While we acknowledge that the label CaLD requires more examination, the Diversity Arts Australia report has motivated us to propose new ways to redress this structural under-representation.
Parallel aims to move away from the common method of ‘diversifying’ art museums via audience development, instead turning to a key role in museums—curatorial practice. We propose that curation, with its focus on caring for the museum’s core operations of collecting, exhibiting and public programming, can offer new ways to think and feel structural change.
This project partners with MAMA to embrace the potential of regional art museums, which are parallel—adjacent to, beyond, distinct from—normative ‘art centres.’ Parallel considers that regional art museums, committed to their local and increasingly diverse communities as a result of humanitarian resettlement programs, can be at the forefront of this kind of structural change.
MAMA is located on Wiradjuri country/Albury and is part of the Albury-Wodonga border community situated along the Murray River. Since the end of World War II, Albury-Wodonga has been a site for the resettlement of refugees and migrants, most recently resettling people from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Philippines, Nepal and India. During the 1960s and ‘70s, the region was also a designated resettlement area for displaced First Nations people. Since its re-opening in 2015, MAMA has been grappling with the complex ways in which displacement and dispossession have shaped its community—a region that is home to people from many distinct nations, languages and cultures.
Between 2022-2024, MAMA will work with Parallel to foster understandings of how museums can be reimagined and restructured in collaboration with curators from CaLD backgrounds.
Parallel has commissioned six independent and/or emerging curators who identify as non-Anglo/CaLD/BIPOC to develop projects that explore opportunities for structural change at MAMA.
The Fellows are: Evgenia Anagnostopoulou Kelly Dezart-Smith Sebastian Henry-Jones Ruha Fifata Lana Kate Nguyen Tian Zhang
Fellows will be mentored by non-Anglo/CaLD/BIPOC researchers (from Parallel) and curators and museum directors (from MAMA/Advisory Network, listed below) to develop vocabularies, protocols, knowledge and networks across multiple cultures.
MAMA and Parallel are committed to better understanding the relationship between museums and experiences of migration, dispossession and colonisation. With Parallel, MAMA will play host to museological and curatorial experiments that can run beside, adjacent to and beyond conventional museum structures. MAMA will offer resources and support our six participants to produce new projects, which will be central to envisaging how MAMA, and other Australian regional art museums more broadly, may reimagine its structures and support diverse art workers.
Parallel and Runway Journal are excited to partner on a new initiative: Parallel Conversations. Over two years (2022-2023) we will support twelve non-Anglo/CALD/BIPOC writers to advance critical, bold and experimental thinking on ways of enacting structural change in Australian art institutions, with a focus on regional art museums.
In 2022 Parallel Conversations will commission six 2000-word texts for publication on Runway Journal’s digital Conversations platform.The 2022 Parallel Conversations commissioned authors are:
Yasbelle Kerkow Isobel Morphy-Walsh Lucia Tường Vy Nguyễn Brian Obiri-Asare Victoria Pham Bea Rubio-Gabriel
Runway Journal cultivates and preserves experimental practice on their digital platform. They commission and publish critical, experimental and bold written and artistic works that engage with current discourse in Australian and international contemporary art. Through our collaboration, Parallel and Runway Journal aim to foster a new generation of writers to grapple with and critique the limits of Australian art institutions, generating new ideas and speculative propositions as to what such institutions can become. We are committed to non-normative writing, as well as critical, astute analysis — both are necessary to understand what structural change is, and how it might better appear in our institutions.
Through Parallel Conversations, writers will undertake an extended period of knowledge-sharing and receive support from Parallel, Runway Journal and invited industry experts, Nicholas Croggon (founding editor of Discipline and Sydney editor of MeMO) and Amelia Winata (founding editor of MeMO and editor of Index Journal). The Runway Journal Board Members working on Parallel Conversations in 2022 are: Mariam Arcilla, Johanna Bear, Julie Ha, Rebecca Hall, Sarah Hibbs, Ellen Formby, Yuna Lee, Janey Li, June Miskell and Siân Scott-Clash.
Verónica Tello, UNSW Art & Design
Salote Tawale, Sydney College of the Arts
Ien Ang, Institute for Culture and Society, WSU
Phillip Mar, Institute for Culture and Society, WSU
Bree Pickering, Director
Nanette Orly, Assistant Curator
Sophie Holvast, Public Programs Officer
Michael Moran, Curator
Tina Baum, Gulumirrgin (Larrakia), Wardaman and Karajarri peoples, Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art, National Gallery of Australia
Ellie Buttrose, Curator, Contemporary Australian Art, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art
Paschal Daantos Berry, Head of Learning and Participation, Art Gallery of New South Wales
Rebekah Raymond, Arabana, Limilngan-Wulna, Wuthathi, and Mualgal peoples, Curator of Aboriginal Art and Material Culture, Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory
Talia Smith, Curator, Granville Centre Art Gallery
Mikala Tai, Visual Arts Director, Australia Council for the Arts