Wunderbox, 28 November 2008 -15 February 2009

In the late 1990s Terry Urbahn set to work embellishing a series of display cases that had been constructed almost two decades earlier by the National Museum Education Service. With their text panels, diagrams and tiny models, these cases sought to instruct school children about the lives of Maori, Aboriginal Australians, and other ‘tribal’ cultures. Urbahn thoroughly disrupts these old lessons. Overlaying the educational texts with a blizzard of mixed messages and placing models of his own artworks within, he breathes unruly contemporary life into these old-fashioned ‘small worlds’.