Creative Residencies



With thanks to the Besen Family Foundation, MAL began a Creative Residencies program in 2022. How do artists interact with an art library? What does creative and critical intervention into the library space actually look like? How does a young, public organisation realise de-colonised institutional practice and totally open dialogue?

Over the year, MAL will host four artists, researchers, curators, and cultural leaders at the library. Melbourne Art Library’s inaugural Creative Residency program engages diverse perspectives to prod, unravel, and provoke the foundational underpinnings and offerings of MAL’s collection. Each resident will share their findings and musings with the MAL community, with the residency culminating in a public sharing event.

As an organisation, we hope to learn from the experiences of the artists we engage with; and welcome critique, intervention, and suggestions for reassembly or altered practice. We want to ensure that artists play a key role in the development of the art library, and are keen to explore the role of libraries as a key resource (tangibly and intangibly) for creative practice.


Creative Residents

Jahkarli Romanis



MAL's inaugural Creative Resident, February-March 2022, was Jahkarli Romanis.

Jahkarli Romanis is a proud Pitta Pitta woman and Naarm-based artist and researcher. 

Jahkarli is currently undertaking a PhD at Monash University through the Wominjeka Djeembana Research Lab. She has most recently co-curated “Still Here, Now” at Platform Arts Geelong; a First Nations show which seeks to assert survival and sovereignty. In the coming months Jahkarli is part of two group exhibitions in Naarm, showing new work centred around her PhD research.

Jahkarli’s work is inextricably intertwined with her identity as a Pitta Pitta woman and explores the complexities of her lived experience and the continuing negative impacts of colonisation in Australia. Her practice aims to subvert and disrupt colonial ways of thinking and image making. She utilises her research and art as tools for investigating biases encoded within imaging technologies and photo-media. Jahkarli’s PhD examines how contemporary mapping technologies, such as Google Earth, represent place and continue colonial narratives of ‘terra nullius’ through the omission of Indigenous Knowledges.


Daniel Jenatsch
Daniel Jenatsch is an artist and composer who makes interdisciplinary works that explore the interstices between affect and information. His work combines hyper-detailed soundscapes, music and video to create multimedia documentaries, installations, radio pieces and performances. His work looks at the social construction of subjectivity, with a concern for the ways in which forms of knowledge and power construct and inform our social and mental ecologies. His works have been presented in exhibitions and programs at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Arts House, Kunstenfestivaldesarts, the Athens Biennale, NextWave Festival, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Liquid Architecture Festival, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, and the MousonTurm, Frankfurt.


Ezz Monem



Lara Chamas



As an artist, knowledge, learning, sharing, and research usually take different modes, not limited to just reading and writing. Where does this fit in within an institution?

Reflecting on my time in academia, during my time in the library I have pondered; what constitutes knowledge, what makes knowledge valid when it doesn’t fit in a box? Where does cultural knowledge, storytelling, anecdotes, gut feelings, oral history go? And why isn’t it automatically good enough?




12pm-5pm, Thursday-Sunday

Melbourne Art Library, Naarm
Testing Grounds Emporium,
438 Queen St,
Naarm / Melbourne VIC 3000
We acknowledge the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation as the traditional owners of the land on which we operate, and respect their enduring connection to country. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land.

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