Mnemosyne Grove: Photography, Memory and Time | Georgia Metaxas in Conversation with Dr. Marta Weiss

Georgia Metaxas is an Australian artist and educator, with Greek heritage, now based in London. Her work explores the tension between artistic intent and documentary practice, with a particular interest in the representation of absence and preservation of memory through photography. She has exhibited widely in the UK and Australia, and has also shown work in Spain, China and Germany. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Photomedia from Monash University, Melbourne, and is an experienced university lecturer. She has developed community engagement programmes with institutions including the East London NHS Foundation Trust, Photoworks UK and the V&A. Her work is held in several public and private collections, including the National Gallery of Victoria and the Museum of Australian Photography. 

Dr. Marta Weiss has been a Curator of Photography at the V&A since 2007 and served as Acting Senior Curator from 2019–2023.  As Lead Curator of the V&A Photography Centre, she oversaw the creation of the UK’s largest space for a photography collection, which opened to critical acclaim in 2023.  Originally from New York, she studied Modern and Contemporary Art History at Harvard (BA) and History of Photography at Princeton (MA, PhD).  She spent two years as a curatorial fellow in the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2004–2006) and, more recently, in the autumn of 2023, participated in the International Curators Visiting Programme at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Greece. 

Weiss’ numerous V&A exhibitions include The Camera Exposed (2016); Staying Power: Photographs of Black British Experience 1950s–1990s (2015); Light from the Middle East: New Photography (2012); and Julia Margaret Cameron (2015), which toured to five international venues. Her books include Julia Margaret Cameron: Photographs to electrify you with delight and startle the world (2015); Autofocus: The Car in Photography (2019); Making It Up: Photographic Fictions (2018); and with Lisa Springer, Julia Margaret Cameron: Arresting Beauty (2023).