Through the Exhibitions Program, UNSW Library collaborates with a diverse range of partners across the University and broader community. This program creates a space for discourse in the Library and provides a venue for the Library to showcase and support the kinds of research outputs that previously didn’t have an outlet within our collections.
The Library also presents exhibitions as digital experiences through our Online Exhibitions which showcase the Library's digital collections, cultural collections held in the University and creative research outputs by UNSW academics.
If you are interested in organising an exhibition please get in touch with the Library’s Curator, Special Collections and Exhibitions.
If you would like to be notified about upcoming UNSW Library exhibitions, join our mailing list.
Current exhibitions
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More-than-Human WellbeingLevel 5 Exhibition Space, Main Library More-than-Human Wellbeing highlights ways of knowing and being within and beyond the world of self-tracking apps, electronic medical records, and smart devices for documenting illnesses and promoting health and wellbeing. Through installation artworks and multi-sensory displays, this exhibition seeks to attune visitors to their role in more-than-human ecologies and how their health and wellbeing and that of the planet is entangled. |
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Flesh & Bone: Illustrations of anatomyLevel 2, 3, 4 and 5, Main Library The rare book display, Flesh & Bone: Illustrations of anatomy, features anatomical illustrations from the 15th to 18th centuries. The plates portray the internal skeletal, muscular, and cardiovascular human body systems and represent the medical learnings of leading physicians, surgeons and scholars of the time. |
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The Lawyers of the Uluru StatementUNSW Law Library This exhibition tells the story of the Regional Dialogues and First Nations Constitutional Convention in 2016-2017 that resulted in the Uluru Statement from the Heart and highlights to work of the UNSW Indigenous Law Centre. |
Alumni mural program
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Alumni mural programMain Library The UNSW Library Alumni Mural Program is a series of site-specific public artworks by UNSW alumni created for the lift foyers of the UNSW Main Library. This series is part of a broader strategy within UNSW Library to enrich the student experience by embedding art and culture throughout the Library. |
Past exhibitions
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Love. Respect. Pride.From 24 February to 26 May 2023 In celebration of Sydney WorldPride, Level 3 of UNSW Main Library featured a vibrant display of colourful paintings, sculptures, photographs, collages, and prints by queer-identifying (LGBTIQ+) artists from the UNSW Art Collection. Through their respective practices, the artists in Love. Respect. Pride. explored queer perspectives, aesthetics, and narratives around identity, sexuality and queer love. |
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Sonus MarisFrom 6 February to 7 May 2023 Sonus Maris was an exhibition navigating the intersections between art and science emerging from an ongoing collaboration between artist Dr. Nigel Helyer and water engineers and scientists at the UNSW Water Research Laboratory (WRL). The exhibition featured audio-visual media reinterpreting data which charts the unique dynamics of intermittently closed and open lakes and lagoons (ICOLLs) along the NSW coastline. |
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Ex Libris: 20th Century Australian BookplatesFrom 5 December 2022 to 30 January 2023 This selection of bookplates was sourced from the UNSW Library Special Collections. Displays explored the work of artists Adrian Feint and George David Perrottet, noted bookplate collector P. Neville Barnett, and Australian Ex Libris societies and clubs. |
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!DO SOMETHINGFrom 12 September to 18 November 2022, Available online The UNSW Wicked Collective invited students, staff, and researchers across the ADA Faculty to submit creative responses and interventions to one or more of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in relation to the wicked problem of Climate Change. |
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Trophy DreamsFrom 30 May to 30 August 2022 Trophy Dreams was a multi-artform interactive exhibition by artists from Studio A, Sydney's leading studio for artists living with intellectual disabilities. The exhibition included new works specially commissioned for UNSW. |
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Where are you from?From 14 February to 12 May 2022, Available online Students and staff share personal stories of what it is like to experience the question 'Where are you from?' in a mostly white Australia. |
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Peoples and Landscapes in Motion: from Silk Roads to AustraliaOnline Exhibition This online exhibition presents artworks of four eminent Australian artists showcasing the diversity of humanity and geography along the ancient Silk Roads. |
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About closed doors: isolation and artFrom 21 May 2021 to 3 February 2022 Curated by Master of Curating and Cultural Leadership students, this exhibition brought together artworks made by 11 UNSW students during the 2020 lockdown. |
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Mental Health and meOnline Exhibition This online exhibition and art prize features digital art by UNSW students showcasing their unique mental health journeys. |
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UNSW Library UnstackedOnline Exhibition UNSW Library Unstacked is a live data visualisation that displays and interprets usage of the UNSW Library collection in real-time, communicating the scale, breadth and depth of library research activity that is otherwise invisible. |
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Performing SydneyFrom 2 December 2020 to 14 May 2021, Available online With story, data analysis and visualisation by Dr Jonathan Bollen (Senior Lecturer, School of Arts and Media), this exhibition maps the story of theatres in Sydney over the last hundred years. |
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Worlding With Oysters: Sarah Jane MooreFrom 14 October to 13 November 2020, Available online In this exhibition Dr Sarah Jane Moore asks us to listen to the Bandangi - the Sydney Rock Oyster. This dialogue between art and science opens up a space to embrace Indigenous knowledge, understandings and wisdoms, where the revitalisation of cultural practices is a call to arms to care for Sea Country. |
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UNSW: 70 yearsFrom 13 November 2019 to 27 May 2021 UNSW Sydney celebrated its 70th year in 2019 and this exhibition, a collaboration between UNSW Library and UNSW Archives, featured archival material that captures the University's humble beginnings in 1949 to the expansive multidisciplinary institution we know it as today. |
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Strong and Powerful: Remembering the Age of AIDSFrom 27 November to 13 December 2019 This exhibition presented posters and ephemera drawn from personal collections that captured the community-lead response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic during the 1980s and 90s in Australia. These personal and collective voices continue to shape the Australian understanding of HIV/AIDS and together reveal the enduring impact and memory of this public response within the affected communities. |
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Photography, Race and Slavery: African Sitters of Qajar Era IranFrom 23 September to 14 November 2019 Curated by Dr Pedram Khosronejad, this exhibition traced the somewhat unexplored history of African slaves in Iran during the Qajar dynasty and looks at the unique role of the camera in Iranian royalty from the 1840s to the 1930s. The exhibition was presented as part of the Silk Roads @ UNSW Seminar Series. |
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Sea Country: Yolngu Bark Paintings in the UNSW Art Collection and Gangaagundi Guunuwaygan (Future Life): Recent works by Chels MarshallFrom 20 May to 02 August 2019 These exhibitions were presented on the occasion of the 3rd Australia New Zealand Marine Biotechnology Society Conference at UNSW in 2019. They were a collaboration between The Global Water Institute, UNSW Library and the UNSW Art Collection. |
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In Response: Dialogues with RealTimeFrom 25 February to 25 April 2019, Availabe online This exhibition marks the closure of the RealTime art magazine and the launch of its archive. RealTime was Australia’s critical guide to national and international contemporary arts from 1994-2018. |
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Extended RealityFrom 11 to 15 February 2019 A suite of Virtual and Augmented Reality experiences, designed for the classroom, to provide students with opportunities to engage with their disciplines in innovative and inspiring ways through experience-based learning. This exhibition provided a chance to try out these emerging educational approaches and see what they can offer the university experience. |
For information about exhibitions presented in 2019, view the UNSW Library Exhibitions Program and Public Art: 2019 Year in Review 9.3MB
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LUMINOCITYFrom 8 to 25 October 2018 This exhibition showcased models and designs produced by current UNSW students working across all Built Environment disciplines. |
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Alun Leach-Jones: a language of his ownFrom 13 August to 19 September 2018, Available online Alun Leach-Jones was one of Australia's best known abstract artists. This memorial exhibition celebrates an artist whose contribution through his work and teaching had a formative impact on a generation of artists and art lovers throughout Australia. |
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Max Dupain: the architecture of UNSWFrom 23 April to 31 May 2018, Available online A decade after its foundation in 1949, UNSW entered a period of major campus development. During this time, from 1959 to 1970, UNSW’s main photographer of record was Max Dupain – one of the leading figures in 20th century Australian photography. This exhibition is drawn from photographs collected by the University Archives from the roughly 140 jobs Dupain carried out for UNSW. |
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Tip of the iceberg: Works from the UNSW Art CollectionFrom 15 December 2017 to 27 March 2018 This exhibition brought together more than thirty paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures by leading Australian artists, reflecting the strengths of the University’s holdings of Australian art from the 1980s and 1990s. |