Healing Arts, Decolonisation

The first exhibition of its kind, ‘Hand in Hand’ featured Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander, Maori, Samoan, Niuean and Fijian Artists based in Aotearoa, USA and Australia.

The 2008 annual Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative’s Sydney Mardi Gras exhibition was an opportunity for Indigenous artists across the Pacific to participate in a celebration of international standing through a program that openly challenged dominant views on sexuality.

The exhibition was also held in collaboration with the Performance Space @ CarriageWorks in Australia.

The artwork featured was a focus on non-conventional media including: the moving image, installation and also inter-disciplinary media including performance art, music and adornment. The artists: Jeffery Samuels, Tracey Moffatt, Arone Raymond Meeks, r e a, Darrell Sibosado, Clinton Nain, Adrian Wills, Dianne Jones, Gary Lee, Moana Nepia, Niwhai Tupaea, Sionelagi Falemaka, Dan Taulapapa McMullin, Claudine Sartain, Salote Tawale & artist / curator: Jenny Fraser (AUS) & invited guest artist / curator Shigeyuki Kihara (NZ).

This was my undergraduate dissertation, parts of which are (somewhat) tongue-in-cheek. However I would like to take this study further. Rare opportunity to talk with and meet two of the four artists. My thanks to Fons Geerlings, Bernard Akoi-Jackson, Tatiana Macic and Marijke Efua Everts, also Sarah Atzori.

An exhibition of the moving image, including stop-motion, 3D and other animation techniques, Big Eye showcases Aboriginal animations from Australia and Canada in a unique cross-tribal exchange of ideas and world views.

Aboriginal Australian screen artists use digital storytelling techniques to bring cultural knowledge and contemporary exploration of country to the fore, with an original and distinctive voice.

Big Eye builds on its 2008 debut screening in Darwin, featuring prominent Aboriginal Australian artists to now include works by Aboriginal Canadian Animators and Artists.

Featuring fom Canada: Dark Thunder Productions, Raven Tales, Skawennati Tricia Fragnito & AbTech, Rabbit and Bear Paws and The Healthy Aboriginal Network; and from Australia: Frank Mcleod & Aboriginal Nations, Aroha Groves, Christine Peacock & Rebekah Pitt & John Graham, the Gunbalanya Community & Gozer Media, and artist/curator Jenny Fraser.

Abstract


The realm of the arts is often viewed as the stronghold in the last line of defence against the enduring colonisation process of the minority Aboriginal populace. It is one of few avenues in Australian society where Aboriginal people can have a voice and fortunately this is partly driven by the influence of the outside international artworld. In more recent years the digital production areas have further enabled the space and recognition for self-determined, culturally specific and diverse sources of creativity, exchange and community building. This is all despite a culture war where mainstream institutions such as the galleries sector, the associated funding bodies, academia and the media are all being utilised and strengthened as non-military mechanisms of imperialism.

The notion of an artistic terra nullius refers to the violent erasure of Aboriginal peoples and in particular to First Nations women, both in the violence of genocide in the colonisation of this place and in ongoing acts of violence; erasure from history and public dialogue, stolen generations,  ongoing removal of children, deaths in custody, sexual violence, systemic and institutional violence, public denigration and imprisonment. The notion builds from the historic phallacy of Aboriginal Peoples as 'absent,’ from the landscape, and responds to the violent erasure of Aboriginal Peoples from the landscape, or ‘horror scapes,’ as named by Prof Tracey Bunda.

This practice led research sets out to document and respond to the work of Aboriginal women in art and community. I have used practice-led inquiry informed using various standpoints; as artist, writer, curator, community researcher and as a Wemba-Wemba & Gunditjmara, matriarchal and sovereign woman. I have practiced community ways of 'being, knowing and doing' as termed by Professor Karen Martin, to witness, participate, and respond to Aboriginal women's art making and activism in a series of essays and a new body of visual works.

The exhibition occupied two separate spaces but related responses. Roslyn Smorgan Gallery held an epistemological space (the knowing), an active studio of a new body of photographic based works drawn from my matriarchal family stories; both past, present and future, that honour matriarchal knowledge and ways of being and respond to a broad body of Aboriginal women’s work. This knowing includes family reclamation of Wemba-Wemba language and associated archival materials. The Performance Space holds an ontological place (the being) of memory and timelessness, respite, healing and repair with familial story, survival, language and knowledge that speaks to loss & the need for spaces of unconditional love.