Monash University Museum of Art | MUMA has announced the opening of Stolon Press: Flat earth on Thursday 29 May 2025.
This exhibition, curated by Stolon Press, a Sydney-based art and publishing collective run by Simryn Gill and Tom Melick, in collaboration with MUMA’s Dr Rebecca Coates and Stephanie Berlangieri, explores how an exhibition can be understood as a form of expanded publishing.
Flat earth brings together longtime Stolon Press collaborators, Buenos Aires and Montreal-based anthropologist, Elisa Taber, and Lebanese-born, Sydney-based artist Khaled Sabsabi.
“The exhibition continues MUMA’s ongoing enquiry into experimental curatorial and editorial practices, bringing together diverse perspectives to explore themes of decentred geographies, rootedness and localness,’ says Dr Rebecca Coates, Director of MUMA.
Initially planned to open on 8 May 2025, the exhibition was postponed by Monash University while the University conducted consultations with Monash students and community. Flat earth is conceived as a flattened map with no hierarchies. The artworks overlap across the galleries as a material gesture toward cohabitation and neighbourliness.
Stolon Press will make carpets and mats out of the residue of their printing process with cardboard boxes, which were collected in their neighbourhood in Sydney. These mats, sewn together by hand, will be distributed across the space.
Khaled Sabsabi presents a new and ambitious iteration of Aajyna (1998/2021/2025), a work which paints the gallery walls with layers of a dark roast Lebanese coffee. This work, which draws on Sabsabi’s personal memories of his childhood in Lebanon during the Civil War, will be made with the assistance of staff and students from Monash Art, Design and Architecture.
Elisa Taber writes and translates herself into an absent presence in An Archipelago in a Landlocked Country (2020) / Otra isla rodeada de tierra (Another Island Surrounded by Land) (2026).
Her work will be present in the galleries in the form of small audio speakers which hang down from the ceiling, at first silent, into which the author will drop her voice for a single live reading on Tuesday 27 June 2025, and then take the form of a text in the subsequent publication.
“A part of MUMA’s 50th anniversary year’s artistic program Stolon Press: Flat earth further reflects our commitment to artistic inquiry in a unique educational context,” said Dr Coates. “Each exhibition, event and encounter invites our audiences to re-examine connections between people and narratives that speak to our time and place and a shared future.”
“Grounded in collaboration, conversation and a desire to explore multiple perspectives, this exhibition reaffirms our role as a vital space for bringing people together to share and exchange ideas about contemporary art in a university context,” said Dr Coates.
Stolon Press: Flat earth
Monash University Museum of Art, 900 Dandenong Road, Caulfield East
Exhibition: 29 May – 12 July 2025
Free entry
For more information, visit: www.monash.edu for details.
Image: Stolon Press, process image 2025 – courtesy of the artists