Professional Development Workshop for Teachers -THE END OF HISTORY

Tuesday 18 June, 1–3.30pm 

Join in ‘close readings’ of selected artworks exhibited in THE END OF HISTORY between 1-2pm, with Academic and Public Program Curator Dr Janice Lally.

Following a light lunch on the veranda, join together again for open discussion and a Q&A session within the exhibition.

Titled THE END OF HISTORY, the exhibition offers a partial survey of works from The University of Western Australia Art Collection made between 1985 and 1995, many of which have not been exhibited since they were acquired. That decade saw transformational changes in politics, media and economics, globally and locally.

In that period Australia connected to the World Wide Web (1989); and philosopher Francis Fukuyama’s essay "The End of History?" was published in The National Interest, No.16 (Summer 1989). In the article, Fukuyama predicted the coming global triumph of political and economic liberalism:

‘What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.’

The exhibition curator Gemma Weston has asked: ‘how does an artwork hold the context it is made in, even if it doesn’t address it directly? And following - how does an art collection, as an accumulation of these contextual tips-of-an-iceberg, hold and shape our histories?’

By also including more recent artworks that ‘are self-consciously concerned with the act of making history, not in the sense of actively shifting its course, but with how it is made by images and interpretations.’ Weston has been able provoke discussion and to suggest that:

‘THE END OF HISTORY is perhaps best thought of in terms of the questions it asks rather than the answers it provides.’

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Image: Opening night, 'THE END OF HISTORY', featuring works by Tom Alberts, Thoughts, 1986 and The wild romance of Otto, 1989, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, 2024, ILLKA K Photography