MIGRATION AS ART MUSEUM

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In 1990 Australian artist Stephen Copland began a series of sculptures, paintings, drawing, artist’s books, installations, photography, video and prints. Like an explorer, ethnographer and writer the artist explored his Scottish, Lebanese and Cuban heritage through diaries, travel and making art.

Over a thirty-year period Migration as Art Museum was developed, a series of three archives of national and international exhibitions:

1. “The Migration Series” (1992-2002) that describes the discovery of his Lebanese grandmother’s diary written on her arrival in Melbourne from Cuba in 1911 and retracing her journey through exhibitions in museums in Cuba, New Zealand, Slovakia, Austria and Lebanon.

2. “Raft-The Drifting Border” (2004-2020) is an ongoing body of art interpreting the darker side of migration and refugees seeking asylum globally.

3. “Transit” (2007-2013) is a series of artworks that interprets the symbolic and subjective aspects of identities in transit in a globalised world.

As his friend Jochen Sokoly said, “It is the task of artists as the chroniclers of the world, to tell their individual story. Artists provoke, make us think about ourselves, and present us a mirror through their own eyes. They tempt us to discuss, reflect and open conversations with one another – a cultural discourse, in which we should overstep boundaries in order to expand our horizons and those of our neighbours.”

THE LANDSCAPE OF HERITAGE
VERCELLI/TURIN

In 2016 the artist was invited by his friend and colleague artist Roberto Gianinetti to conduct the workshop, Landscape of Heritage in Vercelli.
The artist first met Roberto when he exhibited in the 7th International Artist Book Triennial Vilnius at the Museo Leone, Vercelli, Italy. (2015)

The artist book workshop introduces students to geography, and more poetically the landscape maps of our human traces and patterns. The history of a past generation can be educative to the deeper construction of individual identity through history, objects, memories, perspectives and the stories which define us as humans inhabiting a particular culture and place at a certain time and epoch.

The workshop led to an invitation to the Albertina Academy of Turin by Professor Laura Valle. Cristina Balma-Tivola, an anthropologist who related to the artist’s ethnographic approach to art, assisted with translation in the workshop.

MIGRATION AS ART MUSEUM Meredith Brice Curator

Purpose and the potential Migration as Art Museum of the museum

It is said that Migration in the 21st century is a form of “world making” and Migration as Art Museum and its educational programs seek this purpose.

Migration as Art [MASA] intends to develop a unique intimate educational institute to promote cultural diversity and integration.

Be a hybrid art facility; Part contemporary art, part community art, part social history, part heritage and part migration history.

Develop links with historic, new and existing local/global community members.

Enhance social connectedness and foster community engagements through tourism, school visits and private tours.

Broadly, the museum seeks to encourage personal understandings between new migrants, not so new migrants, and members of mainstream communities internationally.

Mentor students, young people and community volunteers into the educational programs relating to all the artworks and interactive material.

Be a “special quiet contemplative experience though art”

The Migration as Art Museum inspires interdisciplinary artistic explorations through the various disciplines – geography, ethnography, social sciences, anthropology etc.

Wall texts generate connections and reference points.

All the artworks have educational material designed as case-studies for use in a group context