We Were Women Before Our Time: Aimee Volkofsky

Next date: Friday, 15 August 2025 | 06:00 PM to Sunday, 02 November 2025 | 04:00 PM

We Were Women Before Our Time is a multimedia portrait of the women shaped by, and shaping, the mining country of far western New South Wales. Set in and around Broken Hill on Wilyakali Country, the work collages interviews, sound, video, and archival fragments to explore how women’s lives are forged in remote, extractive towns.

Drawing from over 20 interviews across generations, the project weaves together memories from women aged 17 to 70, alongside excerpts from girls’ diaries spanning the 1900s to the 1990s, including the artist's. These voices are layered into immersive soundscapes, combining field recordings and original compositions. Visual materials, both newly captured and archival, float and fracture across digital projections, holding tension between pride, pain, resilience, and resistance.

The work speaks to themes of girlhood, physical development, identity, feminism, and environmental connection. It also acknowledges the entanglement of gendered labour, colonisation, and survival in a place where the land itself is both a resource and a relative.

Through this layered installation, We Were Women Before Our Time becomes a kind of chorus, sometimes dissonant, sometimes harmonious, of the past and present, amplifying voices often overlooked in the shadow of the slagheap.

Image: Aimee Volkofsky, Still from We Were Women Before Our Time, 2025.

2025 Open Cut Commission winner