When curator Paola Balla’s exhibition Executed opened in 2015 at City Gallery, the responses were united: this was a moving show people were unlikely to forget. It told the little-known story of two Aboriginal men who, in 1842, were the first Indigenous people to be executed in Victoria.
In Sovereignty, Balla and ACCA’s artistic director, Max Delany, now focus on a much broader but no less moving narrative about nationhood. Balla, a Wemba-Wemba and Gunditjmara woman who is a PhD candidate and researcher at Victoria University, puts it bluntly: “Sovereignty is on the table.”
New work by artists including Brook Andrew, Vicki Couzens, Destiny Deacon and Virginia Fraser, Gary Foley, Steaphan Paton and Steven Rhall go up with key historical pieces such as Wurundjeri leader and activist William Barak’s painting Ceremony, c. 1880–90.
In his powerful essay for Sovereignty, Tony Birch says the colonial project of dispossession and legal disenfranchisement has failed. The works of artists in this exhibition are testament to this failure, he says, and sovereign rights cannot be granted to Indigenous people by colonial society because sovereignty was never ceded. It flows through all aspects of Indigenous life: Country, nations, ecology, kinship systems, family, the body, the heart and the mind.
Balla says one of the most powerful works is a series of Super 8 films made by Bill Onus in 1946. Titled Aborigines in the Community, the footage captures the lives of the Indigenous communities of Fitzroy, Healesville and elsewhere. “It is a beautiful portrait of life in the everyday,” Balla says. “It is not the colonial gaze on our community.”
Sovereignty
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art
17 December – 26 March
65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art is an extraordinary account of the unique art of this continent, published alongside a landmark exhibition at the Potter Museum of Art. Necessary and urgent, it tells the story of Indigenous Australian art; a new art history unlike anything we’ve seen. For Jane O’Sullivan, it’s a remarkable and must-read book.
In a new series of illustrated postcards available as a free gift with purchase only at the Art Guide Bookstore, Oslo Davis takes on classic and contemporary art terms and genres and reimagines what they could be referring to.
With so much to choose from, we’ve rounded up the major summer exhibitions in each capital city, open all summer long. Spanning Yayoi Kusama, Magritte, the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, and many more.
About Face is a smart piece of marketing. The new book on portrait painting from Australia and New Zealand has a mission to change buyers’ minds about the field. But as Jane O’Sullivan discovers, any sales pitch wears thin if it’s repeated often enough, and the close attention to how portrait painting is received by the market means that other important conversations fade to the background.
In two new exhibitions at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, René Magritte and Cao Fei speak to each other across cultures and eras about the way that perception can unsettle reality—and the places the real intersects with the surreal.
In her latest exhibition at Plimsoll Gallery, Janine Combes uses her background as a jewellery maker to create a body of work inspired by abandoned towns once marked for settlement in Tasmania.
