“We Change the World” is an interactive all ages art exhibition at The Ian Potter Centre at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in Melbourne, Australia. Visitors are invited to explore how art and design can inspire positive change, and are encouraged to think about how they as individuals have their own potential to create change.
In a new exhibition at the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia in Melbourne, more than sixty works of Australian and international contemporary art, design and fashion from the NGV Collection are featured. This includes works by Ben Quilty, the Guerrilla Girls, Richard Bell, Delissa Walker, Marlene Gilson, Ai Weiwei and Iris van Herpen. The exhibition has four thematic sections: the environment, activism, the everyday, and the future. “We Change the World” explores complex contemporary issues, that are of especially significant to younger generations, including the climate emergency, inequality, humanitarian injustices, culture, and identity.
Interactive activities and digital content at the exhibition invite audiences to directly engage with its themes. A specially designed QR-code voting system and microsite allows visitors discuss the featured art and design works. They also encounter text-based provocations and questions throughout the space, inviting critical thought and reflection inspired by the exhibitions’ pieces and design.
The exhibition will feature a new acquisition from contemporary Australian painter, Ben Quilty: 150 year, Rorschach, 2019. “During a bushwalk in the NSW Southern Highlands, Quilty and his son came across a National Parks and Wildlife sign that described the location as ‘a favourite gathering place for locals for more than 150 years’. The waterholes have been important locations for the Gundangara people for millennia and Quilty created this painting in response to the ongoing institutional denial of Aboriginal history.”
Peter Drew’s Aussie series of street posters, are created from portrait photographs of Australians found in the National Archives of Australia, is also displayed in “We Change the World.” Drew’s works draws attention to historical and contemporary prejudices by challenging people’s stereotypes of what a typical Australian may look like.
Tony Ellwood AM, Director, National Gallery of Victoria said: “Change, at its heart, is a creative gesture; and this exhibition celebrates the power of art and design to inspire us all to be creative, to celebrate uniqueness, to find our own voice and to think differently.”
All resources relating to the exhibition can be found here.
“We Change the World” is showing until the 19th of September, 2021, and is free entry. Visit the inspiring exhibition at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Fed Square, Melbourne.
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