Artists in residence present Rewind Forward at Public Record Office

Public Record Office Victoria (PROV) has selected its 2025 creatives in residence and is celebrating by launching a group exhibition, with the five artists showcasing their work at the Victorian Archives Centre (VAC) Gallery in Rewind Forward.

PROV’S residence project provides artists with a unique opportunity to research and create work based on their archives, helping understand how the past continues to inform our current day-to-days.

Following an application process in which the PROV was “truly overwhelmed by the exceptional quality of proposals,” the organisation landed on Emile Zile, Sam Wallman, Shannon Slee, Susan Fitzgerald, and Queer-ways, a duo composed of Luciano and George Keats.

Although all five artists have a distinct focus and specialisation, they share a common goal; to use the archives to extract the facts of past everyday life out of distant memory and walk the audience through the lesser-known histories that made Melbourne what it is today.

The culmination of their research will be presented in the group exhibition Rewind Forward.

As the title suggests, while the past is a starting point, the present day can never be ignored. Instead, these artists have used the archives to, as Susan Fitzgerald puts it, take the audience on “a trip down memory lane,” all while considering the broader social, economic and technical developments that allowed for change.

Ms Fitzgerald, who specialises in graphic design, traces past designs of public transport tickets and the lost art of the manufacturing process, asking why, and how, these materials came to be used, while Sam Wallman – a port worker and comic journalist – focuses on the impact of automation at the docks across time.

Shannon Slee changes it up again, using her skills in textiles to explore historical violence perpetuated against women through the prohibition of safe abortion access, memorialising the many women who lost their lives to this. Queer-ways also uses textiles, but for a different end, bringing to life outfits that landed people in the courts for gender non-conformity in the early 20th century.

Finally, video and performance artist Emile Zile creates personal essay film, informed by the lingering traces his own family have left in the archives.

Creating art from PROV’s vast collection is not an easy task. As Mr Zile points out, the collection is “immense, almost unfathomable,” but it is within this scale that opportunity lies.

[It is] a storyteller's dream, each archival drawer opening offers multiple narratives and ways of telling stories of our shared history”, he said, adding that the “the opportunity to work with PROV on a wide-ranging large-scale public project is both thrilling and daunting.

Mr Wallman echoes this: “The archives are a collective property, a kind of commons, and I am grateful to have an excuse to sniff around them,” he said.

Rewind Forward is the manifestation of these archives, saving the audience the time and meticulous attention to detail required to trawl through them by presenting fresh reflections on where we’ve come from, and where we might be heading next.

Opening night is on May 29 at VAC Gallery in North Melbourne. Free tickets are available via eventbrite.com.au. •