2024 Being Collected Lecture: Shifting Collections Care from objects to relationships
The annual Being Collected Lecture was established more than two decades ago to acknowledge and celebrate the unique perspectives of curatorship from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
Historically, Western conservation practices have focused on the physical preservation of an object, however since the inception of the First Nations Directorate, the Powerhouse is trying to shift the focus onto caring for relationships and acknowledging living connections as part of its collection management practices.
Madeline Poll, Nathan mudyi Sentance and Tammi Gissell will discuss how in their day to day work they are trying to make this shift possible and work toward a museum collection that is created to serve First Nations communities first and foremost.
In person-tickets for this event have now sold out, however, you can still register for a live-stream of the lecture to watch at home.
About our speakers
Madeline Poll is an early career curator with a deep passion for preserving and showcasing the rich cultural heritage of Aboriginal and Torres strait Island communities.
Madeline’s ancestral connections are from the Loyalty Islands (Li-fou), where her ancestor George Watego brought to the Torres Strait Islands by The London Missionary Society. Through marriage Madeline has family connections with Aboriginal, Torres Strait and South Sea Island families throughout east coast Australia.
Madeline has worked for the Powerhouse Museum for 5 years where she first began as a visitor services officer and has since been in curatorial for 2 of those years.
Nathan “mudyi” Sentance is a cis Wiradjuri librarian and museum collections worker who grew up on Darkinjung Country. Nathan currently works at the Powerhouse Museum as Head of Collections, First Nations and writes about history, critical librarianship and critical museology from a First Nations perspective.
His writing has been previously published in the Guardian, British Art Studies, Cordite Poetry, and Sydney Review of Books and on his own blog The Archival Decolonist.
Tammi Gissell is a longtime horizon hunter descended from the Murruwarri-Wiradjuri peoples. She is a freshwater woman with cultural ties to the Baaka River in North-West NSW.
A professional performer and performance theorist by trade, she has spent almost three decades in service of embodied knowledges in action. For the last four years, Tammi has applied her understanding of Indigenous knowledge systems to the development of culturally appropriate policy and procedure in the role of collections coordinator, First Nations at the Powerhouse.
Tammi yearns to set the records straight about our collective human past, knowing that we are all Indigenous to somewhere and equally entitled to our old stories. Tammi has previously written for the QLD Art Gallery of Modern Art, the Australian New Zealand Arts Journal, Performance Paradigm, and the Precarious Movements: Choreography and the Museum publication.