The Museum of Us opens up the boundaries of creative excellence for artists and audiences alike, unearthing new and different stories and amplifying voices vital to fully understanding what it is to live and be creative in this state.
Güler Altunbas, 'Feather Musings & Coloured Pebbles', digital art, 2020
Click here for the video transcript
We commissioned 50 Deaf and Disabled artists to create work exploring the questions:
We encouraged artists to develop responses that are:
The Museum of Us can act both as a time capsule and as a crystal ball, helping us move towards cultural equity for Deaf, Disabled people.
The project’s innovative and disability-led approach has helped develop new works that challenge:
The Museum of Us:
All the works offer access features including audio description, captions and image description.
The project is currently offline as its presenting partner, Victoria Together website, is no longer online.
The Museum of Us was funded by the Victorian Government.
Hello, and welcome to the Museum of Us.
I’m Caroline Bowditch, and I am the CEO at Arts Access Victoria. I’m coming to you today from the unceded lands of the Boonwurrung people, and I pay my respects to their elders past, present and emerging.
I also pay respects to any Deaf, Disabled and Neurodiverse colleagues that may join us for this online exhibition.
For those of you who don’t know of Arts Access Victoria, we are the state’s peak organisation for arts and disability. We’re dedicated to cultural equity and increasing the visibility of Deaf, Disabled and Neurodiverse artists. Our work diversifes the bodies, thinking and ways of being usually experienced in arts and cultural spaces.
Through the support of Victoria Together funding, AAV has curated a signifcant body of short digital artworks exploring the questions: What could an accessible future be for Victoria? And what sort of future do we want to emerge?
In many ways, the arts world has never been more accessible to Deaf, Disabled and Neurodiverse people. More and more of us have begun to make and fnd art online during our periods of isolation. Artists are reaching new and bigger audiences. And arts lovers have more ways to engage with art online than they ever have had before.
The Museum of Us commissions have been made using multiple forms of digital technology, ranging from text, animation, audio and video recordings, computer graphics and digital drawings, to paintings, sculpture, collages and photographs. Several of the artists will also take you behind-the-scenes, with short videos about their works and how they were made. All of the works offer access features including audio description, captions and image description.
In line with Arts Access Victoria’s values, artists were encouraged to develop artistic responses that are authentic, proud, bold and curious, and to refect on how recent experiences can be used to imagine a new future. In this way, the Museum of Us can act both as a time capsule and as a crystal ball, helping us to predict and move towards cultural equity for Deaf, Disabled and Neurodiverse people. The project’s innovative and disability-led approach has supported the development of new works that challenge stereotypes, normative behaviours and cultural biases.
The Museum of Us opens up the boundaries of creative excellence for artists and audiences alike – unearthing new and different stories, and amplifying voices vital to fully understanding what it is to live and be creative in this state. So please, come in and experience these artists’ impressions of a future we can all share in.
Enjoy.
