The Australia Pavilion exhibition for the Venice Architecture Biennale of 2023 Unsettling Queenstown makes its way to home soil for its first Australian appearance since the biennale.
The exhibition will be presented at Design Tasmania between 3 August and 8 September 2024.
Curated and developed by the Ali Gumillya Baker, Anthony Coupe, Emily Paech, Sarah Rhodes and Julian Worrall, the installation responded to the overall biennale theme "Laboratory of the Future," set by curator Lesley Lokko. The exhibition explored concepts of decolonisation and regeneration, focusing on the "unsettling" of two Australian Queenstowns - one in Tasmania and the other in South Australia.
The creative directors explained the exhibition prompts viewers to cast their mind beyond the borders of Australia. "A place both specific and typical, there are Queenstowns all over the world, reflecting the global reach of British colonialism and the impact of its pattern of relations to land, nature and people."
The display features a large suspended copper structure, two-dimensional paper elements and a multimedia (video and sound) component. The suspended structure dubbed "Belvedere Ghost" is a replica of the arched belvedere of the Empire Hotel, which was built in the year of Australia's Federation in the copper-mining town of Queenstown, Tasmania. Two video works are also presented as part of the display, each created to convey a personal sense of place.
In his critique of Unsettling Queenstown, Donald Bates said of the multimedia aspect, "I hear a deeper, more connective narrative emerging, as personal stories and reminiscences give anecdotal flesh to the histories of our Queenstowns, laying bare the political, social and racial complexities of the past, present and future Queenstowns," he said.
