SMALL MUSEUM, Simone Rosenbauer

A project of immense and complex scale, Small Museum is an encounter with 41 community museums across the Australian continent. The project provides six perspectives for each location: building, people, collection, still life, portrait and object. This multifaceted approach is further supported by interview excerpts, underpinning the images with the agency of oral history.

Small Museum is a deep exploration of these intimate social spaces that are at once personal and universal in their significance. How do objects carry memory across space and time? How do they mediate loss and forgetting, exile and diaspora? What stories do they convey through both their objects and the personal journeys of their caretakers?

The extent of the project itself forms a small museum — one that charts the human imperative to collect, archive, sustain and display objects and information for public consumption. And one where the artist’s role has many dimensions: producer, artist, editor, curator, director, tourist, archivist and collector.