A velvet ant, a flower and a bird
24 November 2025
The University of Melbourne’s Potter Museum of Art is proud to announce an ambitious new exhibition curated by internationally renowned curator Chus Martínez titled A velvet ant, a flower and a bird.
Opening 19 February and running until 6 June 2026, the exhibition brings together works from the University of Melbourne’s Classics, Biology, and Art collections, alongside new commissions and performances by acclaimed artists from Australia and abroad.
‘This exhibition can be seen as a garden of knowledge, structured around three familiar figures from nature — a velvet ant, a flower, and a bird. These figures represent a parliament of beings, each carrying symbolic and metaphorical weight that encourage us to reimagine what intelligence means.’
Historic and contemporary works will be displayed in dialogue, fostering unexpected encounters between the University’s collections and contemporary practice. The exhibition invites visitors to question the divide between natural and artificial intelligence, and to see intelligence as something shared across all living systems and materials, rather than an exclusively human trait.
This expansive curatorial vision explores how museum collections can open space for new ways of reasoning. “In approaching the University’s collections outside conventional academic frameworks, I came to the idea of calling animal wisdom into account,” Martínez explains.
“Collections hold many narratives – historical, cultural, economic, material – and by bringing them into living knowledge systems, we’re able to dissolve the binary between the natural and the artificial. The visitor enters a kind of ecosystem, where objects and digital media exist without hierarchy, allowing the imagination to roam widely.”
The first of these entities is the velvet ant, which Martínez describes as “a wise being, a connoisseur of materials and renewable energies,” who represents radical adaptation — inspired by recent scientific studies into its uniquely light-absorbing structure, which could revolutionise solar technology. The flower, regarded as a “sun-fed intelligence,” symbolises perpetual renewal and adaptive creativity. The bird, inspired by Nobel Laureate Giorgio Parisi’s pioneering flocking studies, embodies “the power of collective intelligence — an emergent awareness that transcends individual cognition.”
‘Chus Martínez’s visionary approach champions arts' capacity to drive social change. Her exhibitions create space for exercising new connections and modes of awareness and encouraging meaningful dialogue across disciplines.’
Martínez adds: “At a time when fantasies of domination – technological or otherwise – threaten to upend our sense of equality, we urgently need spaces that train free thought. A relevant society is one where many forms of knowledge flourish, inspiring new languages for thinking and feeling together.”
Participating artists include: Adrian Mauriks, Agnieszka Polska, Alan Craiger-Smith, Alexa Karolinski & Ingo Niermann, Alexandra Copeland, Angela Goh, Ann Lislegaard, Anouk Tschanz, Anthony Romagnano, Barbara A Swarbrick, Benjamin Armstrong, Brent Harris, Carol Murphy, Daphne Mohajer va Pesaran, David Noonan, Derek Tumala, Din Matamoro, Eduardo Navarro, Gracia Haby & Louise Jennison, Harold Munkara, Heather B Swann, Helen Ganalmirriwuy Garrawurra, Helen Maudsley, Ian Wayne Abdullah, Inge King AM, Ingela Ihrman, Jane Jin Kaisen, Joan Jonas, John Pule, Josie Papialuk, Judith Pungkarta Inkamala, Julie Mensch, Kate Daw, Lauren Burrow, Liss Fenwick, Lorraine Jenyns, Malcolm Howie, Margaret Rarru Garrawurra, Marian Tubbs, Mel O’Callaghan, Mia Boe, Miles Howard-Wilks, Nabilah Nordin, Naomi Hobson, Noemi Pfister, Noriko Nakamura, Percy Grainger, Pippin Louise Drysdale, Rivane Neuenschwander & Cao Guimarães, Rosslyn Piggot, Rrikin Burarrwaŋa, Salvador Dalí, Taloi Havini, Tamara Henderson, Teelah George, Tessa Laird, and Tony Warburton.
Martínez has collaborated with exhibition designer Nguyen Le and graphic designer Ana Dominguez studio.
A series of publications, titled Art Museums Papers, authored by Chus Martínez, Laura Tripaldi, and Neha Cheksi will accompany the exhibition, offering further insights into its themes.
The exhibition will feature a vibrant public program featuring talks, performances and an opening weekend celebration with local and international artists on Friday 21 and Saturday 22 February 2026. Also built around the exhibition will be the Potter’s annual Interdisciplinary Forum under the theme of Intelligence on Saturday 9 May 2026.
This will be the second exhibition presented at the Potter since its re-opening in May 2025 following the acclaimed exhibition 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art.