Artefacts Exhibition
October 2024 - March 2025

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).

ARTefacts Brochure: Available here