Alex Rizkalla and Victor Georgopoulos

R is for relics remains and ruins

Life is made up of a great number of small incidents and a small number
of great ones; this exhibition is both. R is for relics remains and
ruins is an extraordinary display of retrieved and rescued historical
refuse unearthed from numerous Melbourne urban landfills, or found in
frequent visits to familiar charity shops or picked up on coastal
beaches where a shipwrecks fragments have slowly surfaced.

This exhibition is both a documentary of an remarkable time most of us
have never encountered on such an unofficial scale as well as a
visually poetic meta-fiction in which each object presented is a word
that makes up a sentence and then a paragraph of material culture and
intimate identity.

Hundreds and thousands of fragments and things, natural and
manufactured, sometimes unrecognizable and many must now be endangered
or extinct; each object has been acquired and collected over many years
by the artists who share a fascination for both history and
aestheticized qualities of material evidence.

In this collaboration Rizkalla and Georgopoulos have unpacked
selections of their enormous archives and built a temporary dwelling
for these objects at Ocular Lab.

“Only in extinction is the collector comprehended*
*(Walter Benjamin: Unpacking My Library Illuminations)
Elvis Richardson.

Alex Rizkalla is an artist and collector.
Victor Georgopoulos is an archaeology and Australian History graduate
and collector.