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Home PublicationsArts View |
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Museum of Modern
Oddities |
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December 2001
Volume 2, Issue 4
The Museum of Modern Oddities (MoMo) is an ephemeral museum created by
performance and public artists Katy Bowman and Neil Thomas. MoMo draws
focus to the ordinary, the everyday and the things that have been discarded,
overlooked or are on the cusp of disappearing. It is a museum-in-process
or a site-sensitive institution in a state of constant becoming.
Neil Thomas and Katy Bowman, Museum of Modern Oddities, 2001. Photo by Laszlo Dudas.
Open five days a week, from August to November, MoMo's most recent appearance
in an old hardware shop in inner city Melbourne had thousands of people
through its front door and literally hundreds of thousands of curious
people passing in cars each week. New and ongoing collections were developed
and added to. These included an ever growing collection of letters in
response to the question, 'What is it that you long for?'; The Publicly
Curated Exhibit (where the public donates a piece of 'pocket ephemera'
and a caption or description of the donated artefact); and The Registry
of Nick Names, with its hundreds of entries.
MoMo is a museum created for and with the public, a free public event
that invites participation from its visitors. Unsolicited donations included
condom moulds from the 1920s, a mummified cat in a glass box and a collection
of bagged assemblages from a fictitious art award. A perpetual collection
of DIY souvenirs made and exchanged by visitors proved to be a fantastic
success.
The first MoMo installation was created in 2000 and presented at the Melbourne
Museum. Development and presentation of 'A MoMo Shop' in Collingwood in
2001 was funded through Arts Victoria's Arts Development program
as a Performance Works site-specific initiative. MoMo has been invited
to create another installation at the 2002 Australian Performing Arts
Market in Adelaide.
For further information visit the website at www.oddmuseum.com or contact Cultural Pursuits Australia on 08 9444 3633.
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