Panos Couros, Jonathan Jones and Ilaria Vanni
The Sound of Missing Objects was a collaborative installation incorporating sound, text and objects to discuss the history of the appropriation and colonial dissemination of Aboriginal artifacts in Australia. In fact, the title of the show conjured the irreplaceable loss of innumerable objects of indigenous significance especially during the nineteenth century, the age of the great international exhibitions. Central to the exhibition was its holistic approach and its seamless intertwining of media, text and audio elements. Indeed, The Sound of Missing Objects was collaborative in the truest sense, muffling individual authorial voices for the sake of the exhibitions broader conceptual ruminations on colonialist theft. Also successful was the show’s evocative transformation of the Performance Space into a quasi-museum. Of course as a trope, the fictional museum containing equally fictionalised objects is by now familiar to many. However, at a time when contemporary artistic production has returned largely to the creation of discreet signature works, The Sound of Missing Objects proved that this investigation of institutionalism is by no means outmoded. This point was further highlighted given that issues of reconciliation and the cultural debt owed by white colonists have largely slipped from mainstream political agendas. Although its overall affect was restrained, The Sound of Missing Objects raised some urgent local cultural and political questions.
Curiously the collaborative nature of this exhibition makes it practically impossible to write about from the perspective of individual artists works. Actually what was first striking about The Sound of Missing Objects was its distinct physicality in which the two near-identical galleries of the Performance Space were transformed into a museum arranged with a series of archival vitrines. The vitrines themselves were illuminated from inside and