All The World’s Memories
Source: https://www.galleries.unsw.edu.au/exhibition/all-worlds-memories Parent: https://www.galleries.unsw.edu.au/
All The World’s Memories
‘All the World’s Memories’ brings together 10 artists from Australia and Aotearoa whose practices consider how memory can be seen and understood.
Fiona Clark\ J Davies\ Nick FitzPatrick\ Matthew Harris\ Pat Hoffie\ Ana Iti\ Zac Langdon-Pole\ Lillian O’Neil\ Grant Stevens\ Desmond Woodforde
The exhibition’s title references Toute la mémoire du monde 1956, Alain Resnais’s short film on the ambition (and ultimate impossibility) of preserving human knowledge. Following a book through the Bibliothèque nationale de France, from classification to storage and circulation, the film presents the library as a site where memories are abstracted from lived experience and rendered only legible through institutional authority.
Artists have long sought to unsettle this desire to determine what is visible and knowable from our past, and what is rendered marginal or expendable within the systems and institutions that influence humanity’s cultural memory. In ‘All the World’s Memories’, artists don't entertain the fantasy of archiving everything. Instead, they express forms of remembering that remind us how memory might instead resist containment altogether. Here, memory is treated as something embodied—alive in the languages, bodies, and lands from which it emerges.
Accompanying the exhibition is a free reader featuring new writing by Judy Annear, DJCS, Micheal Do, Katie Dyer, James Gatt, Djon Mundine OAM, Sarah Rose, Lisa Slade, Tim Riley Walsh, and Catherine Woolley.
—\ Curated by José Da Silva
When
13 February — 3 May 2026
Where
Address
Cnr Oxford St & Greens Rd Paddington NSW 2021
Hours
Wed to Fri 10am–5pm; Sat to Sun 12–5pm
Phone
+61 2 8936 0888
Nick FitzPatrick, Signs (Descendence) 2025.\ Installation view, ‘All The World’s Memories’, UNSW Galleries, 2025.\ Photograph: Jacquie Manning
Installation view, ‘All The World’s Memories’, UNSW Galleries, 2025.\ Pictured: Zac Langford-Pole, Porous World (Cloud Study A) 2023 and Nick FitzPatrick, Signs (Descendence) 2025.\ Photograph: Jacquie Manning
Installation view, ‘All The World’s Memories’, UNSW Galleries, 2025. Photograph: Jacquie Manning
Installation view, ‘All The World’s Memories’, UNSW Galleries, 2025.\ Pictured: Matthew Harris, Cosigned to Oblivion 2023; Ana Iti, A dusty handrail on the track 2021; Nick FitzPatrick, Document (Swan River) 2025 and Document (Boola Miyel/ Bluff Knoll) 2026.\ Photograph: Jacquie Manning
Desmond Woodforde, Tjakatu Tjukurpa (Milky Way Storyline) 2025.\ Installation view, ‘All The World’s Memories’, UNSW Galleries, 2025.\ Photograph: Jacquie Manning
Grant Stevens, Feelings 2024.\ Installation view, ‘All The World’s Memories’, UNSW Galleries, 2025.\ Photograph: Jacquie Manning
Installation view, ‘All The World’s Memories’, UNSW Galleries, 2025.\ Photograph: Jacquie Manning
Lillian O’Neil, Flood 2020, Rock 2025, and Slow annealing 2026.\ Installation view, ‘All The World’s Memories’, UNSW Galleries, 2025.\ Photograph: Jacquie Manning
Pat Hoffie, The Yellow Line (The Recreational Laboratory of Fear) 2025.\ Installation view, ‘All The World’s Memories’, UNSW Galleries, 2025.\
J. Davies, All at Once 2026.\ Installation view, ‘All The World’s Memories’, UNSW Galleries, 2025.\ Photograph: Jacquie Manning
Artist to Artist
\ A series of conversations bringing together practitioners with shared interests and material concerns.
Pat Hoffie & Lillian O’Neil\ with Izabela Pluta
Zac Langdon-Pole & Nick FitzPatrick\ with Consuelo Cavaniglia
Fiona Clark & J Davies\ with Paul Knight
Public Programs
Opening Celebrations\ DJ set by Annabelle Gaspar
Film Screening\ Fiona Clark: Unafraid
Image: J Davies, Holding On Tight 2022.\ Courtesy the artist, Naarm/Melbourne