Obsolete?
Artist, Object, Small Museum
Nicole Barakat, Aleshia Lonsdale, Fiona MacDonald + Professor Lyndall Ryan
Artists Nicole Barakat, Aleshia Lonsdale and Fiona MacDonald apply their creative and investigatory flair to museum collections, in this case to Kandos Museum on the NSW Central Tablelands and Dubbo Regional Museum. The exhibition title Obsolete? Artist, Object, Small Museum, asks a central question: how can ordinary lives, then and now, and provincial objects randomly collected, illuminate Big Picture issues?
By using contemporary art’s collaborative processes, the artists create a regional historiography to engage with critical national conversations on the events, policy and propaganda that have subjugated Indigenous people and on current environmental and land contest. Their theatrical strategies mix assemblage and performance and re-making or unmaking every day or sublime objects to shed light on who assigns value and, therefore, who claims History.
