Being Collected 2025

The annual Being Collected Lecture was established more than two decades ago to acknowledge and celebrate the unique perspectives of curatorship from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The Chau Chak Wing Museum is delighted to welcome Jack Gillmer to deliver the 2025 Being Collected lecture.

Jack’s recent research and practice critically interrogate museum institutions, revealing how they continue to reproduce coloniality across experiential, architectural, and systemic levels. Drawing from his experiences through the Galang Residency Program, the Australia Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, and his role on the Cultural Council of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford (UK)—where he contributes to rethinking institutional practice and reimagining the museum’s 150th anniversary rehang in 2034—Jack explores new models for Indigenising cultural spaces. His exhibitions and architectural works extend this inquiry, asking: how might museums shift from sites of possession to places of cultural practice, story, and living knowledge—where First Nations peoples are given agency, authority, and access to their cultural materials?

About our speaker

Jack Gillmer is a proud Worimi and Biripi guri of the Gathang language group and an architect who positions Country as the driver of narrative in his practice. Advocating for and facilitating First Nations leadership and co-design, his work navigates both tangible and intangible cultural paradigms to reveal latent knowledges embedded in Country. Jack is particularly interested in forging connection between cultural knowledge systems and the built environment as a space of unrealised opportunity and endless potential.

Guided by a cultural obligation to care for Country, Jack enables design processes led alongside Traditional Custodians—an approach he recognises as essential to meaningful projects and the future of urban fabric. He contributes broadly across professional and community contexts, including university teaching, publications, and public programs, and is undertaking a Certificate III in Gathang Language to support revitalisation and the sharing of his ancestral language.

In 2024, Jack was awarded the Galang Residency, a partnership between the Powerhouse Museum and Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris. Over three months abroad he explored repatriation, rematriation, and (re)conciliation through artistic practice and a cultural architectural lens, reframing museology and its role within cultural institutions. His expertise in this space has led to international opportunities such as keynote lectures in Canada, and England, as well as his recent appointment on the Cultural Council at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford UK, to put protocols in place for practice, and work towards a rehang for their 150th year anniversary in 2034.

His ongoing research and practice across the arts, exhibition, and museum sectors—together with the collective expertise of the Creative Sphere—positions Jack as co-Creative Director for 'Home', the Australian Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale.

Header image: HOME, Australian Pavilion, 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale. Photo by Peter Bennetts

Also check out other Arts events in Pyrmont, Exhibitions in Pyrmont, Fine Arts events in Pyrmont.