Unbound Collective, Natalie Harkin and Seana O’Brien, Archive Performance Skirts (detail), 2019, calico, poems and archival material on banana leaf paper, marine ply and bamboo, foliage, incandescent bulb with wiring, variable sizes.

‘Sovereign Acts | Love Praxis: Unbound Collective’, exhibition installation view, Flinders University Museum of Art, Tarntaya/Adelaide, 2024. Photo: FUMA

Unbound Collective, Ali Baker and Seana, Skirt nets (detail), 2023, recycled cotton with found feathers and manila rope, variable sizes

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.