EXHIBITION
Floribunda
2025
VENUE
Bunjil Place Gallery
YEAR
Studio Peter King was engaged by Bunjil Place to design Floribunda, presented in partnership with the National Gallery of Victoria and curated by David Sequeira. Taking its name from the Latin for "many-flowering," the exhibition brought together more than 150 works from the NGV collection — spanning painting, fashion and textiles, decorative arts, and First Nations and Pacific art — each selected for its connection to flowers, staged within a single wunderkammer-style gallery.
Using video and virtual reality, the design team tested and refined the spatial relationships between paintings, fashion, sculpture and other mediums, building the layered scenography that defines the exhibition. Floral fashion forms a major chapter of the show, presented in front of faceted mirrors that reflect both the garments and the salon-style hang of floral paintings on the opposing wall.
A specially commissioned three-part score by Peter Corrigan brings a sonic dimension to the exhibition, tying the galleries together as visitors move through the space.
Client: Bunjil Place In Partnership with NGV Melbourne
Curated by: David Sequeira
Exhibition Design: Studio Peter King
Graphic Design: Forde Nicol
Build: Prop Art
Music: Peter Corrigan
Lighting: MEGS Lighting
Graphics: Decently Exposed
Floral Millinery: iPaper Lab
“In another section of the gallery, in a little chamber purpose-built by Bunjil Place, sits A Chaotic Garden, by Japanese artist Azuma Makoto, a work built from 130 plant specimens…
Sequeira says the work is "at the heart of the show". The notion of the rose was a "powerful curatorial idea" in developing Floribunda. A Chaotic Garden is the centre of the rose, and the other works around it are the petals unfolding.
"But I think what's beautiful about this work is, when you're in here, for me, the experience is of being in a place where time is suspended, where I'm in that place between life and death, or mortality and immortality — or whatever words you want to choose — but that very in-between space.”
-Anna Kelsey-Sugg
ABC Arts, 3 April 2025