By Dongyun Kwon
A local art museum once again got good recognition among the Victorian art community.
Tarrawarra Museum of Art (TWMA) was awarded Highly Commended in the medium project of the year for the gallery sector in the 2024 Victorian Museums and Galleries Awards for its exhibition The Soil Project.
The Soils Project was exhibited from 5 August to 12 November last year at TWMA and is now showing again at the Van Abbe Museum in the Netherlands until 24 November.
TWMA director Victoria Lynn said the TWMA team was honoured to win the highly commended award for the second year in a row.
“It’s really gratifying to know that our peers in the museum and gallery industry recognise the original work that we’re doing at TWMA,” she said.
“The award recognised the ambition of the project and the participation of artists and communities across many different countries including many Indigenous artists.”
The Soils Project has brought together 13 practitioners and collectives from Australia, the Netherlands and Indonesia to explore the complex and diverse relationships between environmental change and colonisation.
The project has arisen from specific and situated practices that each of the participants and artists brought to their understanding of soil, as both metaphor and matter.
Ms Lynn said the works of the participants were very positive and had looked a lot at the idea of regeneration of Indigenous planting and healing of the soil.
“We came together just before the Covid pandemic around questions of the link between colonisation and climate change, and in particular, looking at ways that artists can express their concerns about the changes to our natural world through the perspective of countries being colonised by foreign powers,” she said.
“So the reason why we work with the Netherlands and Indonesia is because the Dutch had a very big colonial presence in Indonesia over a few centuries, and also as we know here in Australia, the British colonised this country.
“The reason we used the word soil in the project is because everybody understands what soil is.”
Last year, TWMA received the same award with TarraWarra Biennial 2023: ua usiusi fa’ava’asavili.
Ms Lynn shared TWMA’s secret to keep on getting good recognition.
Originality, working with topics that are relevant to people’s lives today, creating new commissions from the artists, exhibiting brand new work by the artists and presenting the excellent scholarly context for the work that we do in the form of didactic panels and information and online content [are our secret],” the museum director said.
“This particular award isn’t just for Tarrawarra but it’s for everybody involved in the project, which were three countries and many participants from different nationalities.”
