A fever of a memory, 2025

For A fever of a memory, guest curator Talia Smith has embraced the ghosts within the Murray Art Museum Albury collection. Traces of lives, moments and histories are embedded within artworks that make up museum collections. These collections can be places of heaviness, where limitations of knowledge and care become apparent as can the presence of histories that favour erasure and exploitation. It is then no wonder that collections can sometimes be thought of as haunted.

In recent years there has been a move towards understanding and working with rather than against the complicated histories of archives and collections. Just as there will always be more voices and stories that need to be included in these conversations there are also the ghosts of the past that will always remain.

Rather than seeking to establish one clear narrative through the MAMA collection, A fever of a memory looks to explore the idea of haunting and what it unearths.

Photo credit: Jeremy Weihrauch