Lot's Wife Edition 1 2017

Disrupting The ‘White Cube’: Two Exhibitions On Indigenous Art
edition one
These two exhibitions – Sovereignty at ACCA and Who’s Afraid of Colour?
at NGV Australia – provide a glimpse into the array of artistic forms from
First Nations contemporary artists, showcasing a myriad of vibrant and
distinct cultural expressions. By no means exhaustive, these two exhibitions
survey the vital and proliferous landscape of contemporary Indigenous art,
exhibiting new commissions alongside historical works. With Sovereignty, ACCA
presents an exhibition that centres upon the contemporary art of First Nations
peoples of Victoria, while Who’s Afraid of Colour? focuses on Indigenous female
artists – ‘great women innovators – transformers of tradition and precedent.’
Both exhibitions seek to challenge presumptions about how Indigenous art
is conceived and interpreted, exploring a range of mediums from traditional
woven objects to sculpture, painting, photographs, and video installations.
The historical backdrop in which Sovereignty and Who’s Afraid of Colour? take
place is inescapable. By the fact of their very existence, these exhibitions are
inherently political, illustrating the intimate link between art and activism.
The title Sovereignty is itself an assertion of First Nations peoples’ claim to the
land, bringing to mind the legal fiction of terra nullius and the history of illegal
invasion and occupation, dispossession and destruction. The exhibition is
explicitly situated amidst current debates related to constitutional recognition
and treaty, and the historic and ongoing struggles of First Nations people for
self-determination and land rights. Who’s Afraid of Colour? boldly proclaims
a politics of difference and identity, centring the perspectives and voices of
Indigenous women.
The conversation surrounding ‘Australia/Invasion Day’ demonstrates
there is widespread and collective cognitive dissonance when it comes to
acknowledging the foundational violence on which the Australian colonial
state rests. As a nation, over two centuries after the fact, we still fail to reconcile
the historical legacy of our national identity. As the common protest refrain
goes: ‘white Australia has a black history’— yet the bedrock of white-settler
Australian culture is rooted in longstanding denial and amnesia toward its
Indigenous past. It is important to note the authoritative role museums,
galleries, and art institutions play in interpreting and legitimizing contested
histories, and to recognize the power they hold as gatekeepers of cultural
production and knowledge. As purveyors of ‘official culture’, museums shape
which – and how – histories are told and subsequently received by the public.
The ‘white cube’ of elite cultural institutions often privilege a Western and
Eurocentric history and lens onto the world. Colonialism, beyond its economic
and socio-political manifestations, is perhaps most omnipresent within the
realm of culture; as the decolonial theorist Ivan Muniz Reed writes: “so much of
the modern world we know and experience has been constructed out of western
imperial categories… the coloniality of knowledge is perhaps harder to discern
and much more insidious to overcome.”
It is important, then, that Sovereignty is conceived through a collaborative
curatorial model, in partnership with the artist and curator Paola Bella, a
Wemba-Wemba and Gunditjmara woman. In the words of Max Delany, the
co-curator of Sovereignty and ACCA’s Artistic Director, it was a “curatorial
process informed by First nation communities, knowledge, and cultural
expression … structured around a set of practices and relationships in which
art and society, community and family, history and politics are inextricably
connected.” Sovereignty represents a new approach in curatorship and knowledge
production: “a shift from authorial, institutional modes of exhibition-making
towards more self-critical, consultative and collective models.” A curatorial
practice that aims to challenge the legacy of colonialism must necessarily
restructure and reinscribe prevailing discourses with alternative perspectives
and narratives, replacing the hegemony of Eurocentric categories and standards
with a form of “epistemic disobedience.” As Paola Balla herself states – “I
am challenging working within the colonial institution, because I have a
cultural and political responsibility to speak back whilst collaborating with
non-indigenous practitioners.” ‘Speaking back’ to white Australia necessitates
traversing across gendered and racial lines, to embody a politics of resistance
whilst also celebrating and asserting the endurance and vitality of one’s
own cultural identity. These artworks articulate resistance and survival,
self-determination and autonomy, while also bearing witness to trauma and
historical legacy – “art that tries to carve out a cultural space… to give form to
that which is often unseen.” These two exhibitions can be seen as a corrective
to the systemic and institutional absence of Indigenous representation in
Australian arts culture, while also engaging with critical historical and political
questions of our time. Sovereignty and Who’s Afraid of Colour? is a challenge to,
and a disruption of, the ‘white cube’ of the gallery space.
lot’s wife
Sovereignty
Australian Centre for
Contemporary Art (ACCA)
Curators: Paola Balla and Max
Delany
17 December 2016 – 26 March 2017
Free Entry, Open 10/11am – 5pm daily
(excluding Mondays)
Who’s Afraid of Colour?
NGV Australia, Federation
Square
Curator: Judith Ryan
16 December 2016 – 17 April 2017
Free Entry, Open 10am – 5pm daily
“Despite being at the forefront of political,
social, and cultural resistance, Indigenous
women’s knowledge and practices are often
omitted and rendered invisible in colonial
academic, art and cultural institutions and
public spaces… Aboriginal women speak back
to white Australia through art and activism by
naming trauma as a disruption of artistic terra
nullius.”
Paola Bella, Catalogue essay: Sovereignty:
Inalienable and Intimate pg.12-13
“In the gallery space and in cultural
institutions, we situate ourselves to return the
gaze with direct eye contact and a request that
you listen to us deeply – whilst we attempt at the
same time to subvert the process; to decolonise
and to Indigenise the very places that have
represented us through the colonial gaze.”
Paola Bella, Catalogue essay: Sovereignty:
Inalienable and Intimate pg.12-13
“The Indigenous artist speaks truth to power
simply by the fact of his or her existence…
the power of presence unnerves some in white
Australia. The autonomous Indigenous body,
within a colonial ideology, should not be.”
Tony Birch, Catalogue essay: Sovereignty:
The Act Of Being pg. 17