#brownmaninawhitemuseum

My residency at the Grainger Museum has been one of the most confronting and enriching projects that I have ever undertaken. Grainger funded the museum himself and donated the collection of over 40 000 objects ranging from his handwritten scores to his underpants and toenails. Clearly, eccentricity is only afforded to the privileged. Given Grainger’s sinister and patronising attitude to people of colour and his worship of blonde-haired blue-eyed Scandinavian culture, the Museum is strikingly inconsistent with the University of Melbourne’s current values and those of my own. Accordingly, my research, which takes the form of new installations, curatorial interventions, talks and performance has been about exploring the ways in which a gay mid 50s, brown-skinned, Indian born, Australian artist/ curator/ academic who has put up his hand for the development of Australian visual arts, makes sense of museum dedicated to an openly racist composer/musician who was committed to promoting his own genius.

 

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< Artist + Art = Curator