Artefacts Exhibition

Detail from modern work by glass artist Harriet Schwarzrock (left), in response to an 8th century BCE bronze spiral brooch (right) from the ANU Classics Museum collection (1980.12).

Exhibition
October 2024 - March 2025

Location
ANU Classics Museum
Ground Floor, AD Hope Building,
Australian National University, 14 Ellery Crescent, Acton

Tours
Please contact ANU Classics Museum at classics.museum@anu.edu.au to organise a tour.

The ARTefacts Project

Co-Curators Dr Georgia Pike-Rowney and Julian Laffan

The ARTefacts Project engages contemporary artists and scholars completing higher degree research in the creation of new works that respond to the collection of the ANU Classics Museum. Co-curated by artist, educator and PhD candidate Julian Laffan, and Friends’ Lecturer in Classics and Classics Museum Curator Dr Georgia Pike-Rowney, the project enables participating artists to animate, activate and interrogate the collection through the lens of contemporary art practice and scholarship.

The exhibition displays the contemporary works throughout, and amongst, the ancient collection of artefacts in the museum, with the aim of creating a direct dialogue between ancient and modern works. The creative responses spark new questions and debates concerning material, meaning, value, and narrative. The aim of the ARTefacts project is to intentionally recontextualise artefacts in order to investigate the politics of identity and materiality from the perspective of makers. Within the museum context, creative practice as a research methodology connects contemporary artists, scholars and audiences with new dialogues, and thus, new futures, for ancient artefacts and collections.

Participating artists have been supported by the Friends of the Classics Museum Creative Bursary towards the new creative and written works. The exhibition launch event is supported by the Research School of Humanities and the Arts (RSHA).

Participating artists:

Aidan Hartshorn (MPhil Candidate, SoAD, ANU) considers the ongoing practices of Walgalu (Wolgalu, Wolgal) people that pre-date the ancient ideal of the Classical object, disrupting colonial narratives through traditional forms made with unexpected contemporary materials.

Julian Laffan (PhD Candidate, SoAD, ANU) considers the life of a tree in the form of a 1st – 2nd century CE Egyptian writing tablet, investigating the connectivity of wood as a material in the story of writing and memory.

Robert Nugent (PhD Candidate, UWS) interprets the 2004 theft from the museum of a bronze portrait head (turn of the 1st century BCE / CE), returning a presence of the artefact to its case in filmic form.

Susie Russell (PhD Candidate, CAHAT, ANU) explores gender and family with a written analysis of classically inspired vessels by Australian artist Wendy Wood.

Harriet Schwarzrock (PhD Candidate, SoAD, ANU) creates plasma-illuminated glass forms in response to an 8th century BCE bronze spiral brooch. This work is created to move beyond the boundaries of the glass case, encouraging visitors to touch the pulsing glass forms.

Acknowledgements

Georgia and Julian would like to thank the following individuals and organisations, without whom the ARTefacts Project, and resulting exhibition, would not have been possible:

Participating artists Harriet Schwarzrock, Aidan Hartshorn, Susie Russell and Robert Nugent
ANU Collections staff Maggie Otto (ANU Senior Collections Advisor) and Charlotte Forbes (RSHA Collections Officer)
Friends of the ANU Classics Museum
Research School of Humanities and the Arts
CASS Building Operations
HAL Admin Team
Drill Hall Gallery
National Museum of Australia