All The World’s Memories

‘All the World’s Memories’ brings together ten artists from Australia and Aotearoa whose practices engage contemporary image-making as a means of recording, translating, and contesting human experience.

• 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 is a nod to Alain Resnais’s short film Toute la mémoire du monde (1956), which considers the impossible task of preserving human knowledge. In Resnais’s film, we follow the journey of a book at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, from arrival to cataloguing, storage, and circulation. The library here represents institutions where memories are controlled and classified; it offers a prototype for the indexing of information, and the regulation and distribution of knowledge. 

In ‘All the World’s Memories’, artists are less concerned with the impossibility of archiving everything than with how memory resists containment altogether. Here, memory is treated as something unstable, embodied, and alive. It moves across time and histories and is alive in the languages, the bodies, and the lands from which it emerges. It is affective, political, and situated in time.

Across the exhibition, artists work with found and appropriated imagery, objects, and text to explore how memory shifts as it is translated into material and visual form. While there are visual nods to archives and systems of processing memory throughout, the exhibition ultimately questions the authority to decide what is remembered or lost in the act of preservation, and whether human memory can ever be universal or neutral.

An accompanying reader features new writing by Judy Annear, DJCS, Michael Do, Katie Dyer, James Gatt, Djon Mundine, Sarah Rose, Lisa Slade, Tim Riley Walsh, and Catherine Woolley.

Curated by José Da Silva

Image: J Davies, _Holding On Tight _2022. Courtesy the artist, Naarm/Melbourne