Rewind Forward at the Victorian Archives Centre 2025
Now showing at the Victorian Archives Centre Gallery, Rewind Forward features the work of our 2025 Creative in Residence artists: Emile Zile, Sam Wallman, Shannon Slee, Susan Fitzgerald, and Queer-ways. Each artist has delved deep into Public Record Office Victoria's collection to examine local histories that resonate with them on a personal level. Through historic photographs, criminal inquest records, original artifacts and hand written documents, they've explored Victoria's past and created works about the relevance of history on contemporary issues.
Location: Victorian Archives Centre Gallery, 99 Shiel Street, North Melbourne
Dates: 30 May - late November 2025. 10am-4:30pm weekdays, plus 10am - 4pm every second and last Saturday of the month. Closed public holidays.
Susan Fitzgerald is a graphic designer and illustrator with a passion for typography and letter forms. Focusing on transportation related typography, she has been researching samples of tram and train tickets, as well as hand painted signage, advertising material and public transport ephemera. Her work, Return Fare includes scaled tickets, both hand painted and screen printed. The intention is not to replicate the originals but to highlight their individuality.
"I'm interested in taking people on a trip down memory lane, showcasing a range of material from the recent and distant past, and considering their context within broader social, economic and technical developments." Susan Fitzgerald
Visual artist Shannon Slee engages with technologies of the handmade to consider soft moments of connection within the flexible aesthetic of textiles. For TEXTILE MEMORIAL she researched PROV's inquest deposition files of the 965 women who died as a result of being unable to access safe services for an abortion up until 1973.
"Public Record Office Victoria contains 916 Inquest Deposition Files associated with Victorian women's deaths caused by abortion from 1859 to 1973, a grim reminder of the effects of state controls on women's bodies. This project will be a memorial quilt for these women." Shannon Slee
Illustrator, comics journalist, and wharfie, Sam Wallman is inspired by the vast historic photographic records in the Public Record Office Victoria collection of Melbourne’s docks, from their early beginnings as wooden wharves through to their current era servicing massive container ships. His work Assisting Automation is a meditation on change, with his digital drawings in dialogue with PROV's historical images.
"The archives are a collective property, a kind of commons, and I am grateful to have an excuse to sniff around them. Vijay Prashad once said that “You go to the past not as a destination but as a resource. This is why we go back to the past, to learn in defeat. In the ruins. To learn what shines, like a magpie. That is what a historian should be, a magpie in the ruins.” I always liked that quote." Sam Wallman
Queer-ways collaborators LUCIANO and George Keats' installation Victorian Vagrants explores historical cases of punishment for gender non-conforming presentation by recreating in miniature, the outfits worn by people when they were arrested, with copies of the records themselves printed onto custom fabric.
"As two queer people with gender non-conforming presentations, we both connect to this history and are driven to amplify the stories of the gender non-conforming people before us, to both pay respect and ensure that their stories are maintained for posterity." LUCIANO of Queer-ways
Artist, filmmaker and performer, Emile Zile has created a personal essay film, informed by the lingering traces his own family have left in the archives. His work explores social relationships mediated by documents, state administration, handwriting and the act of recording.
"The opportunity to work with PROV on a wide-ranging large-scale public project is both thrilling and daunting. The immense, almost unfathomable collection that PROV offers to work with is a storyteller's dream, each archival drawer opening offering multiple narratives and ways of telling stories of our shared history. Having created performances and films in the past from historical archives and legacies, this opportunity to work in the belly of PROV to generate new creative work is a compelling offer and one I take seriously." Emile Zile
