17 September - 3 October

How do things acquire value?

Barking Spider Creative sidesteps the cultural and economic conventions to explore the experiential value of everyday things. The Valuer, premiering at Melbourne Fringe this spring, invites punters to bring their object for one-on-one consultations with an unpredictable valuer manifesting as a human-sized raven.

“The work started with a simple question: who decides what something is worth? The more I pulled at that thread, the more urgent it felt — we're consuming at a rate that's genuinely catastrophic, yet we rarely stop to ask why we value what we value. Enter the Raven”, says Penelope Bartlau, the lead artist.

“At GalleryGalleryINC, we like thinking by doing”, says Josh Wilson,

Director of Special Projects and Philosophy, “and the only way to find out what values, insights and sociality encounters with The Valuer can generate is to host her and let the magic happen”.

“To change the world, we need to practice seeing the extraordinary in the everyday”, says Justas Pipinis of the Aimless Research Institute, initiator of Curious Entanglements, a joint artistic research program with GalleryGalleryINC that sponsors and co-produces the show.

The Valuer can be consulted at GalleryGalleryINC,

17 September - 3 October, on Thursdays and Saturdays;

Bookings essential. Book here.

The opening event is on Thursday, September 17, 6 pm - 7:30 pm.

Barking Spider Creative, the brainchild of Penelope Bartlau, creates extraordinary experiences across art forms, transforming people’s perception of the familiar and unfamiliar. Since 2006, they have delivered over 1,300 events, some of which have been presented at institutions such as the National Museum of Australia, NGV, and Heide, and in places as diverse as China, France, and India. Currently, Penelope is a PhD candidate at RMIT University; she also holds an MA (Puppetry) from the University of Melbourne.