By Dongyun Kwon
A Healesville art museum won one of the 2023 Victorian Museums and Galleries Awards on Tuesday 10 October.
TarraWarra Museum of Arts was awarded Highly Commended in the medium project of the year for the gallery sector for their outstanding work in TarraWarra Biennial 2023: ua usiusi fa’ava’asavili.
Museum Director Victoria Lynn said it was the team’s first time winning an award after they launched the biennial exhibition in 2006 with the purpose of exploring and representing contemporary Australian art through an experimental, curatorial platform.
“TarraWarra Museum of Arts is thrilled to be awarded Highly Commended at the recent Victorian Museums and Galleries Awards,” she said.
“It’s very important that we are recognised by our peers and colleagues in the sector for excellence.”
The judges of the awards said the exhibition showed a commitment to championing new voices in the field and exemplifying an innovative curatorial model sparking conversations about Indigenous aesthetics and practices across Australia and in neighbouring Asia and Oceania.
This year the main theme of the TarraWarra Biennial was looking at ancestral stories of diverse groups of Australian artists in a poetic way.
The title of the exhibition, ua usiusi fa’ava’asavili, was an alagāʻupu, Sāmoan proverb, meaning ‘the canoe obeys the wind’ which was a Great Ocean celestial navigation practice.
“It was curated by an artist Dr Leuli Eshragi who has Persian and Samoan background and Leuli was interested in the way Australia is part of an archipelago,” Ms Lynn said.
Dr Leuli Eshragi has been named curator of Indigenous arts at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in Canada.
