Resonance: Fiona Foley at the National Art School

Fiona Foley: Who are these strangers and where are they going?, exhibition installation view, National Art School (NAS), Sydney, 2020; image courtesy NAS, Sydney; photo: Peter Morgan

Fiona Foley’s last survey exhibition to be seen in Sydney was in 2009–10 with ‘Forbidden’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. A decade later, ‘Who are these strangers and where are they going?’ at the National Art School (until 8 February) includes her most recent work that describes the depth of her interest in Queensland’s vexed histories and their control of Aboriginal people, as well as photographic series and installations since 1984. Her largest series of photographs, ‘Horror Has A Face’ (2017), acknowledges her family connection to the Bogimbah Mission (on K’gari/Fraser Island). It tells the story of the failure of this colonial intervention, exposing the power imbalances that existed between Aboriginal people and their ‘protectors’, and the role of opium in enslaving the Aboriginal population.

‘Who are these strangers …?’ premiered at the Ballarat International Foto Biennale last year. It was shown in Ballarat’s historic mining hall, a building with high warehouse ceilings and small anterooms along the side. More works are presented in Sydney, with a smaller footprint that in many ways tightens its delivery.

It opens with Foley’s new film Out of the Sea Like Cloud (2019), which tells the first contact story between Badtjala people on K’gari/Fraser Island who witnessed the passage of Captain Cook’s Endeavour past Takky Wooroo/Indian Head. The film segues into a colonial opium den, then conducts the lead character through a dreamlike passage where he wakes on K’gari to reclaim his place, innocence and sanity. The words of the song echo the film’s hypnotic mix of reality and fantasy throughout the exhibition spaces, with works that discuss opium on the ground level, and those more focused on identity and racism upstairs.

It is the (literally) shifting ground (with corn, carpets and oyster shells on the floor) of what curator Djon Mundine refers to as Foley’s ‘memory, truth and consciousness’ that is most evident in the exhibition. While it highlights the consistent conceptual core of Foley’s art, the soundtrack of the film gives the work an emotional resonance which is hard to resist. Her ongoing challenge to the ways in which Aboriginal people have been represented, and wresting back control to narrate a different story (drawn from Queensland’s archives) build powerfully. Foley’s ‘Badtjala Woman’ photographic series of 1994, featuring herself in the guise of one of her ancestors, is a reminder of how well she has delivered a resonant image – always.

Louise Martin-Chew, Sydney