QUEER: Stories from the NGV Collection

QUEER: Stories from the NGV Collection is a sprawling hang split across all seven galleries of the third floor of the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) International. It is the largest queer exhibition ever staged at a state gallery in Australia, consisting of approximately 400 works from antiquity to the present including fine art, fashion and design. The exhibition was brought together by a curatorium of five internal curators: Ted Gott, Angela Hesson, Myles Russell-Cook, Meg Slater, and Pip Wallis. QUEER doesn’t attempt to provide a definitive history of queer art—that would be impossible, especially given the historical limits of the explicitly queer content in the NGV’s collection—instead the central ambition of QUEER is to explore the NGV collection through a ‘queer lens’. Divided into several loose thematic groupings that bleed into each other, the list of artists is so vast it is impossible to succinctly survey: Andy Warhol, Vivienne Binns and a Grecian vase from 540BCE are included in this broad church. After all, QUEER is a collection hang, where the imperative is to ‘get it out and show it off’. This is evident in the crowded exhibition design, a not uncommon result of collective curatorial visions, especially one that is attempting to satisfy intergenerational and diverse queer communities. In QUEER, design interventions are minimal: no mirrored walls or architectural interventions typically associated with the NGV’s major exhibitions. The lack of pizzazz that one might expect from a queer celebration leaves it feeling a little straight. Accompanying the exhibition is a 628–page publication with over sixty texts, and like the exhibition the catalogue surveys queerness not only though expressions of identity but as a politics, a sensibility, and an aesthetic movement.

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