Callum Morton: Valhalla

Imagine an Australian modernist family home transposed from the streets of a typical Melbourne suburb onto a war-ravaged battle zone and you’re getting close to envisioning Callum Morton’s crumbling, majestic Valhalla – the work with which he represented Australia at the 2007 Venice Biennale. Half-way between ruin and monument, Valhalla re-creates, at three-quarter scale, his (now demolished) childhood home, serving as a kind of monument to loss and reflecting on the profligacy of property development. Valhalla, in Norse mythology, is a great hall for slain combatants and in a sense, here, Morton immortalises his building too, bringing it back from the dead. Now imagine, in sharp relief against its disintegrating facade, that the home’s interior has been scrupulously fitted out in the sickly slick style of corporate foyer design – the type of space that Morton sees as a kind of purgatory; a thoroughfare or non-space – with elevators that all go straight to hell. There’s no need to imagine it; Valhalla is at last being shown in Australia. Go and experience this much-lauded epic work for yourself. Also on show and not to be missed in association with MIAF is Morton’s latest project, Smokescreen, at Anna Schwartz gallery and a work from 1999, International Style, at ACCA.

The Arts Centre, Forecourt