Rowden White Library, Level 2, Student Pavilion, Building 162 Monash Road, Parkville

Conceptual Infrastructure: A Workshop Series

MAL is pleased to be presenting 3 workshops with George Paton Gallery in October. 

Join us for unpacking and exploring the intangible frameworks needed to support contemporary creative production. Through structured discussions and joint close-reading, we'll consider how we might create and foster these supports.

Session 1 will look at creative spaces and precincts, and question the interplay between tangible and intangible ingredients that make these spaces work, or not.

Session 2 will explore the act of writing art histories — through exhibitions, criticism and collections — and how this helps frame and legitimise arts practice.

Session 3 will take a broader view, untangling ideas of ‘institutional art theory’, the bounds between contemporary art and life, and how we might apply this knowledge to our own practices.

The workshops will run on Thursday Oct 3, Oct 17, and Oct 24, from 2-4pm at the Rowden White Library, Level 2, Student Pavilion, Building 162 Monash Road, Parkville.

Register Here.

We are pleased to continue our relationship with Walker St Gallery, Dandenong, and have contributed a selection of books to complement the themes explored in their current exhibition HOME 24 – Olana Janfa: Too Much Drama.

MAL’s reading nook will be open througout the exhibition from 2 July until 6 September 2024.

HOME 24 – Olana Janfa: Too Much Drama

‘Too Much Drama is a site-responsive project by Ethiopian-Norwegian, Naarm-based artist Olana Janfa.

Combining bold images and political statements with lightness, dry humour and vivid colours and tones, the exhibition brings together old and new works by Olana, displayed across Walker Street Gallery and Arts Centre and Settlers Square.

Olana Janfa: Too Much Drama is the 2024 iteration of HOME, City of Greater Dandenong’s longstanding program of exhibitions featuring artists with a refugee and asylum seeker background.’

HOME 24 – Olana Janfa: Too Much Drama is open 12-4pm Tuesday to Friday until 6 September at the Walker Street Gallery and Arts Centre, Corner Walker and Robinson St, Dandenong.

MAL is pleased to be partnering with RMIT Gallery to present a pop-up library of books responding to the themes explored in their exhibtion Working Title: Studio Practice in the RMIT Art Collection.

MAL’s reading pop-up library will be open througout the exhibition from 2 until the 27 of July 2024.

Working Title: Studio Practice in the RMIT Art Collection

‘The studio is a place in which artists conceptualise, experiment, develop and ultimately produce their artworks. Studio practice is different for each maker, some artists confining themselves to the solitude of their workspaces while others take their work outside to their communities.  Whether artworks are made by individuals or collectives, many inevitably meet a similar fate, eventually leaving the studio for exhibition and the next phase of their lives—in the hands of a buyer or collection, historicised alongside their peers.  

Working Title explores the RMIT Art Collection and unearths a rich history of studio practice at RMIT, revealing notable academics, alumni, methods and collaborations across collecting legacies over the past century.’

Working Title: Studio Practice in the RMIT Art Collection is open 11-5pm Tuesday to Friday and 12-4pm Saturday’s until 27 July at RMIT Gallery, 344 Swanston St, Melbourne. 

We are pleased to continue our relationship with Walker St Gallery, Dandenong, and have contributed a further selection of books to complement the themes explored in their current exhibition A Tra$hy Dreamland.

MAL’s reading nook will be open througout the exhibition from 19 March until 8 June 2024.

A Tra$shy Dreamland Exhibition

You are invited to participate in this fun and immersive installation by artist Moon Girle. 

Engage with the community through self-reflection, mass production and ethical ways of reusing broken and unwanted objects. Explore this reflective space and foster important conversations about the environment and cultural diversity. Through play, collaboration and interaction let your creativity shine. The artwork encourages you to connect and reflect on the community’s nostalgic dreams through a unique sensory experience. 

A Tra$shy Dreamland is open 12-4pm Tuesday to Friday until 8 June at the Walker Street Gallery and Arts Centre, Corner Walker and Robinson St, Dandenong.

Presented by Sky Vermont 

Our relationship to fashion is so defined by consumption that it can be hard to imagine anything different. Welcome to the PLAY magazine library where a fashion collection is flat packed, folded down into an A4 magazine format and freely available to borrow. Could fashions future be one of creativity, tactility and trust?

Straddling the border of garment and published matter, this collection explores the entanglement of fashion, media and consumer culture through a collection of garments that fold down into A4 magazines. Attendees are invited to sign up to PLAY library and borrow a magazine before folding and tying it into a wearable clothing item. Without traditional seams, each garment is constructed through a series of ties and slits cut into the fabric, accessible without any sewing skills or equipment.

PLAY magazine is an attempt to recenter the material, sensory experience of fashion as opposed to focus on image and aesthetic. The magazine excludes images, instead allowing the image of the garment to arise in real time and space as the wearer constructs it. The construction of each garments calls for time and attention, direct experience and tactility each of which is marginalised in our consumer society.

Duldig Studio and Melbourne Art Library (MAL) have partnered to deliver a facilitated discussion exploring the broad topic of design.

The Discussion will run for three online evening sessions  with the final, fourth Book Club meeting taking place face-to-face at the Duldig Studio.

Two weeks before each session participants will be sent three articles based on a design focused topic. The Discussion will then be facilitated by the expert librarians at MAL encouraging participants to discuss the themes within the articles.

It will be a wonderful, inspiring and fun program that you can enjoy from home – encouraging you to reflect and discuss with others the impact of design.

The final fourth session will be held in the Duldig Studio on a date to be decided by the club.

Participants can book individual sessions but to create the best club experience we encourage you to book the series.

Duldig Studio and Melbourne Art Library (MAL) have partnered to deliver a facilitated discussion exploring the broad topic of design.

The Discussion will run for three online evening sessions  with the final, fourth Book Club meeting taking place face-to-face at the Duldig Studio.

Two weeks before each session participants will be sent three articles based on a design focused topic. The Discussion will then be facilitated by the expert librarians at MAL encouraging participants to discuss the themes within the articles.

It will be a wonderful, inspiring and fun program that you can enjoy from home – encouraging you to reflect and discuss with others the impact of design.

The final fourth session will be held in the Duldig Studio on a date to be decided by the club.

Participants can book individual sessions but to create the best club experience we encourage you to book the series.

Melbourne Art Library was delighted to welcome Jenna Lee to lead our Artists' Syllabus in February 2024. 

Jenna Lee shared two essays which have impacted her artistic practice: ‘Around and Within’ by Freja Carmichael featured in Becoming Our Future – Global Indigenous Curatorial Practice (Art Gallery of South Australia, 2020) and ‘Mother Tongue’ (Gertrude Contemporary, 2018) presented as part of the Octopus exhibition series. 

Artists’ Syllabus invites local artists and designers to select and share a text that has been influential to their practice. By sharing selected passages, the artist will give unique insight into the significance of the text from their perspective. Through this exploration we will seek to discover the direct, tangential or unexpected ways the text has had an impact on the artists’ chosen discipline/s, creative process, and approach to presenting completed works. In group discussion, we will untangle the themes explored in the text and bring attention to those formative passages which sparked an ‘ah-ha moment’ or cemented in the mind. More broadly, we will get together to exchange our ideas (and our reading lists).

Supported by City of Melbourne Arts Grants and Michael Robertson.

Image: Gianna Rizzo.


Jenna Lee is a Gulumerridjin (Larrakia), Wardaman and KarraJarri Saltwater woman with mixed Japanese, Chinese, Filipino and Anglo-Australian ancestry. Using art to explore and celebrate her many overlapping identities, Lee works across sculpture, installation, body adornment, moving images, photography and projection.

With a practice focused on materiality and ancestral material culture, Lee works with notions of the archive, histories of colonial collecting, and settler-colonial books and texts. Lee ritualistically analyses, deconstructs, and reconstructs source material, language and books, transforming them into new forms of cultural beauty and pride, and presenting a tangibly translated book.

Driven to create work in which she, her family, and the broader mixed First Nations community see themselves represented, Lee builds on a foundation of her father’s teachings of culture and her mother’s teachings of papercraft.

Represented by MARS Gallery in Naarm (Melbourne, Australia).

What power dynamics are at play in the distribution of information? How democratic is ‘collective’ knowledge? And how are individuals and collectives disrupting the flow of information?

The Distribution forum series prods, unravels, makes-visible, and excites non-mainstream ways of information sharing. Engaging publishers, editors, and alternative institutions, the series explores active projects in Naarm/Melbourne that question the traditional flow of information.

Join Isabella Hone-Saunders of Seventh Gallery, Sophia Cai of Bus Projects and Beatrice Rubio-Gabriel and Katie Paine of KINGS Artist Run Initiative as we discuss the role of artist run initiatives in knowledge sharing.

Supported by the City of Melbourne.