National Portrait Gallery

Located on King Edward Terrace in Canberra, the National Portrait Gallery is home to Australia’s portrait collection.

From its outset, the National Portrait Gallery has signalled its direction as a museum offering a distinct brand of visitor experience, underscored by the specific capacity that portraiture has for enabling up-close encounters with others and hence the effectiveness of a national portrait collection as a means of relating information about our identity, history and culture. Through its temporary exhibitions, permanent displays and related programs, the National Portrait Gallery has continued to demonstrate portraiture’s flexibility, energy and resonance; while the interpretation of the Gallery’s ever-growing collection creates a means for people to connect with the lives of others: the people we variously revere, revile or desire; those we are most inspired, moved, perplexed or intrigued by; those who best illuminate historical experience and circumstance; and all of the other past or present-day companions whose lives might cause us to reflect on and understand our own.

King Edward Terrace Parkes ACT 2600

02 6102 7000

portrait.gov.au

Daily 10am–5pm.
Disabled access.

Creativity beyond mortality

Have you ever wondered if someone who is no longer alive could create art? In answer to this question, biological artists Guy Ben-Ary, Nathan Thompson and Matt Ringold, in collaboration with the now deceased Alvin Lucier, have extended the experimental composer’s “ideas about the resonance of sound” for their immersive exhibition, Revivification at the Art Gallery of Western Australia.

Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen

Sammy Hawker’s acts of co-creation

Under Sammy Hawker’s gentle guidance, whale song takes shape, ocean water becomes collaborator, salt crystals scatter themselves like stars across analogue film, and ashes murmur secrets onto silver nitrate-soaked paper. Through what she terms “facilitated acts of co-creation,” Hawker gives voice to places, materials, and the more-than-human world.

Camilla Wagstaff

Monica Rani Rudhar on (be)longing

Step inside Monica Rani Rudhar’s space at Parramatta Artists Studios, where she works across ceramics, sculpture, video, performance, and latterly, public art. Rudhar is working towards her solo exhibition at Martin Browne Contemporary, while reflecting on the value of play, how imitation leads to authenticity, and why she’d be lost without her sketchbook.

Jo Higgins

National Portrait Gallery