to listen, not to preserve

                                                           
March 2022
group exhibition with Archie Barry, Akil Ahamat, V Barratt, Snack Syndicate, Debris Facility Pty Ltd, Kevin Diallo, Jesse Gall at the Living Museum of the West, Curated by Isabella Hone-Saunders and Sebastian Henry-Jones.

This group project has developed in recognition that today, visibility carries with it a growing caveat. Being present and identifiable has become a double-edged sword in the age of Capitalist and state-sanctioned surveillance. At the same time that there is a call for more equal representation in our institutions and official histories, vulnerable groups and individuals are also wishing to avoid the capture of their information within biometrics-driven processes that seek to identify and control them.

to listen, not to preserve places the practices of early, mid and advanced career artists in dialogue with the rich, community-driven archive and history of the Living Museum of The West, to consider different ways and positions from which storytelling may evade the impulse to make empirical sense and order of our lives.

Through the re-framing, interpretation and presentation of historical material alongside and within newly-commissioned work, the artists in this project demonstrate the power of storytelling, that brings conventional, narrative construction and the role of the narrator themselves into question. Such an undertaking requires a sensitivity to the at once exclusionary and extractive histories of single-author archives and modes of exhibition, and recognises opaqueness, artifice and imagination as useful strategies for avoiding easy classification. As such, those values constitute a way of working as much as they form the subject matter of the project.

Co-curated by Isabella Hone-Saunders and Sebastian Henry-Jones.
Co-presented by West Space Offsite.

This project was supported by Create NSW and City of Marybyrnong.


Read here, ‘The paradox of paradise’ a response to to listen, not to preserve written by Rosemary Forde.

Read here, ‘And Seb starting thinking about the birds’ a response by Isabella Hone-Saunders.