‘Julie Mehretu: A Transcore of the Radical Imaginatory’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia

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‘A Transcore of the Radical Imaginatory’ is the first Australian retrospective of Julie Mehretu. Based primarily in New York, Mehretu traces her family origins to revolutionary Ethiopia, which informs her practice and its connections to radical discourses, encompassing subjects including migration, multiculturalism and racial conflict. Mehretu is also interested in the philosophy of language, and has spoken of how her work functions semiotically.

Highlights from ‘A Transcore of the Radical Imaginatory’ include a cycle of exuberant black paintings, Femenine in nine (2022-23), named after a piece by American composer and pianist Julius Eastman. The exhibition also centres a series of paintings titled TRANSpaintings (2023-24), presented in concert with a work by Nairy Baghramian, Upright Brackets (2023). Baghramian’s sculptures act to support Mehretu’s freestanding paintings and illustrate a puissant collaboration between the two artists. Mehretu’s paintings are boldly contemporary, layered and multidimensional, and draw from photos of historical protests and demonstrations, translating them into a mélange of dynamic lines, gestures and colours.

Mehretu speaks openly about the “sombreness” of her paintings in the Trump era, as well as the sense of innovation that came with “pushing boundaries” during Obama’s administration. Mehretu emphasises the layered nature of her paintings and how such layering is evident in her use of media and material as well as her use of subjects and reference points. The exhibition is accompanied by a film, Julie Mehretu: Palimpsest, which traces the artist’s mid-career survey, co-organised by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2020. The film features the artist commenting on her work as well as interviews with friends and collaborators.

Reflecting on her art in preparation for the opening, Mehretu said, “there are myriad positive and negative aspects to the world we are living in. It’s overwhelming ... the accelerated pace of information can feel difficult to negotiate. I am deeply committed to the language of abstraction as a place to negotiate these complexities and contradictions from a nuanced and subjective place.” Mehretu is an accomplished abstractionist who shows how colour and form can provide a window to historical struggle—and her vision of movements of social change shows that colour itself is indeed radically imaginatory.

Vanessa Francesca, Warrang/Sydney

‘A Transcore of the Radical Imaginatory’ is on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia until 27 April 2025.

Why do you choose to work with paint?

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In a world where you can work with any technology or material, why do you choose to work with paint? This was the question posed to nine artists from around Australia, who discuss the medium’s enduring relevance.

Abdul Abdullah

“When I finished undergrad in 2008, I considered myself exclusively a painter, but in 2011 I was embroiled in a wave of negative pushback to my Archibald entry of Waleed Aly, so I drew from my journalism studies to explore more politically motivated work. In doing so I exploited what I saw as a cognitive bias that lent photography and video an inherently real quality—they are understood as evidence of something that actually happened. There is an assumption of the fantastical in painting, even though these other mediums have as much opportunity for contrivance. I really enjoyed working with these other mediums and particularly enjoyed working with friends like David Charles Collins. But since 2020, I have returned almost exclusively to painting. I find it very democratic. Every school in the country, no matter how rich or poor, has  Chromacryls in the cupboard.”

Christopher Bassi

“I am sure that at this stage a commitment to painting has something to do with my sensibilities and the very idiosyncratic ways that I need to think, take in and figure out the world. For example, at any one time, a painting can be about many things: something academic, imaginary, relational, visceral or personal. The process itself requires time, an often-unspoken space between maker and artwork that is a flux of critical thinking and dreaming, full of self-doubt, failures and hidden successes. Simply put, painting has become my method for making sense of the world and understanding myself within it.

Painting is a dialogue and to paint a picture today is to be acutely aware of its historical backdrop. As a Meriam and Yupungathi man, I’m left grappling with the medium’s legacies as a colonial, patriarchal institution rooted in European ideals of ordering and visioning the world. But rather than working for the sake of subversion, I end up asking myself, ‘What, if anything, can this medium do for me?’ Through a type of critical re-imagining of the potential of painting, it then becomes an opening, and also transforms to become the language to speak to history in other more complex and personal ways.”

Dean Cross

“The material pleasure of working with paint is one of the primary drivers of my interest in it: the tactility, the sensuousness of it, even the smell. On a conceptual level, I think a lot about painting in the context of the Australian landscape tradition and how my work fits into that continuum, as well as how my work fits into a non-Western painting tradition, a First Nations tradition. I’m very interested in the overlaps and digressions of those two lineages. For me, painting provides a rich opportunity to speak about—and to speak to—being alive in the twenty-first century, in all its complications and difficulties, and all the great things, too.

But maybe that’s just a complicated way of saying: I just love painting. I love making paintings. I have always loved painting. I’ve been looking at paintings all my life, but a good painting still has the power to stop me in my tracks.”

Gian Manik

“I work with paint because it’s something that I feel capable and confident with. From a young age, I've been exposed to paintings and paint by my grandparents, my mother and teachers. It never felt like learning the medium was annoying or tiresome. Like any muscle, I’ve trained the paint one so that it works proficiently.

Although I love and understand the medium, it still challenges me—I consider pushing my study of it to be part of my practice. That is, I feel like there’s enough there for me to bend the medium in order to best execute concepts. My ideas shift often, so the medium moves with them. I find the process of matching techniques and concepts therapeutic in both the studio and exhibitions. 

I really love all kinds of art and artists, but I feel that painting is something that I can use to express my art in an honest way.”

Jelena Telecki

“It is always interesting (not to say perplexing) to be asked to explain why you are working with paint when there are so many other available options. In addition, being asked why you are a painter often entails the unspoken implication of painting's supposed status as an obsolete art practice. Yet after 20 years of working as a painter, I feel that there is nothing ‘special’ about choosing to work with paint, and that discussion surrounding relevance of painting is irrelevant at its best, and tiresome at its worst. 

Painting—like any other art form or discipline—is exactly that: an art form, a way to make art and in doing so come closer to discovering or understanding something that may not be otherwise possible. For me, painting is a process that is flexible and allows for experimentation; it does not have to be overtly pre-planned and can always surprise you, all of which are the reasons why I am an artist who happens to be a painter, and not the other way around.”

Khadim Ali

“I work with paint because it connects deeply to both my heritage and the ancient traditions that inspire my practice. My ancestors come from Bamiyan, Afghanistan, where the world’s oldest oil paintings were discovered—and are still visible on cave walls after nearly 1,500 years. This enduring legacy informs my practice, making every brushstroke a connection to that history.

I’m also inspired by Persian and Mughal miniature paintings. I appreciate their precision, vibrant colours and intricate details. Yet paint offers me more than just tradition—it provides freedom and fluidity to explore both the past and present. It lets me blend echoes of history with contemporary emotions, making the medium feel alive and personal.

Paint is inherently poetic. Every human emotion has a colour, and through paint, I can capture the full spectrum of feelings—joy, sorrow, nostalgia. It’s a quick and handy way to visualise my imagination, allowing ideas to flow seamlessly from thought to canvas.

Though I also work with modern mediums like sound, storytelling and the intergenerational practices of embroidery and tapestry, paint remains central to my art. It offers a directness and flexibility that allow me to fully express the complexity of my identity while honouring the timelessness of this ancient medium.”

Louise Zhang

“In this age of technological advancement, there’s even more reason to paint. We can’t lose that tactility, the art of the handmade. Digital methods can add to or simplify the process of artmaking, but this can overshadow the practice of experimenting and imagining—to me, technology remains just a tool.

Painting endures because it fulfills an innate human desire to work with our hands. Cooking, crafting, building houses; the act of making is deeply rooted in our humanity. Painting contrasts sharply with the fast-paced demands of modern life, making it more important than ever. The way paint dries, the way it’s applied, the varnishes—it all requires patience, time and risk. Artists can spend hours in the studio applying paint, sitting back, reflecting, approaching it again. Unlike digital mediums, there’s no undo button in painting; once applied, paint alters the canvas irrevocably. The decision-making process—and the accidents and ‘mistakes’ that might occur—create a depth that you can’t manufacture through digital means.

My passion for painting is also driven by history and culture. My grandfather’s calligraphy table where he studied and practiced remains in his home in China. His brushwork, the act of him applying ink with a brush, is evidence of the tactile. It connects me to him, and this human element defines the art of painting.”

Marikit Santiago

“I think the simple answer to why I choose paint is because, frankly, I’m good at it. I have full control over the image I can produce if I work with paint. Working with oil allows me to flex my full range of skill over colour, technique and composition. It allows me to fully realise the images I visualise. I also think that audiences will always be impressed by what we can create with our hands.

It’s also an accessible medium for my children to work with and, when I was a child myself, working with paint always felt like a serious undertaking, a medium that required time and consideration. So in my early experiences of art making, working with paint felt like a privilege.

I have always admired the paintings from the Western classical canon and my work continues to be influenced by this period of art history. I still aspire to create an image with the skill of the Renaissance artists. 

But really, I think painting chose me. I have tried creating work with different media without success—I’ve even tried not being an artist at all. But I always end up painting. I just can't help it.”

Prudence Flint

“Painting has limits and specific conditions and because of this it offers up freedom. It has proven to be an unmatched portal into other worlds. Surprisingly robust, it survives beyond the millennium. It is intimately connected to the hand and the reflexes. It smears, blends and shines; it is slick, rough and bumpy; the consistency of food and bodily excretions. It demands a million unconscious decisions, all of which have inexplicable effects. Painting has served institutions of power, representing status and wealth, but is simultaneously defined by its intrinsic generosity and endurance.”

This article was originally published in Art Monthly Australasia’s Summer 2024-25 edition, Issue 341. Purchase a copy here.

Image credits: Art Sodsirikul (Abdul Abdullah); Joe Ruckli (Christopher Bassi); Dario Hardaker (Dean Cross); Alex Kelaart (Gian Manik); Felicity Jenkins/Art Gallery of New South Wales (Jelena Telecki); Yasa Ali (Khadim Ali); Garry Trinh (Louise Zhang and Marikit Santiago); Karina Dias Pires (Prudence Flint)

Repatriate Love Back to Our Ancestors: The Unbound Collective’s ‘Sovereign Acts | Love Praxis’ at Flinders University Museum of Art

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The Unbound Collective celebrates its tenth anniversary with the exhibition ‘Sovereign Acts | Love Praxis’ at Flinders University Museum of Art (FUMA). The collective features four First Nations women, artists and academics based at Flinders University, who speak back to colonisation on Kaurna Land and beyond: Ali Gumillya Baker (Mirning), Faye Rosas Blanch (Yidinyji/Mbararam), Natalie Harkin (Narungga) and Simone Ulalka Tur (Yankunytjatjara).

‘Sovereign Acts | Love Praxis’ also includes work from other contributors, widening the collective while maintaining a shared relatedness to place. These new works sit alongside the critical and creative works representing the five acts of sovereignty that the collective has performed over the last ten years. They have left a footprint as powerful yet graceful and gentle as the image of the four women gliding through the Art Gallery of New South Wales as part of Sovereign Act IV | Object (2019), wearing hoop skirts layered with foliage, carrying hand-held instruments and projecting images onto colonial art works, leaving only a trail of smoke. It is ephemeral, the smoke will dissipate but the fire remains. Through their work, the artists ask themselves, “What are the ideas that we can collectively bind ourselves to and what are the ideas that can set us free?” And how is this done within a university that in the past had used an image of a tall ship to announce itself? A symbol of colonisation now used within this exhibition that reclaims place and narrative.  

I have an uncanny ability to lose my way; maps rarely help. But a vocal sulphur-crested cockatoo on the corner building leading up to the campus of the university named for a coloniser—and the muscle memory within me of an undergraduate student from many years ago—leads upwards to FUMA. The walk prepares the senses for what is to come. History and an understanding that survival is not an academic skill (as Audre Lorde argues) is a tiny grounding prologue to the journey taken by First Nations women in this exhibition to continue reclaiming their sovereignty through artistic acts that repatriate love back to our ancestors.

The bird theme continues at the entrance to the space with Skirt nets (2023) by Ali Gumillya Baker and Seana O’Brien. Feathers of many species of bird are caught in a net. On the opposite side is Net (2024), by the same artists, with Kaurna seaweed reminding us whose land we stand on.

The smell of old books containing racist content overwhelms the senses. They are arranged in four pillars, but once stood as one narrow tower as part of Sovereign Acts | Decolonising Methodologies in the lived and Spoken (2014), also by Ali Gumillya Baker. Relief comes as the eye is drawn to the beautiful and witty image by Baker of fellow member Simone Ulalka Tur from Bound/Unbound Sovereign Acts – Act II (2015). This bold image of Tur’s face is a play on Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (c.1665). It does not convey the innocence of the Dutch artwork. Instead, it shows strength, wisdom, a knowing of both coloniser and colonised. A reminder that we are the original peoples.

I pause to engage with the video montage before spiralling back out to be in the moment, sitting with the knowledge that the archival records forming the skirt that is the work of Natalie Harkin and Seana O’Brien, Archival Performance Skirts (2019), is echoed somewhere in a drawer at my home, where there are copies of the records that gave permission to remove children from their families—children who are now mothers, now grandmothers and great-grandmothers. The skirts are illuminated just as the records are illuminated in the mind: as something that wants to be alive to tell a story, just as Harkin has done with her poetic reclamation within the archives. It is familiar, it is familial, it is pain transformed into love praxis.

Somewhere in between spiralling in and out of this deeply moving exhibition, I find time to sit and watch the video collection. Faye Rosas Blanch will tell you that it’s so Hip to be Blak (2014). I want to be as cool as this collective un-layering, a way of being and giving back to ancestors instead of always moving forward to teach First Nations knowledges in a world that continues its acts of genocide through denying us a voice, humiliating us when we speak of a world that needs love praxis, not war and erasure. The Unbound Collective reaches back, though, not just to honour their ancestors but to pick us all up through an ongoing process. In 2025, the collective will publish a book by Wakefield Press with contributions from Romaine Moreton, Léuli Eshraghi, Clothilde Bullen, Nici Cumpston, Karina Lester and Julie Gough. The collective transformation goes on, gliding through with grace and strength towards freedom.

Frances Wyld (Martu), Tarntanya/Adelaide

‘Sovereign Acts | Love Praxis’ is on at Flinders University Museum of Art until 13 December 2024, then from 17 February to 11 April 2025.

Australian First Nations art was in the spotlight at Frieze London and Frieze Masters 2024

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The past few years have seen a remarkable surge in the visibility of Australian First Nations art on the global stage. A record number of First Nations artists took part in this year’s Venice Biennale—and Kamilaroi and Bigambul artist Archie Moore, who represented Australia, took home the event’s top prize. Next year, Tate Modern is hosting a solo show dedicated to Emily Kam Kngwarray, which has been developed in collaboration with the National Gallery of Australia, and the National Gallery of Victoria is touring the largest exhibition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art ever presented internationally around the US and Canada.

These institutional shows have been matched by increased interest in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art in the commercial sector. In 2023, D’Lan Contemporary presented the solo exhibition ‘Emily Kam Kngwarray: Everything’ at Frieze Masters in London, marking the first time an Australian Indigenous artist was shown at the fair. Frieze Masters aims to offer works of art historical significance, while its sister fair, Frieze London, has a contemporary focus. The gallery sold eight of the nine Kngwarray works on offer for a total of US$2.7 million.

This year, D’Lan Contemporary returned to Frieze Masters with a presentation of the revered Gija artist Paddy Bedford, who was known to family, close friends and kin by his traditional name Nyunkuny or his nickname Goowoomji/Kuwumji. Speaking at the event, the gallery’s Founder and Director D’Lan Davidson said that the current market momentum signals a permanent shift in the way Indigenous Australian art is viewed internationally, and that collectors around the world are increasingly drawn to the powerful narratives and deep history of Australian First Nations art.

Bedford’s balanced and sombre compositions draw upon his childhood experiences growing up on a cattle station in the East Kimberley region of Western Australia and capture his people, Country and culture. Like Kngwarray, Bedford began his career later in life, but his work carries the weight of thousands of years of ancestral knowledge.

Situated between ancient Greco-Roman sculptures, Tang Dynasty earthenware figurines and prints by iconic American modernists, Bedford’s paintings were quiet—they did not aggressively vie for viewers’ attention, but they still stood out. Exhibited facing a wall of drawings by household names such as Chagall and Picasso, Bedford’s work exuded confidence, secure in its significance in this international milieu. At the fair, Bedford was, as Davidson put it, “perfectly in place, finally recognised internationally as a master.”

And it is clear that the global art market is responding with keen interest: the gallery sold two works for US$250,000 each, setting a record for the artist, with total sales just over US$1.3 million. Davidson said that collectors today are seeking works that tell strong stories and fill gaps in their understanding of international art histories. This sentiment was echoed by Ursula Sullivan, a Director at Sullivan+Strumpf. The gallery took part for the first time in Frieze London this year with a striking presentation of three internationally acclaimed Australian artists: Gregory Hodge, Lindy Lee and the Yolŋu artist Naminapu Maymuru-White.

Maymuru-White, a senior leader and one of the most revered women in her community, is particularly in the spotlight this year following her inclusion in the 60th Venice Biennale. At Frieze London, her densely patterned and textured bark paintings, which depict the Yolŋu concept of Milŋiyawuy—the intertwined paths of the Milŋiyawuy River and the Milky Way, the Yirritja moiety land of the dead—were featured b­oth in Sullivan+Strumpf’s booth and in an exhibition hosted by the watch brand Breguet. Sullivan noted that all of Maymuru-White’s works were sold before the fair opened to the public, primarily to European buyers new to collecting Indigenous Australian art. The work presented at the Breguet booth, which was made up of 17 bark paintings, was also bought—by Tate Modern.

Davidson said that the surge in institutional interest in First Nations art is driven by a growing need to address the void in international art histories, especially as decolonisation movements reshape public understandings of Indigenous cultures worldwide. Sullivan agreed. “It’s not a fad,” she said. “Indigenous artmaking has existed for tens of thousands of years, and the world is finally ready to accept it. It’s here to stay.” As global art events—both institutional and commercial—continue to feature First Nations artists, it will be fascinating to see how these artists, their communities and their cultures will reshape the art world in the years to come. 

Zeta Xu, London

Canberra Art Biennial 2024: Jazz Money’s ‘Only Country Lasts Forever’ shifts our perspective on a familiar landscape

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Despite its status as the centre of power in this country, Kamberri/Canberra is known to many Australians mostly through simulacra, reproduced endlessly in political reportage. Even locals, who live and work in close proximity to these sites of power, can become complacent to the goings-on in the Parliamentary Triangle. The Canberra Art Biennial, which opened on 27 September, provides an impetus to recontextualise this familiar landscape.

This is the fifth iteration of the festival. It was launched in 2016 by Neil Hobbs as ‘contour 556,’ a reference to the elevation above sea level of Lake Burley Griffin, but the growing scope and geographical reach of the event—this year, it includes 20 sites and 60 artists, as well as collaborations with independent curators, art spaces, a cinema and restaurateurs—has necessitated a change in name.

Its new identity opens the event up to broader audiences and, unlike the more esoteric ‘contour 556,’ makes plain that this is a public art biennial which takes place in Kamberri/Canberra. Since its inception, the Canberra Art Biennial has, according to Hobbs, interrogated “the transformative nature of public art on the public realm” through interventions in the unique landscapes of Kamberri/Canberra—political, cultural and architectural. When it comes to the notion of the public realm, Kamberri/Canberra is an intriguing case study: a city designed by architects Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin around an artificial lake, imposed on the unceded lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people, conceived specifically to become the centre of public (which is to say, political) life.

Only Country Lasts Forever (2024) is a site-specific installation by Wiradjuri artist Jazz Money that perceives this familiar landscape through poetics. The form of the work is simple—a sheet of powder-coated aluminium, with the titular words spelled out in negative space, revealing the landscape behind. It is Money’s spatial dialogue with the site which proves most powerful. Only Country Lasts Forever is installed at Commonwealth Place at the intersection of two perpendicular axes (land and water) which form the Griffins’ central design of Kamberri/Canberra.

The land axis runs from its south apex at Parliament House, across the lake and to the Australian War Memorial and Mount Ainslie, the latter a particularly important site for local First Nations people. Only Country Lasts Forever interrupts this view, now only visible through Money’s words, which she describes as “portals to Country”. Viewed at just the right angle, Only Country Lasts Forever obscures the War Memorial from view, leaving only a vision of Mount Ainslie. This is a work about changing perspectives, in the most literal sense.

Money’s practice is in dialogue with the contemporary moment but always situated in an understanding of deep time. To appreciate the full impact of the work, it should be observed across time. At night, the installation is lit from within against the inky backdrop of the lake. The proximity to water is also significant. “As a Wiradjuri person, we are freshwater people, and specifically, river system people,” says Money. There is a connection to Money’s homelands, which sit on the Murrumbidgee River, which flows into the Molonglo River and Lake Burley Griffin.

There is a duality to Money’s words. Only Country Lasts Forever invokes a sense of hope for the longevity of the world’s longest continuous culture and First Nations people’s connections to Country. “I have some hope that the problems of colonialism, capitalism and imperialism will be outlasted by Country. Blackfellas are an inextricable part of Country. If Country lasts forever, so will our culture,” says Money. There is hope, but also protest. Only Country Lasts Forever is a direct challenge to Kamberri/Canberra. It tells the forces that manipulate and exploit Country to perpetuate colonial power that their reign is temporary. It is a threat and a promise.

Sophia Halloway, Kamberri/Canberra

The Canberra Art Biennial, led by Creative Producer Tegan Garnett, continues until 26 October 2024. Find the full program here. 

Loss, language and love: How young Australian artists are navigating cultural dislocation

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Metal shields that shimmer with watery patterns; a shell-encrusted grotto made from an old fishing boat; a film about a cow and girl who are both named Monica; a floor of nearly 4,000 hand-cast paving stones that clink underfoot; and a series of silk curtains inked with stories and pastel hues. These are some of the pieces you will encounter should you visit ‘Primavera 2024: Young Australian Artists’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, an annual exhibition featuring artists aged 35 years and under.  

Each of the artists in this year’s edition “are turning to materiality and form to record their personal and familial stories,” says curator Lucy Latella. This intimate curatorial focus emerged from Latella’s “interest in the potential of an artistic practice to navigate feelings of loss and to forge pathways for deeper cultural connection,” she explains.  

The shell-encrusted boat shrine, sinners grotto (2023) by Teresa Busuttil, for example, comes from a deeply personal place. The artist spent hour after cathartic hour creating the sculpture in an ode to her late father. It speaks of his labour as a fisherman as well as his sea voyage immigrating from Malta to Australia many years ago.  

Busuttil’s other smaller-scale sculptures—Jesus was a Capricorn (2024), Over Sea (Self Portrait) (2024) and Isimghu (Listen) (2024)—similarly blend a mixture of emotions and references. Pop-cultural icons, such as an image of Madonna, sit alongside mosaicking and Catholic iconography to explore the various influences of her Maltese Australian heritage.

While these reference points and stories are unique to Busuttil, the kitschy tourist souvenir aesthetic she employs is familiar and the pink and blue lighting playfully adds to a sense of fun and warmth that intermingle with her grief and discomfort. “There are often broader entry points to deeply personal works for audiences to reflect on and draw their own associations,” says Latella. 

Aidan Hartshorn’s artwork Yiramir Mayiny (River People) (2024), also deals with loss, drawing on his family history as a Walgalu (Wolgal/Wolgalu) and Wiradjuri man to offer a lesser-known counter narrative to the history of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme. Constructed between 1949 and 1974, ‘the scheme’ is often lauded as one of Australia’s most successful nation-building projects and is soon to be upgraded in a project titled Snowy Hydro 2.0. However, behind this story of success is another soaked in sadness. The dam was built on sacred sites of the Walgalu people, meaning that Hartshorn’s family and community have limited access to these culturally significant places due to controlled dam levels.

Hartshorn’s four diamond-shaped shields, made in industrial aluminium and printed with photographs of the water that is discharged by the Snowy Hydro plant, convey this layering of co-existing stories. Their ghostly abstracted surfaces play with ideas of visibility and invisibility. While Hartshorn acknowledges the many benefits of the Snowy Hydro—“I wouldn’t give up the luxury of electricity,” he says—he believes that unacknowledged histories need to be foregrounded. “It’s not just the rivers that need protecting, it’s also the stories.”

Across the gallery from Hartshorn’s shields, another artwork transports viewers from Australia to the streets of Ankawa, Iraq, where artist Sarah Ujmaia’s parents once lived. Visitors are invited to walk across thousands of pavers which Ujmaia painstakingly cast by hand. Made from shell grit, their gentle jangle is reminiscent of the sounds of Iraq’s markets.  

Ujmaia’s choice of a material that takes thousands of years to form mirrors the slow transformation of oral languages across generations. For those who walk across the floor, their shoes will pick up the chalk of the pavers and carry traces through the rest of the exhibition and beyond, transferring pieces of the artwork in a kind of material symbolism of how culture and language spreads and morphs.  

The piece is beautifully titled And thank you to my baba for laying the timber floor (2024), and grew from the artist’s appreciation of her father, who left his PhD in Physics to work as a labourer to provide for his family after immigrating to Australia.

Appreciation runs deep throughout the exhibition. “I appreciate the way that the artists’ inquiries and processes have very real implications for them, often strengthening their connections to, and within, their families and communities,” says Latella.  

Monica Rani Rudhar’s film We Were Connected in a More Complicated Way Than Either of Us Could Even Begin to Understand (2023) and larger-than-life sculptural earrings, for example, relied on oral storytelling from various members of her Romanian and Indian families and for her parents to act as interpreters. Through the process of archiving her family’s stories, she grew closer to various members from whom she’d felt a distance due to language barriers.

Likewise, Chun Yin Rainbow Chan’s Long Distance Call 長途電話 (2024) touches on communication barriers as a result of growing up in Australia and how overhearing international telephone conversations between her mother and late aunt gave her a glimpse into the Weitou language and culture of her family in Hong Kong.

As well as appreciation, there is an undercurrent of love that weaves through the artworks—love for places, for people, for objects, for languages, for losses and for family. How does love shape our identities and our culture across time and countries? This is the question that the exhibition ask us to contemplate with each encounter.

In a society that is often dominated by stories of division fuelled by cultural differences, it is refreshing and hopeful to see a young generation of artists navigating their sense of cultural disconnection in complex, thoughtful and layered ways. It is presented not as something nasty or scary, but something with the potential to be full of joy, learning and connection.

Lara Chapman, Warrang/Sydney

Curated by Lucy Latella, ‘Primavera: Young Australian Artists’ continues at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia until 27 January 2025.

Jasper Jordan-Lang: ‘Attention Interest Action’ at Cache

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Jasper Jordan-Lang’s exhibition ‘Attention Interest Action’ at Cache brought attention to the people and places who have come before us and provided a window into the everchanging landscape of Naarm/Melbourne.

Walking down Little La Trobe Street, I worried that I would miss the entrance to the gallery. Founded by artist Tommaso Nervegna-Reed and architect Andre Bonnice in early 2024, Cache resides on the top floor of the old offices of Edmond & Corrigan, the architectural firm behind many prominent Melbourne buildings, including the VCA Theatre building in Southbank, Building 8 of RMIT and Niagara Galleries in Richmond.

I entered Cache full of assumptions. Previous iterations of Jordan-Lang’s work that I have encountered were meticulously refined geometric forms that came together in response to their geography. What I did not expect was to see a collection of photographs emblematising the visual style of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner 2049.

At first glance, the five photographs comprising the exhibition were incomprehensible—akin to the experience of seeing an impressionist painting. I was convinced that the work had been altered in some way: Photoshop, AI or collage. However, on closer inspection (and receiving clarification from the artist himself) the crackling neon pictures revealed themselves to be unedited photographs of existing images.

The original pictures in question were stock photographs for La Do Vietnamese and Thai, a now defunct restaurant located on the corner of Boundary Road and Canning Street in North Melbourne. Once marketing spring rolls, Peking duck and miscellaneous alcoholic drinks, a decade of wind, sun and rain exposure has morphed the once commonplace into the sumptuously absurd.

Riddled with nostalgia, Jordan-Lang’s work buzzes with the grit and vibrancy of a late-night dining spot, the kind that is bathed in a pool of neon light and where the edges of your vision blur. Images of martini glasses and pints dripping with anticipation scratch against a decade’s worth of exposure to UV radiation. There is no colour from nature in this series—if they were food, they would probably give you cancer—but the effect is a cybernetic display of extravagance. 

Nestled among the gridded black rails that guard the old Edmond & Corrigan library, the five photographic artworks take on the characteristics of a lab-grown gemstone. Ink-jet print on particle board, the photographs jilted against the utilitarian space, their vibrancy a sonogram of the bustling city outside.

In many ways ‘Attention Interest Action’ is an extension of the site specific, minimalist work that Jordan-Lang has previously produced. In this iteration, however, rather than engaging with found objects as a reference to location, Jordan-Lang makes traces of Melbourne’s lost geography visible through the pictorial plane. The oblique marks imprinted in the photographs footnote the years of development under city life. Each indication of grit and weathering forms a register of years passed.

The particle board backing of the pictures mimicked the floor of Cache to create a synergy between art and place. The photographs also matched the space in a different way: while the subject of the images captures the effect of time, the gallery, which operates on a month-to-month basis while waiting for renovation plans, is an example of time passing itself.

Resplendent is a terrible word. Truly it is terrible, it imparts a high-school-naivety onto beautiful things and in doing so transmutes them into a gaudy caricature. However, despite my reservations towards the term, when I entered the tight gallery and saw Jordan-Lang’s exhibition, it was the first word that came to mind.

The photographs speak to the ever-changing topography of Melbourne and offer a glimpse of stagnation within a rapidly developing landscape. Jordan-Lang’s ‘Attention Interest Action’ is the relief print of the city’s past and a spectre of the people and places who have come before us.

Lily Beamish, Naarm/Melbourne

‘Attention Interest Action’ by Jasper Jordan-Lang was exhibited at Cache in Naarm/Melbourne for a single weekend, August 24–25 2024.

Artists Gail Mabo and Nikau Hindin introduce their project for the Sydney Opera House

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Every night until 15 December 2024, Badu Gili: Celestial, a digital animation featuring works by Meriam artist Gail Mabo and Te Rarawa/Ngapuhi artist Nikau Hindin is being projected on to the Bennelong sails of the Sydney Opera House. The work is a joint commission by the Sydney Opera House, the Biennale of Sydney and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain.

Although they’re separated by a stretch of ocean, Mabo and Hindin share the same commitment to sharing First Nations stories and histories that are held in the stars through their art. Both Mabo’s bamboo and star-sand maps, and Nikau’s bark cloth kites and maps, carry traditional knowledge, which is now being showcased in a new way through animation. Celestial is an instalment of ‘Badu Gili’, the Opera House’s free, nightly light display of work by Indigenous artists.

“Tubowgule, where the Sydney Opera House stands today, has long been a meeting place for celebration, culture and community,” explains Michael Hutchings, Head of First Nations Programming at the Opera House. “‘Badu Gili’ continues this legacy, sharing both living and ancient stories told through vibrant animations projected onto one of the 20th century’s most iconic buildings. The ‘Badu Gili’ project, meaning ‘water light’ in the language of the traditional owners of the site, was initiated by our inaugural Head of First Nations Programming, Rhoda Roberts. Rhoda’s passionate advocacy and curation was instrumental in the project’s beginnings in 2017. Now in its fourth edition, Badu Gili is a pillar of the Opera House’s year-round First Nations program, demonstrating our commitment to fostering and celebrating the rich history and vibrancy of First Nations people and culture.”

Here, in conversation with Billie Phillips, Assistant Curator of the Biennale of Sydney, Gail Mabo and Nikau Hindin discuss how Badu Gili: Celestial came to life.

 Billie Phillips (BP): Both your works deal with constellations. How did each of you learn about the stars and the stories that are depicted in your works?

 Gail Mabo (GM): The star maps came from stories that my dad told me, which are the stories told throughout the Torres Straits, of Tagai. Tagai was our main God that we use to navigate across the Straits. And when you’re looking at Tagai, you’re looking at the whole sky. From the tip of Queensland, Australia to Papua New Guinea, that’s that small bracket of sky that we look at, and that’s where Tagai lies.

 I also put in an acknowledgement to my children and their Koori heritage through the Emu Dreaming story, along with the Lamir Kuskir, or the Seven Sisters story, which you have from the Central Desert, but also in the Torres Straits. Lamir Kuskir refers to the wives of this old man who he banished to the sky. They sit above him, laughing, due to the things that he did wrong to them. ‘Poor fella, he still lives by himself. Look at him down there!’ they say. It’s been translated through dance and now I’ve translated it through a star story.

Nikau Hindin (NH): I first learnt about the stars when I was living in Hawai’i. I was learning about bark cloth practice at the same time I was learning about celestial navigation. The star maps that I create are a way for me to memorise our stars, our specific names for those stars, and where they rise on the horizon. The stars become markers for direction, so that we can locate ourselves in time and space. Then, when I returned to Aotearoa, the process of making star maps became even more important because I had to then translate the Hawaiian and English names into our Maori names and learn our Maori stories.

Since learning about celestial navigation, I’ve discovered more about the way that our stars change during different times of the year and how our stars have been used to record time. Indigenous peoples have observed stars throughout generations and possess an inherent understanding or knowing about time and an understanding that a single generation is brief and that the knowledge that I know about stars now is many, many generations old.

BP:  Both of your works draw upon such a deep well of community and cultural knowledge. I know that in the making of this work you both engaged in a series of collaborations. What was it like for you when you saw your works being transformed from one medium into another?

 GM: In the initial conversation I was trying to wrap my head around the idea of projecting onto the Sydney Opera House. I thought: ‘How are they going to animate the maps?’ When they first showed me the early animation of pulling it apart and putting it back together, I was amazed, I had this whole fascination with ‘What else can you do? What are you going to do with my stars?’

 Later, when I was sleeping, I could hear ‘Requiem for Eli’, which is a sound piece by Nigel Westlake. There was a bit of music in there that just kept standing out. And it was grand, it was bigger, it could be big as a sky. So, when I awoke, I went to Nigel and I said, ‘There's a piece of work that you have’ and he knew exactly what it was and that it needed to be used for this. He went to his studio for a moment and through the speakers came the sound I wanted. We also needed the vocals of a male chant, so we approached David Bridie. I’ve worked with him on different things, he’s a writer and composer from Melbourne who works with people from Papua New Guinea.

 NH: Having my kind of works on the Sydney Opera House is such a massive shift in scale, but also in material. My work is very physical and labour intensive and the materials are from our environment, whereas an animation is transient or intangible. So I really had to trust the animation process because I’m not an expert in making patterns move, so I enjoyed that exchange. In some aspects, I was quite specific with how I wanted the movement to happen because of the way that I interpret or understand how the stars move, and how I would like the maps to be read.

BP: What aspect of each other’s work resonates with you the most?

NH:  I was left speechless at the way that the stories of our stars are told through Gail’s artwork and the conceptualisation of this vast space. How she creates something that’s tangible to interpret this vast, vast knowledge system.

 And also, the stars. There are so many little things about scale in your work, which is really interesting. You’ve kind of gone from tiny to big, all from a tiny grain of sand. So, there’s this beautiful thread of scale that is really profound. I love that, Gail, you hold the stories of your people. You’re a Kaitiaki, or a guardian of those stories that are so old and so important.

GM: Thank you, Nikau. My mind is blown at what you’ve done. It’s absolutely beautiful. The first thing that gets me with your work is that sound. When I close my eyes, I drift to where you come from. I can see your kites flying around in my head. Then, I see your work unfolding: the beating of the cloth, to the beautiful patterns they become, to the kites that fly through the sky. Your work gives me a reason to go investigate a little bit more into your culture.  One day I will come across to New Zealand and you can show me.  

NH: You know it!

This is an edited extract from a longer conversation that was published in Art Monthly Australasia’s special edition about the 24th Biennale of Sydney. Buy a copy of that issue here.

Please note macrons in the Te Reo Maori terms do not appear on this webpage.

Claudia Nicholson: ‘If The Mountain Is Burning, Let It Burn’ at UTS Gallery

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Rearranging, recollecting and recovering: these are the actions that define Claudia Nicholson as she reaches back into her archive. ‘If The Mountain Is Burning, Let It Burn' is a sombre, blurry and glittering exhibition, and the latest output of the University of Technology Sydney’s (UTS) Artist in Residence program. Positioned within the Ultimo campus, UTS Gallery is dimly lit, as if you were searching for photographic clarity through a smouldering haze. Nicholson’s spotlit photographs remind me of how museums tend to illuminate disparate artefacts to increase their dramatic effect. The subject matter and the memories evoked are vast, heavy and sentimental.

In developing the exhibition, Nicholson excavated her personal archive to glean and reorganise a portrait of Colombia, with images taken from family photographs, negatives discovered at flea markets, as well as her own photographs and videos. The artist is one of thousands of children adopted from Colombia to Australia since the 1970s, a subject Nicholson has explored at different points throughout her practice.

Many of the histories conveyed in the exhibition are small and personal, like the images of Nicholson and her sister. Butterfly Sanctuary (2024) presents a sweetly inquisitive little girl, her gaze fixed on a butterfly as it hovers towards her heart; imagery that could feature in the music video for a pop song contemplating the evanescence of girlhood. Equally wistful is The Deep Rivers Say it Slowly (2023), the video installation at the heart of the exhibition. The lulling and slightly unnerving music by Monica Brooks accompanies images of protest, violence and more butterflies. The video is projected upon a surface covered in a delicate and fine glitter, cohering the story of war and amnesty, girls and butterflies in nostalgia. Images fade into one another, as if doubly exposed, to evoke memories interposed with the dreams of an observer.

Many of the photographs in the exhibition have been captured by Nicholson, several by her father, and others collected on a 2008 trip to Bogota. The narrative connecting these images asks: what if memory was outsourced? If we stole historical memories as personal ones? If we inserted personal memories into archives? Who does the memory belong to? 

Nicholson describes the project as coming “after a pause in making.” The residency program has provided Nicholson with a recess to arrange her personal archive, and working with Cherine Fahd and Dr Marivic Wyndham has encouraged the artist to reconsider her past portraits of Colombia by applying a newly developed visual language. Nicholson’s vibrant Alfombra de aserrín (sawdust carpets) that have previously been made into installations and performance works stand in stark contrast to what we see here. Usually, their form has allowed them to be destroyed in some kind of performance spectacle. If they were neon, they pulsated with gradients and gothic fonts associated with the played out ‘Tumblr aesthetics’ of the mid 2010s. Nicholson’s exhibition at UTS Gallery is much more opaque.

‘If The Mountain Is Burning, Let It Burn' offers further evidence of the important role played by artist research initiatives such as the UTS Artist in Residence program. These opportunities provide artists with the resources to experiment and conduct research into innovative modes of making and, in this case, has allowed Nicholson the access to facilities and expertise to explore new outcomes in her practice. The negatives from old family albums and found photographs are transformed by Nicholson’s processes and treatments. The photographs begin to escape the precision of the institution, and sometimes even eschew the camera entirely. They suggest hidden iterations, progressions that were once crystalline to atrophying copies and prints. The technology of image making reshapes what was captured into a narrative, creating a new texture for the artist’s history and her relationship to Colombia. And the texture is sometimes a glittered projection surface.

Laura Luciana, Warrang/Sydney

‘If The Mountain Is Burning, Let It Burn’ is on display at UTS Gallery until 20 October 2024.

Tony Albert, Erin Vink and Kimberley Moulton discuss curating First Nations art across borders

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In his role as the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain First Nations Curatorial Fellow for the 24th Biennale of Sydney, Tony Albert commissioned works from Indigenous artists both in Australia and around the world. In the following conversation, he discusses opportunities for international collaboration between First Nations artists, curators and communities with Kimberley Moulton (Yorta Yorta), Senior Curator of Rising festival and Adjunct Curator, Indigenous Art at Tate Modern; and Erin Vink (Ngiyampaa), Curator of First Nations Art (local and global) at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) and Chair, Art Monthly Australasia.

Tony Albert (TA): Erin, your role has recently changed from Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art to Curator, First Nations Art (local and global). Why is that an important transition within the title and within the institutional framework of caring for and acknowledging global Indigenous art?

Erin Vink (EV): My position shifted to include a global Indigenous remit about 12 months ago. It stemmed from a long, warm conversation I had with our shared colleague, Léuli Eshrāghi [Seumanutafa/Tautua], who undertook a three-month research review of the AGNSW in early 2020. Léuli prepared a report for the gallery on how to grow a collection, which also included other elements such as exhibition programming, positions and the like. I have taken Léuli’s initial proposal and reformatted it to become something that is achievable within the existing structures of the institutional model. I believe it is important that we have an outward-facing curatorial position demonstrating that we care for all Indigenous kin. Grounded in local First Nations art, we can adopt best practices for how to work with our global Indigenous artists, how to support community and how to respect language and cultural groups, for example.

TA: How would a work by an international First Nations artist be entered into the institution’s collection?

EV: At the AGNSW, prior to my role, artists would come into the collection through the international collection stream: into the Pacific collection, for example, if they were Indigenous from the Great Ocean, or Indigenous artists from Asia would go into the Asian art collection. Maybe their language group would be recorded on their catalogue record but, more often than not, none of the information that we, as Australian First Nations people record, would be assigned to their artwork. Now that I care for the global Indigenous collection, we treat international First Nations art as we would Australian First Nations work.

TA: Kimberley, you have previously done a fellowship at Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection at the University of Virginia with a focus on Indigenous Australian art.  

Kimberley Moulton (KM): I was the recipient of the inaugural curatorial fellowship at the Kluge-Ruhe with the National Gallery of Australia and Wesfarmers Indigenous Arts Leadership Program in 2015 and have done several programs with other Indigenous curators to connect with mob internationally. I’ve been to Sápmi country, Norway, Sweden and Finland, North America and South Asia connecting to peers and kin. These opportunities were such a crucial time for me in thinking around how we communicate our culture, our art and what we’re doing in the world in connecting with other mob. These moments opened my world, connecting me with international Indigenous practice. It’s about building solid relationships based on relationality, and not necessarily just about exhibition and extraction, which often is the focus in the art world and museum spaces. This time of connecting led me to develop my practice and to consider how to create space for Indigenous artists and communities and build our own determined spaces.

TA: The dialogue amongst artists has gained international traction over the past few years, particularly with the aabaakwad (it clears after a storm), a series of Indigenous-led conversations founded in 2018 by Wanda Nanibush [Anishinaabe]. I am often surprised at how Australia is viewed internationally with regards to its First Nation dialogue: we as Indigenous Australians are seen as having infiltrated institutions, sometimes through force, to have our voices heard. I’m wondering if you could talk about the history attached to Indigenous curatorial practice and its contemporary presence on the global stage.

EV: There have been amazing movers and shakers that have carved out this space for us. If you put your finger on the pulse right now, what I find the most interesting is institutional curators who are all working to the idea of Indigenisation rather than decolonisation. We’re working in a way of adding culture to our institutions, and it doesn’t always have to be in the same way. We have the flexibility of experimentation due to the core work that our Indigenous curatorial leaders have done in overcoming roadblocks that they themselves experienced in curatorial positions in the 1990s and early 2000s.

TA: It is an interesting comment because we hear about decolonisation so much, and I’ve always been a fan of Indigenising space rather than decolonising space. We (as people) need to be in the institution and have autonomy to add to it.

KM: A lot of my early international research was connecting with and reserching our Ancestral Belongings in places like the British Museum. These places hold our material, but I was also trying to understand the ways in which artists, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, connect within that space and with ‘museum’ objects. I learnt that we are always within this Oceanic grouping of people and came to understand and critically evaluate the legacy of homogenisation, ethnographic collecting and the effect of that on the way in which our contemporary art and practices are understood by non-Indigenous curators and anthropologists. My research has also led me to work deeply in the ways in which First Peoples artists can restore the spirit of collections and history through practice. More recently I have focused on more of a contemporary framework, working at the Tate Modern. However, I challenge the binary of historic and contemporary in my practice—it is all connected and relevant.

I believe having more Indigenous curators and artists engaging internationally and having roles with autonomy and responsibility that are engaged properly with institutions and their collections is important. There’s still work to be done, but the growing realisation within international art spaces and museums is that they need to work with Indigenous people, and that we need to have the position of leadership in terms of our contemporary art and determine the way our cultures are represented in these spaces. We need to also critically challenge the absence of our presence in art history in these places, which connects directly to current discourse in Indigenous-led research into theories of race, relationality and anti-colonial practice.

Whenever you work for any institution, there’s always this immense responsibility that you have to community and ancestors. It’s too much for one person to carry. I’ve worked in institutions for a long time now, and I’ve come to the realisation that you can care, and you can take that responsibility seriously, but you can’t carry the entire load of the history of Indigenous art and colonial ethnographic collecting to try and change or decolonise these spaces. I think my strategy going in, especially into my new role, was, okay, I can’t decolonise these big institutions, whatever that means. I don’t even believe in that anymore. Instead, it’s thinking that, if I’m here for however many years and I understand the current policies of acquisition, of exhibition, of the institution, then there can be a progression in the representation of First Nations people and a stronger focus on Indigenous art—and I can help the institution address that there has been a very large absence of that to date. Ultimately, I ask myself: how can I make the most impact for First Peoples artists and community in whatever I do?

This is an edited extract from a longer conversation that was published in Art Monthly Australasia’s special edition about the 24th Biennale of Sydney. Buy a copy of that issue here.

Tim Hardy: ‘Decor’ at Treadler

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Tim Hardy’s ‘Decor’ is sneaky, like the best conceptual art. Cunning like the conceit of things hidden in drawers, actually. Although coldly oblique at first, the contents of each of Hardy’s photographic panels is eventually revealed, similarly to how Marguerite Duras rummages through her own chest of drawers in Practicalities (1987), a collection of autobiographical essays, excerpts of which are distributed at the show as a bundle of dishevelled paper scraps—again, just like you might find tucked away in the ramshackle neglect of an ‘everything drawer’. Which is to say, like Duras in her essays, Hardy is interested in the baroque, the romantic and the mysterious, and in marrying these things to the everyday, to the domestic. What’s in a chest of drawers? Depending on the drawers you might have old secrets gathering dust (or shame), unpaid bills, love letters, or any amount of useless bric-à-brac which at one time might’ve seemed important. But things fade. Or conversely, they wax in importance, even in their neglect, to be resurrected at a later date. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes by chance.

The photographs within Hardy’s panels (read: drawers) are imagistic mementos, floating out of context much like the notes we embalm as memory, the very bedrock of recall. Nothing is recalled whole; our sense of history (personal, national) is a haphazard bundle of fragments, the more sensory the better. Here we have: images of someone’s intimate effects, Act One: Domestic Scene (2024); feminine legs surrounded by luggage, Act Two: Compact Mirror (2024); and a violin, Act Three: The Lament (2024). Drowning in negative space and utterly void of explication, Hardy’s invitation here is to confabulate, to dream connective tissue where there is none. Such is the mystery of old drawers, or an old bureau. The kind your grandparents have, which probably isn’t haunted but emanates the vibration of the past; a banal kind of hauntology, the eerie thickness of layered residues. The confounding silence of the trace. If these images are inaccessible, it is the inaccessibility of someone else’s life which we can only read in glimpses. Every history that isn’t ours is an alien ruin.

Between the disarray of a ransacked drawer set and the alluring legs of a woman in transit (presumably), the idea of a traveller is evoked in Hardy’s work. Perhaps these are ghostly or sad images because they’re all that’s left of a person that’s gone. Not dead necessarily, which makes the situation arguably even more crushing than a bereavement, because they have vanished due to circumstances or (worse) choice. Perhaps then the violin emits a dirge of unspeakable loss. That we are here, while the traveller is out there collecting more experiences, more memories, more artefacts for her own drawers, which she can then curate in the museum of old age. To speculate further, perhaps the sense of grief found in ‘Decor’ is laced with the bitter realisation that no person can ever be contained within a drawer, that a living breathing person is always more than the ritual objects we use to conjure them. Flesh violently trumps symbolism.

‘Decor’ is a promising albeit quiet vision from a young visual artist perhaps poised to do something bolder down the line. Though in caveat the stillness of the works is probably the point; that memory is dead, that its artefacts are dead, that hoarding the past in dusty totems can never be the séance we perhaps want it to be. And it can certainly never be resurrected in the ways we’d like. Still, the romance here is (so much like Duras) one of longing, born of quiet. Quiet between momentous action where we wobble, or doubt, or look back out of fear of what’s ahead; defensively craving the past as something completely and utterly known which in itself is a delusion. If there’s one thing that can’t be trusted, it’s our memories of the past. They’re curated like anything else, selected or denied according to criteria in the present, subject to so much occult revision. Which, by this essential tragedy, is probably why we hunt and collect so many tchotchkes related to versions of ourselves we can never receive again except as ghostly hallucinations, by the turn of the planchette. Kept, of course, in an old chest of drawers.

Samuel Te Kani (Ngapuhi), Tamaki Makaurau/Auckland

‘Decor’ is on display at Treadler until 15 August 2024.

Please note macrons in the Te Reo Maori terms do not appear on this webpage.

How Mangala Bai Maravi is preserving the Baiga art of tattooing

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Mangala Bai Maravi was born in Lalpur, a small village in the Dindori district of Madhya Pradesh, India. The daughter of Shanti Bai Maravi, a well-known Baiga tattoo artist from Lalpur, Mangala has developed an interesting way to revive and preserve Baiga tattoo culture by translating tribal tattoo designs on to paper and canvas. This has not been done before. Historically, the designs were passed down through oral tradition, or worked on from memory. Mangala’s innovative works on papers and canvas are keeping her Baiga tradition alive and have drawn international attention to the distinctive tattoos and culture of the Baiga people, while also providing a dependable source of income for her family.

At just seven years old, Mangala took an oath to learn everything she could about her own traditions and culture from her mother. By the time she was twelve, Mangala’s sole dream was that it would be her, out of all her brothers and sisters, who would carry on the Godna tradition of tattooing.

Throughout her life, Mangala has always been interested to discover more about the stories behind every symbol and motif of her ritual patterns. She perfected the tattooing technique after many years of training with and learning from her mother, who passed everything she knew down to Mangala. In the Baiga tribe, only women can carry this tradition ahead. When travelling with her mother, Mangala started to learn how to paint on canvas and paper. She then fused this knowledge with her tattooing technique.

The motifs of Baiga tattoos are primarily inspired by the natural world. Patterns of triangular lines depict mountains, while the circular motif of the sun is often a central feature. Symmetrical lines, which vary in thickness, and dots and crosses are the other major shapes that recur in Baiga tattoos.

Baiga women often have elaborate tattoos on multiple body parts, including on their forehead, arms, legs, back, neck and breasts. Different parts of the body are adorned to mark different milestones in life. The forehead tattoo is done around puberty to mark entry into adulthood. Arms and legs are completed by the time a woman is considered of an age appropriate for marriage. These tattoos are linked with ideas of beauty, healing and history. They are also believed to be carried into the afterlife because the ink integrates with the body itself.

Mangala is doing everything possible to keep this tradition of India alive. I believe Mangala has the courage and strength to make the Baiga people’s Godna tradition approachable for everyone around the world who is interested in learning about this art form and willing to approach it with love and respect.

Amit Arjel-Sharma

Amit Arjel-Sharma is an artist assistant to Baiga artist Mangala Bai Maravi. Both were recently in residence at the University of Sydney, where they worked on a series of paintings that were displayed at the Chau Chak Wing Museum and White Bay Power Station as part of the 24th Biennale of Sydney. Amit is both a close friend of and a translator for Mangala, having spent years working with and learning the ways of the Baiga. Amit shares Mangala’s story here with her input and permission.

This article was originally published in Art Monthly Australasia’s special edition about the 24th Biennale of Sydney. Purchase a copy here.

'Robert Fielding: NYARU’ at Canberra Glassworks

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Robert Fielding’s exhibition ‘NYARU’ at the Canberra Glassworks is a powerful showcase of culture, innovation and reclamation. Fielding is a celebrated multi-disciplinary artist of Pakistani, Afghan, Western Arrernte and Yankunytjatjara heritage and lives in the Mimili Community in the remote Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands in South Australia.

Fielding has used glass, metal and mirrors to create this new body of work, which he developed as part of a residency at Canberra Glassworks in 2023. ‘NYARU’ begins with a cluster of discarded and reclaimed car doors, their metal or glass windows painted and sandblasted to create words, or cultural or landscape designs. His work Kultuni (spear right through) (2024), a single car door, sits at the centre of the room facing the entrance. It greets audiences with a glass spear penetrating the body of the door, emerging on the other side. Although glass is fragile by nature, this thick spear represents strength, power and culture, as does any traditional wooden spear.

A recurring subject in Fielding’s practice since 2016, the mutuka katalypa (car wrecks) tell overlooked or forgotten stories, particularly from his Mimili Community. Each door offers an insight into Community life and into Fielding’s innovative vision to recycle, upcycle, repurpose and reclaim discarded vehicle parts to create engaging and beautiful artworks. The artist wants audiences to consider the importance of the car, the stories they hold and their persistent abandoned presence out on Country. These doors also honour the important role cars have in enabling families living in remote Communities to attend ceremonies and visit Country.

In the connecting corridor between the exhibition’s two rooms, Fielding’s work Puruni (to press against) (2024) features impressions of objects with minor ochre detailing, embossed into white paper, providing a visual break. The corridor leads audiences to Fielding’s final work, his pièce de résistance, Kapi iili (steady rain) (2024), a large-scale installation featuring dozens of transparent spears hovering over a mirrored floor. The reflective effect of the artwork creates an optical illusion of movement, as if spears are raining down upon the viewer. A singular spear also sits central to the mirrored floor and stabs into it, creating tension as the shattered fragments of mirror distort all reflections. The overall effect is mesmerising.

Fielding’s use of words in conjunction with his physical artworks is another device he uses to articulate and share his thoughts, cultural knowledge or histories. He is a natural wordsmith, offering both poems and contextual information to provide a sense of balance to the artworks occupying the space.

‘NYARU’ demonstrates Fielding’s embrace of glass as medium to create stunning, engaging and strong cultural contemporary artworks. Together they embody life, identity, culture, history and experience. Fielding’s father, Bruce Fielding, was a member of the Stolen Generation, which Fielding references in much of his work. In this exhibition, he also subtly responds to the momentous 2023 Australian Indigenous Voice Referendum and the subsequent ‘No’ vote through his exploration of unity, equality, past and present, and fragility and resilience.

The power glass gives to Fielding’s practice cannot be overstated. Despite being an inherently fragile medium, glass actively portrays the artist’s deep cultural practice and strong natural ability. The artist residency at the Canberra Glassworks has provided many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists with the opportunity to experiment, innovate and learn new skills working with the medium.

Fielding’s works in ‘NYARU’ are breathtaking. His natural ability, keen vision, thoughtful intellect and innate creativity have culminated in a stunning and powerful representation of culture and contemporary Community life. The exhibition is truly inspirational.

Tina Baum, Gulumirrgin (Larrakia)/Wardaman/Karajarri, Senior Curator, First Nations Art at the National Gallery of Australia

Co-curated by Erin Vink (Ngiyampaa) and Aimee Frodsham, ‘Robert Fielding: NYARU’is on display at the Canberra Glassworks in partnership with Mimili Maku Arts until 21 July 2024.

Erin Vink is Chair of Art Monthly Australasia.

The importance of narrative sovereignty

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‘Indigenous peoples are the First Peoples of this country. We have a right to be shown.’
– Gail Mabo

First and foremost, I am the sum of my ancestors, hailing from ancient lineages of the Gurindji/Malngin, Pertame Arrernte and Worimi nations of the continent of Australia and the Baloch people of the Middle East. My skin name is Mpetyane. This is my identity among my people, one I share with all other Mpetyane. It determines my relationship with Altyerre, our creation story, and with everyone and everything around me. I state this here because my cultural heritage and identity are crucial to my work as a filmmaker.

I am the co-founder and creative director of GARUWA, a wholly Aboriginal-owned creative agency dedicated to sharing First Nations culture and stories in the right way, with community at the fore. The films that I produce follow protocols around cultural safety that draw on ancient traditions of respect, relationality and reciprocity that are embedded in my diverse lineage—and in many First Nations cultures. I feel a deep responsibility when translating First Nations art and culture to the screen. Indigenous peoples have been stereotyped and subject to bias, misrepresentation and cruelty in media going back centuries. The media has played a huge role in shaping narratives that have championed colonial perspectives, and justified violence and dispossession. But running counter to this dark history is another story: the long tradition of Indigenous artists and storytellers pushing back against colonial narratives and setting the record straight, in their own words. 

Both our own people and wider audiences need to understand and experience First Nations perspectives and worldviews. Narrative sovereignty—having the power to tell our own story on our own terms—is integral to this. There is no one better placed to tell our stories than us. Without a deep understanding of the nuances of Indigenous cultures, there is a risk that stories about First Nations peoples will fall into the trap of being clichéd, extractive and exploitative—as much media representation of Indigenous peoples has been throughout history.

I am currently working on a series of 14 short documentaries, one about each of the First Nations artists who were commissioned by the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain to make new work for the 24th Biennale of Sydney. The opportunity to document the incredible work of these artists from across the globe is exciting, but it is also nerve-wracking, as I have a duty of care to each of these individuals and their unique creative practices. Telling an artist’s story through film is no easy task. An artist’s work is the ultimate representation of their identity, their creative response to their experience of the world around them. One of the big questions facing me with this project is: how can I translate these artists’ creative talents to the screen?

Another question I had was: how can I accurately and respectfully capture and communicate each of the artists’ cultural traditions? The artists come from around the world. Among them are Cristina Flores Pescorán, whose work is inspired by Peru’s Indigenous Chancay culture; Baiga artist Mangala Bai Maravi, who is based in central India; and Dylan Mooney, a Yuwi, Torres Strait and Australian South Sea Islander man, to give some idea of the diversity of First Nations cultures represented. Going into the project, I had knowledge of some of the artists’ traditions, but not all—yet it was my responsibility to capture them all on film.  

With that in mind, I began the process of making these films with intentional relationship building. I exchanged details of positionality, personal stories, cultural tales and more with the artists, allowing our relationships to evolve naturally and organically. A good yarn creates an opportunity for connection before the cameras start rolling, which results in the sharing of more meaningful stories. The making of these films has reaffirmed my belief that, while our contexts are not the same, there exists a deep camaraderie between Indigenous peoples around the globe. There are commonalities between us, including shared experiences of resistance, a commitment to the revitalisation of our cultures and a belief in the power of storytelling to improve the plight of our peoples. It has been a privilege to learn about these artists’ perspectives and artistic processes from a position of intercultural understanding. I feel honoured that they have all placed such great trust in me to tell their stories.

This anthology of documentaries we are producing is a co-production between GARUWA and our friends at Entropico, an international production company. The films are being made by a diverse team of creatives, including one of Australia’s best cinematographers, Tyson Perkins (Eastern Arrernte/Kalkadoon). Tyson and I chose to shoot in various formats—Super8, 16mm and digital—to create a visual language that spoke to the artists’ diverse voices, as well as the myriad histories and traditions upon which they draw. We have involved the artists in the creative process from the beginning to ensure that they have ownership of their stories. This collaborative process has resulted in a wonderful series of films. I cannot wait to share them with the world.

Kieran Mpetyane Satour (Gurindji/Pertame/Worimi)

Kieran Mpetyane Satour’s documentaries about the First Nations artists commissioned by the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain to make work for the 24th Biennale of Sydney will be released later this year.

This article was originally published in Art Monthly Australasia’s special edition about the 24th Biennale of Sydney. Purchase a copy here.

What is ‘Wilderness Ideology’ and why is it problematic?

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Wilderness Ideology has emerged from the fields of land management and conservation, but its effects are seen and felt in the arts. In short, it’s the idea that true wildernesses are untouched by people and should largely remain so. In the context of conservation organisations, this does not seem like a bad thing. However, it can lead to an overemphasis on landscapes being vacant, effectively removing people—especially First Nations people, who have lived on and cared for Country for millennia—from the picture, even if we are still present. It’s a contemporary expression of terra nullius.

In 2012, Professor Marcia Langton addressed the subject at length in ‘The Conceit of Wilderness Ideology’, a talk she delivered as part of the Boyer Lectures series. Langton explained: ‘Aboriginal land is targeted both by mining companies and conservation campaigners precisely because it is Aboriginal land. These vast areas owned by Aboriginal people are the repository of Australia’s mega-diversity of flora, fauna and ecosystems because of the ancient Aboriginal system of management, and because Aboriginal people fought to protect their territories from white incursion. They are not wilderness areas—they are Aboriginal homelands, shaped over millennia by Aboriginal people.’

In the art world, Wilderness Ideology can be seen in the contemporary art market’s positioning of Country as something of a “Dreamtime” place. Today, there is the expectation that Indigenous artists will portray Country, but there is not always a proper understanding of the reality that First Nations artists actually live on Country and are intrinsically connected to it. These misconceptions of First Nations peoples’ relationships with their homelands are rooted in the history of the forced displacement of Australia’s Indigenous people from their Country and on to missions, reserves and stations.

Coming from Mapoon, and being a Teppathiggi and Tjungundji man from the Western Cape of Cape York, my own lived experience as an artist has shown me the immense importance that Country and on-Country practices bear in our daily lives. Today, a number of Cape York-based First Nations artists are challenging the art market’s framing of Indigenous peoples—especially artists—as spectators of Country, rather than part of it. They are doing so the way our people always have: by remaining, and by showing we remain.

The late and great Granny Mavis Ngallametta (a cousin of my Grandmother, Jean Little OAM) led the charge. She—and at a similar time, Naomi Hobson—established a visual tradition depicting Country precisely, while also incorporating elements of purposeful “abstraction” to disguise the sacredness and hidden knowledge linked with a place. Over time, the more truly abstract and minimalist works of artists from the Lockhart River Art Gang came to the fore, as did the Hope Vale painters’ depictions of their township. What Granny Mavis and these other artists did—and what some are still doing—was to showcase their Country itself as well as their deep and inexplicable connections to their lands. Visual art is the medium through which these artists and Lorekeepers prove First Nations peoples’ place on and within Country, which is an important response to Wilderness Ideology’s attempt to divorce people from place.

Informed by a—perhaps subconscious—Wilderness Ideology, players in the art market still cater to the non-Indigenous thirst for First Nations artworks that maintain the image of an untouched, sunburnt land. Kowanyama artist Tania Major, a proud Kokoberra woman, has spoken to me in the past of the noticeable absence of Blak peoples in First Nations artists’ own works—especially those from remote and regional areas. In answer to this, Tania and her fellow Kowanyama artists have frequently shown portraits in many forms at the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair.

Tania herself is a decorated artist, having won the CIAF Innovation Art Award in 2022 for her painting Dragon Flys Everywhere: Coming Into The Dry Season (2022). Structurally, Tania’s dragonfly painting is innovative and offers a psychedelic view of Country, as though viewing the tangible and sustaining land through the spirit world. When looking at Tania’s work, the paintings of Uncle Syd Bruce Shortjoe (who is a proud Wik-Iiyanh man of the Wik Mynah people) from Pormpuraaw also spring to mind. To me, his works typify a unique school of landscape painting, which seems to only come from the Western Cape of Cape York Peninsula. There’s a multidimensional quality to his paintings and his works on paper: they appear as if you are looking simultaneously at, floating above and sitting within any given landscape. Granny Nita Yunkaporta from Aurukun (a Wik-Mungkan Elder) is another superb artist with a similar approach. In fact, this emerging school likely came from the women artists of Aurukun, including Granny Mavis Ngallametta.

The key factor in the landscape works of cousin Tania, Uncle Sid and Granny Nita is that they often feature their/our own peoples (or at least glimpses of them/us) living and working on the land—as do works by Wanda Gibson, Gertie Deeral, Daisy Hamlot and Dr Bernard Singleton. All these artists’ works are culturally authoritative and position First Nations people as part and parcel of Country, which is a riposte to Wilderness Ideology. The works of these great artists remind audiences of our eternal presence on our homelands, across our Country, while also celebrating the beauty and vibrancy of the bush.

Jack Wilkie-Jans (Teppathiggi/Tjungundji), Gimuy/Cairns

Jack Wilkie-Jans is a multi-disciplinary artist, arts worker, writer and an Aboriginal affairs advocate.

Inside Archie Moore’s ‘kith and kin’—the exhibition that won the Golden Lion at the 60th Venice Biennale

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I step into the dark, quiet space and find myself surrounded by thousands of Ancestors, their names written in white chalk on blackboard paint covering the walls and ceiling, all of them engulfing me in a giant family tree. The names look down on me like stars in the deep night sky.

In front of me is what first looks like a model of the cityscape, but upon closer inspection is revealed to be piles of documents, reports of the deaths in custody of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia. I pause and look deep into the pool of reflection at the foot of this table of documents. I stand there and contemplate this immense exhibition, ‘kith and kin,’ by Kamilaroi and Bigambul artist Archie Moore, which has been curated by Ellie Buttrose for the Australia Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale.

I walk around the walls, reading each name, tracing each connection. Nestled in this First Nations family tree, I find moments where missing people’s histories have been erased, the chalk rubbed out and faded, or deep black holes where no information exists at all. Some boxes feature crude names that were used in the past to incorrectly label and identify Indigenous people. I recognise one – ‘half-caste’ – a term that was placed upon me as a child, and one I firmly reject.

Some boxes are simply not filled – these people’s names are absent, yet their absence speaks loudly. I reach the centre of the room and the box marked “me.”  The story of Archie begins here. On one side, there is the neatly arranged family tree of his father’s British and Scottish heritage. On the other, his mother’s Kamilaroi and Bigambul family forms a beautiful flowing current of names, lines and interconnected kinship relationships. This Indigenous family tree grows and spreads throughout the exhibition space, reaching the heights of the ceiling and fading into its dark abyss.

Evidence of Archie’s research into his genealogy is incredibly impressive. Through his years of investigation, he has accumulated more information than many institutions hold. I tried to imagine Archie’s journey with this work, from obtaining information about his maternal great-grandmother, Jane Clevin, from the anthropologist Norman Tindale, to venturing into the depths of state and federal archives. The journey to obtain the information and also to hold it, in his heart and spirit, must have been incredibly heavy.

My gaze falls from the dark ceiling down to the bright white piles of documents, some stamped with the seal of the crown, many of which feature ‘just’ another name on a piece of paper, another Indigenous death in custody, another family member lost – an all too familiar story for First Nations people. The documents hover above the dark pool of reflection. It is as though they sit above the tears of all those families and Ancestors that surround me. Some of the names are from my community. I feel a deep sense of loss.

As I mourn, sparkles of light catch my eye. They dance on the walls through a small, floor-level window that lets the sparkling reflection from the waters of Venetian canals in, connecting this sacred space to the waters outside, and onwards to the waters of home. I find comfort that those waters are reflected in this space. I feel hopeful that through the power of art and Archie’s remarkable work, our stories are now being shared beyond Australia, and are connecting us with other Indigenous peoples around the world.

This is my second visit to the space. The first was jarring because I entered during the launch of the exhibition. It was filled with people yarning and laughing, doing what we have come to expect from an exhibition opening. However, this was not your typical exhibition. I stood at the top of the display, solemn as I considered the juxtaposition of the endless names of Indigenous people who have died, set against the packed space of people celebrating. It did not feel right to me. However, that is the machinery of an exhibition launch. I understand why these events happen – and there was much to celebrate.

What is evident throughout the exhibition is the collaborative nature in which the work was brought together, with the support of Elder Bandjalung creative Djon Mundine; the considered exhibition design of Kaurareg and Meriam architect Kevin O’Brien; and the backing of Creative Australia, which commissioned the work. Ellie, from the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, has curated the exhibition with care and sensitivity. The complementary and collaborative nature of these relationships manifest themselves in this exceptionally thoughtful, heart-swelling exhibition.

‘kith and kin’ won the biennale’s prestigious Golden Lion award for Best National Participation. This is the first time in history an Australian artist has received this accolade. Congratulations to Archie, Ellie and the Creative Australia team on this deeply moving exhibition.

Peggy Kasabad Lane (Saibai Koedal Awagadhalayg), Venice

Peggy Kasabad Lane is the First Nations Curator at Court House Gallery and Tanks Arts Centre, Cairns, and attended the Venice Biennale as part of the (re)situateBiennale Delegates program run by Creative Australia.

Curated by Ellie Buttrose, ‘kith and kin’ by Archie Moore continues at the Australia Pavilion, Venice until 24 November 2024.

Justine Youssef: ‘Somewhat Eternal’ at the Institute of Modern Art

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A parsley stem is placed over a Samsung mobile phone displaying an image of a pillow resting on a bed; detached from location and absent of body, the ritual endures.

This poetic action and hauntingly absent frame, captured in Darug/Sydney based artist Justine Youssef’s three-channel video work exhibited as part of the multi-sensory installation Somewhat Eternal (2023) at the Institute of Modern Art (IMA) in Meanjin/Brisbane, is a stark and timely echo of the ongoing impacts of colonialism. Somewhat Eternal grapples with questions concerning the displacement and attempted erasure of distinct global communities and the lasting effects this can have on diaspora peoples’ connections to their homelands.

Filmed in Lebanon, a multi-channel video work formulates the central focus of Somewhat Eternal. The video follows Youssef’s aunt performing R’sasa, an alchemic practice intended to ward off the evil eye in the pursuit of healing and repair from ailments and misfortunes. Due to their embodied knowledge of local ecologies, R’sasa has been practiced and sustained by generations of Youssef’s family, despite famine and military occupation. Reprised here, a mobile phone and WhatsApp video call become mediators of hybridity, enabling the ritual with parsley, water, lead and body to be shared, despite being fragmented and altered so as to traverse geographies. An uncannily familiar interaction for many migrant, refugee and Indigenous families who have formed an immediacy with the virtual to chart cartographies of the self despite, and within, the complexities of colonisation, globalisation and localisation. The persistence and resilience of Indigenous cultures to adapt to this networked connection stands in contestation to the changing cultural landscape and continues to press toward the decomposition of colonial power.

Filigree and embroidered text border the walls and suspended rose blankets rest in both gallery spaces. As our movement reveals the haunting histories contained in this text, we learn that the lead in R’sasa is reclaimed from the ammunition remains of AK-47 guns supplied by Australian weapons exports to Israel during their invasion of Lebanon between 1982 to 2000. A horrifying, yet unsurprising, parallel of our nation’s complicit action in upholding and promoting Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian land and genocidal practices against Indigenous communities both in Palestine and on our own soil, with police brutality and increasing black deaths in custody an enduring source of national shame.

Truth-telling is embodied in Youssef's exhibition, framed by object, relation and ritual, to supersede the reductive and bias accounts of history found in western archives. A subtle perfume distilled from blessed milk thistle, burnet rose, Damask rose and Lebanese cedar permeates from the blanket textiles located throughout the gallery. This complex blend of aromatics is brought together by histories of land subjugation and occupation, while balancing aspirations for renewal through resilience. The scent acts as a surrogate body, reflecting adaptations to conduit bodies as dates feed displaced Palestinian babies instead of their mother’s milk.

The cardinal coloured and hydrosols steeped gallery offers a space in which to build solidarity in this time of crisis. Through Youssef’s work of cultural persistence and resistance, we are urged to sustain each other in our collective education, protest and demand for the end of the siege on Gaza, and annihilating attacks on Rafah.

As the photograph of Youssef’s pillow is laid on the bed with the parsley stem, we see in the video that her aunt ensures the phone is placed on charge as it rests overnight. This common gesture becomes a poignant commitment towards cultural endurance and forges it as somewhat eternal. These virtual formations facilitate and transform the possibilities for diaspora affiliation and aversion to colonial regimes. Affirming an inherent belonging with their homelands across oceans, land and networks. Somewhat Eternal asks us to consider how we might sustain solidarity and actively seek alternative futures that break our acquiescence to the creation of displacement.

Georgia Hayward, Meanjin/Brisbane

Curated by Stella Rosa McDonald, Tulleah Pearce and Patrice Sharkey, ‘Somewhat Eternal’ is on display at the Institute of Modern Art until 7 April 2024.

Inside and out: Notions of interiority at the NGV Triennial

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The third NGV Triennial showcases international and local art, featuring new pieces alongside the National Gallery of Victoria’s permanent collection. Stemming from the curatorial prompt of ‘Magic, Matter and Memory’, the third NGV Triennial features more than 100 artists and interacts skillfully with the National Gallery of Victoria’s permanent collection.

The NGV Triennial features a range of international and local artists whose work spans installations, sculpture and portraiture, highlighting the interior and exterior elements of the human experience as well as the gallery’s architecture. Crucially, in an exhibition featuring the likes of Tracy Emin and Yoko Ono, the voices of local female artists are no less strong and no less resonant, and provide a piercing snapshot of the inner lives of the artist and the subject in time, space and dreams.

Prudence Flint’s series ‘Hunting and Fishing’ (2023) depicts the Melbourne artist’s feminist interiors. Interestingly, the curators positioned the meditative portraits in Flint’s signature pastel tones amidst the ruminative portraits of the Dutch Masters, thought to symbolise the birth of the individual subject in modern European life. It’s a juxtaposition Flint finds apt, as well as flattering. ‘I had no idea how it was going to look,’ remembers Flint. ‘They came to me about three years ago and told me I was going to be put in the Dutch Master’s section. The carpet hadn’t been put down and I really loved it. I thought the paintings looked beautiful there.’

Flint cites portraits like A Fine Romance (2005) which depicts a female painter sitting in front of an easel, as having the mirror-like effect of individual self-discovering, speaking not only of the self’s invention but what she calls ‘a sense of underplayed violence and implied threat.’

In the work of Kosovan artist Petrit Halilaj, the process of invention involves transforming war to whimsy. ‘The catalyst of Very volcanic over this green feather (2021),’ explains Halilaj, ‘was a series of drawings I made while I was living in a refugee camp during the Kosovo War (1989–99). I wasn’t able to go back to them until 2021, when I created the exhibition for Tate St Ives. So, this project emerged as an intimate response to particular events such as war and displacement. It was a reaction, not a discovery. Through time, I found art to be a potent tool for empowering through memory. Art gives me a sense of being able to alter the course of my personal history, and by consequence, that of collective ones.’ Indeed, the NGV Triennial can be seen as a historical document of how art practice contributes to collective histories.

Halilaj’s drawings are blown-up in size and hung in the centre of the gallery. The installation leaves a series of gaps and open spaces where people can walk amongst and interact with the images of birds, trees and people; depictions that reflect a distressing period in Halilaj’s war-torn childhood. ‘How do you translate your experiences once you lose a sense of home and then you have to invent your way of being in the world?’ Halilaj asks rhetorically as I speak to him one evening. ‘I made this series of drawings when I was 13, when an Italian psychologist arrived at the camps and asked us kids to express our memories and experiences with felt-tip pens. I have always drawn a lot, but in that context, drawing became a tool for survival. I drew the images that were sculpted in my mind. Most of them depicted scenes from the war I had witnessed or heard of. Others were my way to escape that situation, like a bird. I watched these flying beings and imagined doing the same, someday. The birds in my drawings are usually very colorful, extravagant creatures. They represent memory and the possibility for a better future.’

From the psychological interiors of the female experience to the creative rendering of one child’s experiences of war, the NGV Triennial represents a range of landscapes and dreamscapes, which turn matter, memory and subjects inside and out. Nowhere is this question of interiority and exteriority grappled with more thoroughly than in Sheila Hicks’s sculpture Nowhere to go (2022). A doyenne of modern feminist sculpture, Hick’s masterfully alludes to the ways in which textile arts can be a metaphor for lived experience; threads woven through and strengthened to speak of resilience, invention and the spaces inside and between us. Nowhere to go could be a landscape or a dreamscape and you can imagine yourself inside it as well as around it, an experience Hicks credits to the immersive nature of her practice.

Hicks sees her subject in bold terms as ‘building the future.’ She describes how ‘when people walk into the room, they lift their eyes and their chin and look upwards and then they scan and build colour and form. There’s so much going on in the world today that drags us downwards, so I like to keep looking upwards. My sculpture is additive, not subtractive. When I get to the top I keep going up. Each person has the privilege of seeing it in their personal way. But I’m adding to the history of art as I see it and I’m trying to be uplifting.’

The third NGV Triennial is rich with the possibilities of uplift. From feminist subjectivity to refugee stories extending hospitality in an existing museum space, the pieces featured in this exhibition show how art can take you everywhere, from places inside yourself to parts of the world where you’ve never travelled. These three artists prove that with bold colours, new perspectives and interesting compositions, the past and the present, memory and magic can interact symphonically and enrich our understanding of why art matters.

Vanessa Francesca, Naarm/Melbourne

The ‘NGV Triennial’ is on display at the National Gallery of Victoria until 7 April 2024.

Non-fungible movements: ‘Contact High’ at Gertrude Contemporary

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We’re told to shuffle backwards to allow more space for the performance. We hardly fit. Bunched up, curving along the back wall of the gallery, this is different from what usually occurs here; it matters more acutely when and where we are in the room. 

Piloted in 2022 by Performance Review and Gertrude Contemporary, Dance, dance is the final iteration of ‘Contact High’, a performance series that places the body transparently at the centre of practice. Of course, this always is the case in life and art, but other artforms such as object-based practice, film and writing can often obscure this fact by positioning the live body in the past. There is something brave about performance in the way it is created anew each time, making the possibility of failure feel raw. We’re quiet and we watch closely. 

We’re also more implicated in the process, attested to by the anticipatory flutter in many stomachs during Cold Tooth (2024) as Harrison Ritchie-Jones plucks an audience member from the crowd, who he continues to intimately roll on top of, cradle like a baby and whack against the wall. As Ritchie-Jones drags dirt around the space, spits wine dramatically against the wall and smears it with fake blood, I wonder whether I can start to eat the burrito hidden in my bag now the gallery decorum has been upended.  

In Mara Galagher’s piece with Andrea Illés and Nelly Clifton, titled unnamed work (2024), we are witness to bodies resting beneath an engine-ready van; a dangerous act heightened as cars move right next to the performers. A flock of birds fly behind Illés’s shoulder as she perches unflinchingly on top of the van looking down High Street, and I’m more aware than before of Gertrude Contemporary’s location and surroundings. Moving and moving outside opens the space of relation, extending audiences and negating the supposed neutrality of our art spaces. The context of the neighbourhood pours in and the smell of cooking lamb wafts out.

The night ends with Sarah Aiken’s Body Corp (iteration no.4) (2024), continuing her exploration of the fractured, incomplete selves we project through our screens. Objects are hidden, revealed, and mismatched as Sarah’s live body momentarily synchronises again and again with her body on the screen. What you see coming into alignment is dependent on your spatial relationship to the performance; a reminder of the multiple truths alongside the absolute; a complicated paradox often obscured in the era of self-branding, reshares and infographics on platforms owned and governed by increasingly wealthy billionaires.

Rather than relegating it to the sadly denigrated-in-the-eyes-of-the-institution public program, ‘Contact High’ progressively positions dance and performance as the main event. Walsh’s curatorial approach provides a deeper contrast to the traditional activities of the gallery and allows for a questioning of what usually occurs here. Dance and performance make the presumed mechanics of the gallery clearer and provide different, compelling, mirror neuron activating options. Instead of facing out to the walls, our bodies look at their bodies and there is something refreshing in the directness. It makes you think, could we have more of these cultural conversations without the collectable objects? 

Dance and performance have a harder time being purchased as an investment (or for lowering taxes) and are inherently more difficult to possess as production cannot be easily divorced from its maker. It is limited by the body which complicates unbounded trade and growth. This particularity of the form challenges pervading economic structures which repeatedly fail to recognise limits of people and ecosystems. The reflection of organic reality feels important as more of life becomes alienated, transactional, and objectified for the ungrounded notion of profit and status. It’s hard to put dance on a wall and it doesn’t easily match the curtains.

Despite a lack of support for dance and performance art, ‘Contact High’ sits as a testament to its popularity and critical function, and grounds the necessity for institutions to provide it with increased support. As we pay more, work more, and see each other less, live art and the gathering it precipitates feels potent. Changing, breathing bodies in the process of entrainment, possible only together and not to be owned or reproduced ad infinitum. 

Lana Nguyen, Naarm/Melbourne

Piloted in 2022, ‘Contact High’ is a three-year partnership between Gertrude Contemporary and Performance Review that interrogates the transference that occurs between performers and audiences, primarily within the gallery space. ‘Contact High’ is curated by Anador Walsh, Director of Performance Review.

The body that holds us: Jordan Wolfson’s ‘Body Sculpture’ at the National Gallery of Australia

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Deep within the brutalist confines of the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), an anticipated new artwork is unveiled. Commissioned in 2019 for the NGA’s permanent collection, Body Sculpture (2023) is an animatronic sculpture by prolific American artist Jordan Wolfson. Branded an enfant terrible early on in his career, Wolfson, now 43 years old, has seemingly entered a new phase, one defined less by transgression and more by abstraction.  

Body Sculpture blends person and object, minimalism and figuration, art and technology, and compels viewers to experience their own bodies and the consciousness it houses. The third in Wolfson’s series of animatronic sculptures after Female Figure (2014) and Colored Sculpture (2016), Body Sculpture is formally innovative and tonally distinct, squarely engaging with human practices such as introspection, spirituality, and, at times, agonizing cogitation. Not since Callum Morton’s Reception (2016), a sculptural installation featuring a robotic facsimile of Melbourne art dealer Anna Schwartz, has an animatronic artwork exhibited in Australia generated such interest. Like Morton’s work, Body Sculpture is capable of eliciting decidedly human responses including sadness, elation, and dread.

The NGA provides an atypical context for Body Sculpture’s inauguration. Despite being somewhat removed from the global contemporary art hubs of New York and London, Kamberri/Canberra and the NGA can provide the space, time, and resources for Wolfson’s ambitious sculpture to be realised, experienced, and maintained. The issue of cost has been the subject of debate since the commission was first announced, with some suggesting it was unwise for the NGA to make the reported $6.67 million investment, despite the potential upside. The debut of Female Figure for instance, saw people queuing for hours outside David Zwirner in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighbourhood. It will be interesting to see whether any snaking lines start to form within the Parliamentary Triangle.

As is typical of Wolfson’s work, meaning is undefined and is constructed by numerous formal elements and signifiers. Stripped of the pop-cultural associations of Female Figure and Colored Sculpture (including references to Alfred E. Neuman, Lady Gaga and Huckleberry Finn), Body Sculpture is ostensibly minimal by comparison. Despite the sculpture encompassing several mechanisms, a central 36-square-inch metal cube assumes the role of protagonist; its consciousness conjured by two jutting arms. Over approximately 25 minutes, the Judd-like cube and its extremities are manipulated by an additional robotic appendage wielding a leaden chain. Framed by an immense steel gantry, the cube performs a sequence of precise movements across three acts. Underpinned by a firm rhythmic quality, tender signs of prayer, meditation and self-care give way to motions conveying sensuality and playfulness, which evolve into a series of intensely sexual gestures before cutting to a stark expression of unfathomable shame. Body Sculpture culminates in simulations of violence, ferocity, and intractable rage as the sculpture thrashes wildly until, finally, it prepares to stage a suicidal action. The artwork is abundantly beautiful and incredibly sad.    

The technological sophistication of Body Sculpture facilitates the profound emotional capacity of what is, in essence, a faceless aluminium cube. It is important to highlight the rigorous collaborative processes that underpin Body Sculpture and allow for the artwork’s conscious faculty to be realised. Roboticist, artist, and software engineer Mark Setrakian, known for his work on films including How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000), Hellboy (2004), and Men in Black (1997), is Wolfson’s longstanding principle collaborator. Other notable consultants on Body Sculpture include composer and percussionist Eli Keszler, clown expert Stefan Haves, and choreographers including Adam Linder, Daphne Fernberger, and Irme and Marne van Opstal.

Whether or not Body Sculpture acts as a proxy for its audience, the elusive beauty of its scraped surfaces engages with broader notions of erosion and decay, acknowledging the constant abrasion of the body that holds us. Wolfson allows Body Sculpture to be scarred by the detritus of life, inviting audiences to hold communion with the affected artwork and, in turn, with themselves. 

Yarran Gatsby, Kamberri/Canberra

Curated by Russell Storer, ‘Jordan Wolfson: Body Sculpture’ is on display at the National Gallery of Australia until 28 April 2024. Jordan Wolfson lives in Los Angeles and is represented by David Zwirner, Gagosian, and Sadie Coles HQ.