More than 150 artworks – and some of the country’s biggest names – are represented in an exhibition that’s equal parts poignant and powerful
here was a telling moment during the recent opening of a landmark First Nations Australian art exhibition in Aotearoa/New Zealand: a speaker commented that Australia is racist and the entire room laughed.
“There’s something in the air at the moment … that reckoning. People are just being honest about it and are talking about it and it is a particularly powerful idea.”The rich – and at times confronting – exhibition brings together more Grainy vision of the 2004 Palm Island protests and its aftermath is intercut with a triptych of police body-worn camera vision, news media and personal videos shot by community members. An elder’s plea: “What’s it gonna take to stop deaths in custody? Our boys in custody? It’s still going on!”Ah Kee’s work takes centre stage for a reason, Pohio says. “It’s been confronting and challenging quite a lot of our visitors, but people have been really engaging with the piece.
“[These photographs] were deliberately shot in the old ethnographic style,” Shen says. “But also part of the narrative arc captures the contemporary world of Uncle Moogy, retaining and reviving culture each and every day he gets out of bed.” Scarce says her work is not always easily understood: “When I first started making my work, people used to ask me whether I needed counselling. Non-white Australians were saying, ‘It’s really intense. I think there’s something wrong with you.’
“Time collapses, it’s not linear. It’s not one way, it’s cyclical, it’s everywhere. Many of the works fit into many of the other themes,” says Baum, a Gulumirrgin, Wardaman and Karajarri woman. “I think people have been really surprised at the diversity, the excellence and just the sheer beauty of these works.Photograph: David St George
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