Curator Jessica Bridgfoot has revitalised paintings from Bendigo's historic collection by asking artists including FAMILY FIRST! (Devon Ackerman and Paul Yore), Juan Ford, Bridie Lunney, Christian Thompson and De Vietri to respond and interpret them from a modern perspective. The exhibition is constructed as an interrogation by current artists of their antecedents.

"By commissioning a series of contemporary responses, New Histories highlights the role of artists as documenters and commentators of the world and invites us to rethink colonial and western ways of viewing," Bridgfoot says. Through a kind of cross-examination, she says, "the contemporary artists are asking for a moment of self-reflection – look at how far we've come – what have or haven't we learnt from the past?"

Rupert Bunny's The Sun Bath, c. 1913, was Bridgfoot's selection for Lunney. The best of Bunny's oeuvre is a homage to women's sensuality. It's a rare (male) artist who gives sovereignty to the female nude as occupying a domain of her own erotic power but Bunny had no difficulty in assigning such agency to his models. Perhaps that's because he was madly in love with his gorgeous fellow artist and wife, Jeanne Morel, pictured far left in The Sun Bath. The work was completed at the height of Bunny's success in Paris, where he had moved in 1886.

Lunney's minimalist installation, Always Radiant, acts as a critique of the body language of The Sun Bath's lovely indolent figures. She has made a large, golden sculptural frame through which to consider the painting, and more broadly the tradition of the nude, from a contemporary perspective. The frame also offers a stark stage set for dancer Lily Paskas, who will perform twice during the course of the exhibition.

Juan Ford found himself "flooded with trepidation" when approaching Thomas Sheard's The Arab Blacksmith (c.1900). How could he fashion a work that both respected Sheard's technical and imaginative prowess while offering a post-colonial critique of the white first world's image of the impoverished third world? With humour. Ford's hilarious painting Unappropriator, scaled at the same size as The Arab Blacksmith, shows a many-armed goddess, balancing a variety of objects that refer to technology (pliers, a hammer) and nature (a rose, a bird) to question who commands the interpretation of such potent cultural signifiers.

Despite its rich and varied nature, the lustre of the show is somewhat dimmed by a gender imbalance: only two of the 10 historic works are by women (Emma Minnie Boyd and Agnes Goodsir). Redressing the balance from the contemporary side, Pilar Mata Dupont worked with an all-female collective – Seecum Cheung, Maike Hemmers, Isabelle Sully and Flora Valeska Woudstra – to develop a 45-minute, three-channel video in response to Goodsir's Girl with a Cigarette (c. 1925).

Goodsir was a sophisticated expatriate artist of 1920s Paris, a stylish woman and successful artist whose painting depicts the woman she loved – Rachel Dunn. The dreamy film montage by Mata Dupont's collective records its impressions of Goodsir's haunts in Paris, where the group undertook research.

Ackerman and Yore, aka FAMILY FIRST!, have made a flamboyant figure that addresses Carl Hoff's The Golden Wedding (1883). The lifesize black mannequin is elaborately adorned with imagery both religious (Virgin Mary) and pop-cultural (Mickey Mouse) as well as a variety of objects and patterned fabrics. The Golden Wedding celebrates the 50th anniversary of a wealthy German couple surrounded by generations of their (straight white) family. As a queer couple, FAMILY FIRST! was intrigued by the "bizarre costume drama" staged by Hoff. Their fantastic figure inhabits an amorphous zone and can be read as male or female, gay or straight, and belonging to black/white heritage.

Bridgfoot says many museums around the world are now presenting their collections as a series of dialogues between artworks. "Rather than reading the museum as a collection of rarefied objects – and museums as sanctions of cultural value – we could consider them as archives." It means the artworks can gain fresh meanings in intriguing contexts.