David Hansen

David Hansen is Associate Professor of Art History & Art Theory at the ANU, and spent twenty-five years as a public art gallery director and curator, in Warrnambool, Mt Gambier, Melbourne, and Hobart. Most of his published writing has been associated with this professional context: exhibition and collection catalogues, essays and reviews in journals, magazines and newspapers, and public lectures and speeches. His essay ‘Seeing Truganini’ was a co-winner of the 2010 Calibre Essay Prize and winner of the Alfred Deakin Prize for an Essay Advancing Public Debate in the 2010 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. His essay ‘Death Dance’, an account of the imagery of the early colonial Indigenous leader Bungaree, was commended in the inaugural Calibre Essay Prize in 2007.

David Hansen reviews 'The Exhibitionists: A history of Sydney’s Art Gallery of New South Wales' by Steven Miller

March 2022, no. 440 • 22 February 2022

The Western, colonial, patriarchal hegemony having eroded somewhat in recent years, the purposes and methods of art and of museum management and curatorship are undergoing fundamental change. Formerly unchallenged Anglophone-transatlantic canons and practices have been undermined by broader international perspectives, by the impact of digital technologies, and by the politics of identity – in et ... (read more)

Māori markings: Tā moko (National Gallery of Australia)

ABR Arts • 25 March 2019

The traditional Western art museum is struggling a bit. Its former role as a repository of national values, as reified and aestheticised in paintings, sculpture, and the decorative arts, is today challenged if not assaulted on multiple fronts: ranging from economic, political, and social globalisation, to digital technology, to commercial popular culture. Increasingly, art museums’ collection di ... (read more)

2007 Calibre Prize (commended): 'Death Dance' by David Hansen

April 2007, no. 290 • 01 April 2007

I am at the exhibition ‘National Treasures from Australia’s Great Libraries’. I have come to see a picture of a man named Bungaree. I am standing in front of him, but I am distanced. The painting is glazed, low-lit, hung on a wall on the far side of quite a deep display case. If I stand up straight he is in focus, but too far away for me to see the details. As I incline my torso forward to e ... (read more)

2010 Calibre Prize (Winner): 'Seeing Truganini'

May 2010, no. 321 • 01 May 2010

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) For what it is worth, my own view is that in contemporary Australia the dialectical quest for truth about the indigenous culture, by open argument and counter-argument, is no less important than about the culture of the invaders and oppressors. Bot ... (read more)