Parallel Structures Exhibition Program

Curated by Verónica Tello and Salote Tawale, Parallel Structures (2023-2024) is an exhibition program developed with and beside the Murray Albury Museum of Art (MAMA).

Between October 20, 2023, and March 17, 2024, Parallel and MAMA staged four curatorial commissions at the Museum and at the Community Farm, Gateway Island.

Parallel Structures engages with the specificity of the Museum’s region. Located on Wiradjuri Country/Albury, the Museum is part of the Albury-Wodonga border community on the Murray River. During the 1960s & ‘70s, the region was a designated resettlement area for displaced First Nations people. Since the end of World War II, Albury-Wodonga has resettled refugees and migrants, most recently from the global south.

Parallel Structures grapples with the region’s histories of displacement and dispossession to advance knowledge on how the Museum and regional art museums more broadly can operate in situated ways.

It re-imagines several facets of museum operations, including collecting, outreach, education, and the interacting concepts of memory, community and resource sharing. How can museums be reconfigured from their colonial foundations to a more localised, responsive base? How do we transmit knowledge on restructuring museums with and for community? How do we make often invisible, yet always palpable, processes of structural change seen and felt?

The Parallel Structures commissions include:
Kelly Dezart-Smith, Dream Variations, 20 October 2023–16 February 2024
Evgenia Anagnostopoulou, Monumental as Anything, 3 November 2023 – 11 February 2024
Ruha Fifita, Our Museum, 2 February –17 March 2024
Sebastian Henry-Jones & Lana Nguyen, Site School (Is Cool), 12–16 March, March 16 open to the public
Tian Zhang, internal project on care at the Museum, no exhibition

Ying-Lan Dann, RMIT Interior Design, leads Parallel Structures’ exhibition design.

Parallel Structures (2023-2024) is a curatorial program led by Verónica Tello (UNSW Art & Design) and Salote Tawale (Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney) in collaboration with Murray Art Museum Albury. The exhibition design for Parallel Structures is led by Ying-Lan Dann, RMIT Interior Design, in dialogue with Parallel and the Murray Art Museum Albury. Parallel Structures is the exhibition outcome of the Australian Research Council project Parallel. For more information, please visit https://parallelstructures.art 

Thanks to the Parallel Advisory Network, Runway Journal, the Australian Research Council, Create NSW, Creative Australia, and the School of Art & Design, University of New South Wales, for their generous support.