I will tell you my story

UTS Gallery

8 February – 1 April 2022

Curator Talia Smith

I will tell you my story brings new context to the UTS Art Collection, its history and future; exploring numerous outlooks including oral histories, personal and institutional identity, remixed and manipulated archives, the cyclical nature of time and representation, and the threat of modern technologies to ownership and authenticity. Institutional art collections can be an archive of their past attitudes and future aspirations as well as a constellation of knowledges and times. As records of evolving tastes and values, collections are prone to inevitable gaps in knowledge, language and care. Talia Smith has curated parts of the collection in conversation with seven contemporary artists, to consider how collections can be re-read in light of the present, challenged as an archive, and imagined anew.

Shown for the first time, Jess Bradford’s The Picture Collection exhibits part of her personal photograph collection. Over the last decade Bradford has been building a personal archive of photographs of the famed Singaporean ‘cultural theme park’ Haw Par Villa. This archive is an alternative visual collection to the top-down institutional imaging of the Nation, it’s cultures and citizens, and explores and challenges what shared cultural memory is.

Exhibition catalogue

Photography by Jacquie Manning