Georges Mora Fellowship

Black and white photo of Georges Mora — Georges Mora

The Georges Mora Fellowship allows a contemporary artist to study, experiment and explore fresh thinking in their art.

The fellowship includes:

$10,000 funding
desk space at the Library for 12 months
access to collections and Library staff expertise.

The Georges Mora Fellowship will also help you:

identify and apply for other local or international residencies
access other people and organisations who can support your project with specialist knowledge.

The funding is based on 2 months of work in the Library, either continuous or broken up over the year.

2024 recipient

Olivia Koh – Shining 顯影

During this fellowship Olivia Koh will produce an intertextual moving image work that explores twentieth century diaspora stories in East and South East Asian regions. Shining 顯影 takes the format and pages of a community published Xerox magazine as inspiration for a new moving image work; drawing on articles, advertisements and gossip tabloids from this publication, the migration history of the artists' paternal family and fictional characters.

Drawing on local and international networks, a collection of archival and newly shot footage, using techniques of collage, montage and animation, letters, photos and documents are interspersed throughout this video work in Mandarin, Hokkien, Bahasa Melayu/Indonesia and English language. The research will engage with the history of Xerox publications, including how the photocopier replaced or superseded previous technologies, and how this technology affected and increased access to grassroots and community publishing.

Olivia Koh is an artist and researcher working in moving-image production. She considers how personal migration histories are expressed and performed through the moving image; videos that mediate new relationships to places, memory and forms of storytelling. Koh holds a Master’s degree (Research) from the School of Art, RMIT University (2023). Recent exhibitions include ‘Island Shapes 岛屿形状’ on Runway Journal, ‘Minyak Sawit Keluarga (Palm Oil Family)’ with Hyphenated Projects & ACMI (2023), ‘Artist Film Program’ at Melbourne Now, NGVA (2023). Olivia is a Teaching Associate at Monash University and RMIT University..

About Georges Mora

Georges Mora was an entrepreneur, restaurateur and art dealer. He was born in Germany in 1913.

After World War II, he briefly settled in New York before immigrating to Melbourne. He purchased and ran the landmark Balzac restaurant in East Melbourne and St Kilda's Tolarno Hotel. The hotel included a gallery, which was moved to South Yarra in 1979.

Georges was an avid supporter of Australian artists, including Charles Blackman, Arthur Boyd, Joy Hester, Sidney Nolan, John Olsen, John Perceval and Albert Tucker. His commitment to the arts saw him produce outstanding exhibitions featuring local and international artists. He died in 1992.

Arts advocates generously donate funding for the Georges Mora Fellowship, which is supported by Alliance Française de Melbourne and other partners.

Previous recipients

Learn more about the inspiring projects undertaken by past and present fellows in our fellows gallery.

2022: Phuong Ngo with the project Racist Furniture which explored and unpacked the history of race and racism in Australia through the history of furniture making and manufacturing.
2019: Ruth Hoflich with the artwork Reality is only a word that drew on the relationship between digital and analogue image culture and information processing, resulting in a printed artwork for the Library's collection.
2018: Dr Jude Walton presented an installation and performance that looked at the topics of women Surrealist artists, Surrealism and performance, the notion of the muse, self-representation and objects of desire.
2017: Catherine Evans with the project The View from Mount Disappointment, which sought to reinvigorate and open questions about individual connection to place amid various tensions present in the contemporary world: be it personal, environmental or political.
2016: James Geurts with the project Floodplain, which identified several sites along the floodplain of the Birrarung River in order to draw out ecological currents and identify cultural significance.
2015: Inez de Vega with the performance Performing Disorder!, which researched the history of women incarcerated in Victoria's psychiatric institutions. Creating this show in collaborative.
2013: Brook Andrew and Trent Walter created four large artists' books combining hand-printed and mechanical-reproduction printing techniques as part of their project Dual/duel.
2012: Linda Tegg used photography and video to create Forecast, a work exploring the interplay between the real and the performed through the personal experience of travel and learning a language.
2010: Ross Coulter released 10,000 hand-folded paper planes from the balconies of the Library's La Trobe Reading Room to create a visual representation of thought patterns that have occurred in the room.
2009: Phillip Brophy with the multimedia project Colour Me Dead which explored the unromantic history of how artists and their art have been depicted in cinema and popular culture as mad, aberrant and psychopathic.
2008: Cyrus Tang with the digital video and large-format print project Memories of Childhood.
2007: Trinh Vu with their project Blue Skies, which researched how 3D digital technologies are being adopted in the fine arts.