MUMA’s 2006/7 summer exhibition featured works from the Monash University Collection alongside selected loans. Before the Body—Matter considered the body, form and matter. Moving over the skin and inside the body, a passage is mapped between surface and interior, an interior as contained as it is infinite.

The Monash University Collection holds a rich array of artworks exploring representations of the body by contemporary Australian artists. Before the Body—Matter brought works from the 1990s into dialogue with those from the mid-2000s, to explore the ways in which material and conceptual considerations of the body had evolved and shifted over the previous decade.

Major works from the collection by artists such as Dale Frank, Brent Harris, John Meade, Vera Möller, Susan Norrie, Mike Parr and Simone Slee were presented alongside more recent work by Hany Armanious, Benjamin Armstrong, Donna Bailey, Pat Brassington and Christian Capurro, among others.

Is our interest in the uncanny, the grotesque and the informe abiding or a newer phenomenon? The exhibition reflected upon these terms, while also exploring the corporeality of artistic practice, and the bodily act of looking. This exhibition was accompanied by a full colour illustrated catalogue featuring essays by exhibition curator Geraldine Kirrihi Barlow and Dr Kyla McFarlane.

Exhibition Catalogue:
Before the Body – Matterr: Works from the Monash University Collection with Selected Loans

^{Image: Benjamin Armstrong, Conflict 2003–05 (detail), Monash University Collection, Melbourne. Donated by Peter Fay through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2005}