IAC Art Talks 2026 #2: Unstable Monuments by Dr Daniel Press

Date: Thursday, 15 October, 2026

Time: 5:00pm – 6:00pm (Sydney time)

Zoom webinar. Please RSVP HERE.

Abstract

The notion of the copy is closely tied to the production of colonial monuments in Australia. In 1919, the City of Hobart went looking for a statue of King Edward VII. It settled on a design already standing in marble at Cubbon Park in Bengaluru, India, because it was the only one the council could afford. Tasmania’s monument to empire has been a copy of an Indian one ever since.

This talk follows both statues through the speaker’s practice-based doctoral research, which used 3D scanning and lost-wax casting to reify the institutional lives of colonial monuments. In Bengaluru, the marble King Edward has spent sixty years oscillating between neglect and repair: activists called for its removal in the 1960s; the state government announced its removal in 1977 but never carried it out; and by the 2010s, the figure was falling apart. Scanning it required letters of support from UNSW and the City of Hobart, permission from the Government of Karnataka’s Director of Horticulture, notification to the Police Department, and the presence of an officer on site. The contractors were refused a raised platform, and the resulting model came back missing sections of the head, shoulders, and plinth. Press argues that these absences are not failures of the record but the record itself. The resulting wax-cast sculptures are ghostly beings, each bearing the residue of inconsistent protocols, technologies, levels of access, and states of deterioration.

About the Speaker

Dr Daniel Press is a curator and researcher based in Sydney. He holds a PhD and a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours Class 1) from UNSW Art & Design, where his practice-based research examined the colonial residues held in public monuments to the British monarchy, using 3D scanning and digital fabrication. The work was undertaken with local and state governments in Australia, India, New Zealand, Northern Ireland and South Africa. The resulting exhibition, Send-Off (2023–24), was presented at Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf and toured to the La Perouse Museum, with coverage in the Derry Journal and The Hindu. Between 2023 and 2026 he co-directed DRAW Space, an artist-run initiative dedicated to contemporary drawing; and he is currently the gallery manager at REDBASE Sydney.

IAC Art Talks

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