Originally commissioned as part of the Australian presentation at the 2007 Venice Biennale, Callum Morton’s Valhalla is now to be seen in Australia for the first time.

The story of Valhalla begins over 35 years ago with Morton’s childhood home in Melbourne. Designed by his architect father, this concrete block homage to Modernist aesthetics was inhabited briefly by the family, sold, gentrified and, more recently, demolished.

Rebuilt by Morton at three-quarter scale, the house manifests as a smoking ruin: stripped out, torched and shot through with holes. It appears to rise up from the dead, a haunting from the artist’s past, certainly, but also as an un-monument to modern order and a symbol of contemporary instability.

In contrast to its ruined domestic exterior, visitors enter a pristine corporate-style interior: a foyer which emanates a soundtrack of muzak. From behind closed doors comes the sound of lifts falling to oblivion and back. In this weaving of the real, model and fantastical, and the merging of public and private spaces, Morton creates a complex interplay of narratives, drawing on Hollywood catastrophe movies, recent world events and his own biography.