Fiona Hall’s new site-specific installation at Sydney’s Hyde Park Barracks, Who Goes Here?, explores a mode of storytelling that could best be described as ‘spatially extended narrative’, creating an environment in which visitors curate their own stories with their feet as they walk through the space. In the forecourt of the Barracks, three hundred ghostly white signposts are laid out like grave posts in a cemetery. Each post bears a cryptic vignette of the life of an individual who stayed at the institution: convicts, immigrants, asylum inmates, a few officials. Atop each post, instead of an angel an arrow points to the direction whence they came and gives the distance travelled. Sparse details of a life are painted in black text up all four sides of each post. For a convict: origin, name, age, crime, sentence, vessel of transportation, outcome, further punishment. For a free settler: port of origin, date of embarkation, vessel, marital situation, what came next. At nearly two and a half metres tall, the posts tower above the visitor: one phalanx for the men, the other for the women.

Adam Lindsay, executive director of Sydney Living Museums, describes each post as ‘a chapter in a vertical novel’ that brings the history of early colonial Sydney alive. While this descriptor points to the spatial dimensions of the work, the metaphor of a novel cannot capture the user-generated, networked structure of the stories pieced together out of this installation. Visitors navigate the space, entering at any point and marking out their own haphazard pathway through the individual posts, generating their own narrative ensemble from the juxtaposition of one individual’s story with another.

Who Goes Here? detail, Fiona Hall 2021 (photograph by Joshua Morris for Sydney Living Museums)

The condensed, telegraphic style of each individual’s details sets up a mode of storytelling that relies more on the gaps, the ellipses, than on what is given. The posts offer just a few facts, evocative glimpses that trigger a journey into curiosity and imagination. Rather than an epitaph summing up a life lived and complete, the details summon it up in the present, captured in medias res, and, as the visitor wanders from one post to another, set off questions, chains of enquiry. What godawful life stretched out in front of fourteen-year-old errand boy William Osborne, sentenced to spend the rest of his days incarcerated for stealing coral beads? Why did he get life when twenty-two-year-old George Vigor, shoemaker, received only seven years for stealing a watch and shoes? Why did Francis Boucher, seventeen, get the same seven-year sentence for stealing just a handkerchief? What was this lottery of punishments? What would a seven-year sentence for stealing a watch mean to John Dwyer, convicted at the age of nine, and what brutal impulse drove deputy superintendent Ernest Augustine Slade to introduce a new cat o’ nine tails that drew blood after only four lashes? What led fifteen-year-old Irish immigrant Ann McDermott to be sacked for being ‘defiant and a very bad girl’, and where did sixteen-year-old Irish kitchen maid Kate Lee find the tenacity to repeatedly fight back against beatings and resist subjugation? What fate awaited the many young Irish orphan girls severed from the known world and transported to this unruly place? All of these questions are thrown out like baits on a hook to lure the viewer in deeper.

A common drawback of installation is that the mobile nature of viewing can result in a fleeting walk-through – just a quick grasp of what it’s about rather than an immersive experience. In Who Goes Here?, the physicality of the installation and the way it sparks questions, connections, and curiosity overcome this. The white posts set out across the space produce an instant iconography – an eerie forest with the feel of a memento mori – and, even in a brief encounter, the germinative nature of each snippet of a life can give a feel for this historic site and the lives endured therein. If visitors take the bait, the curiosity evoked by one vignette lures them in further, to another story and then another, as the cumulative effect of the funereal ambience and the impact of the narratives of discipline, punishment, and survival intensify.

Who Goes Here? is part of Sydney Living Museum’s commitment to partnering with artists to bring history alive in the present and, at the UNESCO World Heritage-listed Barracks, opened in 1819, to use stories to give ‘texture and depth to a place’, as Lindsay says. Readers familiar with Hall’s previous work will know the aesthetic brilliance, wit, and imagination of her sculptural works, such as Paradisus Terrestris (1989), held in the National Gallery of Australia: a set of exquisite miniature erotic sculptures, each nestled in a sardine can and germinating into jewel-like botanical forms. The Barracks installation builds on an impressive portfolio of Hall’s site-specific works that bring together this conceptual rigour and mastery of materials to play with the relationship between objects, spaces, and historical memory. Published photos of the installation don’t do justice to the work; they make it seem flat, one-dimensional. It is in the material, embodied experience of walking the space that the installation comes to life in all its richness and complexity.

Who Goes Here? continues at the Hyde Park Barracks until 30 May 2021.

This review is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.