The City of Melbourne presents its latest exhibition at the City Gallery, The Museum of Falling – featuring a tragi-comic parade of items that depict what it means to fall in civic space.
Avid collector Patrick Pound had access to over 13,000 items from the City of Melbourne’s Art and Heritage Collection to curate this amusing and precarious exhibition at the City Gallery.
Showing until 14 February 2025, the free exhibition attempts to unpack the material history of civic space and the all-too-human approach to naïvely navigate it.
The Museum of Falling includes a rich collection of items describing civic space and relationships with it, such as:
- Arrangements of found photographs, including snaps from newspaper and cinema archives
- Historic Melbourne building models, traffic plans and tripping hazards
- Diagrams, records, architectural models and perspective studies of Melbourne landscapes.
Some images display falling cyclists or pedestrians and a sequence of objects where trees topple, buildings collapse and ships capsize. There is a photo from an album of images of the vintage Melbourne Town Hall elevators.
Featured objects from the City’s Collection have fallen by the wayside and speak to attempts to take control of city spaces. These include a time-punch of a city worker, a taxi flag-fall meter, a computerised parking ticket machine and other curious devices for measuring and organising.
“I had the privilege to trawl through the eclectic collection and realised that many of these ‘treasures’ have fallen from use. But, for this exhibition, we briefly revive a handful of them,” said Pound.
“In a deliberate and playful way, I tested how to rethink these objects for visitors to respond to them afresh. As you spend time in the space, you can piece together the dynamics of falling.”
“The tipping point for the falling-theme was finding in the City’s Collection, a 1956 Melbourne Olympics photograph of a pole vaulter floating mid-air at a great height, about to fall,” said Pound.
“The Museum of Falling showcases what it means to take a tumble – as many have done literally and figuratively throughout Melbourne’s history,” said City of Melbourne Lord Mayor, Nick Reece.
“Profiling more than 40 items from our incredible Art and Heritage Collection at Town Hall – this exhibition has something each gallery-goer will be able to relate to through the highs and lows of life.”
Other exhibition standouts include a large-scale model of Birrarung Marr that features a quirky proposition of a waterfall, a postcard from Niagara Falls and a necklace with a small piece of a meteor.
The free exhibition is full of remnants and traces of Melbourne and reanimates the City of Melbourne’s Art and Heritage Collection in an amusing way. The Museum of Falling is a reminder that civic pride all too often comes before a fall.
Patrick Pound is an Australian artist working with an ever-growing 70,000 piece-collection of images and objects as if on a dare. He has worked with numerous public gallery and museum collections. With over 50 solo exhibitions, Pound has also featured in more than 80 curated exhibitions in Australia and internationally.
The Museum of Falling
City Gallery – Melbourne Town Hall, 110 Swanston Street, Melbourne
Exhibition continues to 14 February 2025
Free entry
For more information, visit: www.melbourne.vic.gov.au for details.
Image: Installation view of The Museum of Falling at City gallery – photo by Tobias Titz