Detail of Bindi Cole Chocka’s Fertility 2, 2017 (detail) shown in the exhibition TELL; Pigment print on rag paper; Image courtesy of the artist.
Around Australia, four exhibitions in as many months together provide one of the most comprehensive looks at contemporary photography practice among First Nations artists. The Shepparton Art Museum (SAM) is currently staging the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) touring exhibition Resolution: new Indigenous photomedia. It celebrates some of the most significant work made by Indigenous photographers, video and multimedia artists in the last five years.
At UQ Art Museum in Brisbane, Still in my mind: Gurindji location, experience and visuality, curated by artist Brenda L. Croft, incorporates photomedia as an important vehicle for storytelling. It carries on the momentum of their exhibition last year, Over the fence: Contemporary Indigenous Photography from the Corrigan Collection (6 August – 30 October 2016), which was promoted with the byline, ‘examining the Indigenous Australian experience, once photograph at a time’, and featured the work of 18 Indigenous artists.
And at the Art Gallery of NSW, a Collection exhibition celebrates a central figure in Australian photography, Mervyn Bishop, while representation at the Venice Biennale this year was handed over to an Aboriginal photographer, Tracey Moffatt.
And of course the success of artist Dr Christian Thompson, who was awarded the Australian National University H.C. Coombs Creative Arts Fellowship in May and has just staged a major survey show with Griffith University Art Gallery, Ritual Intimacy (20 July – 23 September), as well as unveiled his most recent series, Lake Dolly, with Michael Reid Gallery.
Christian Thompson’s Devil’s Darning Needle (2017) from his most recent Lake Dolly Series; Image courtesy the artist and Michael Reid Gallery.
Adding to this momentum, a number of photomedia artists were included in the NGAs 3rd National Indigenous Art Triennial Defying Empire (which just closed on 10 September) – including Reko Rennie, Jonathan Jones, Megan Cope, Brenda L. Croft and Brooke Andrew – and we are on the eve of what has become the most important festival of Indigenous art, Tarnanthi, opening at the Art Gallery of South Australia and other venues on 13 October. At its helm is indigenous photographer and curator Nici Cumpston, and photomedia naturally are given a voice in this contemporary dialogue.
Also just concluded was the exhibition TELL (19 August – 17 September 2017), which was part of the The Ballarat International Foto Biennale. Curated by Jessica Clark, it bought together new commissions and recent works that deployed new photographic technologies and techniques to articulate the experience of life as an Indigenous person.
‘TELL highlights photography as a multifaceted and innovative outlet of expression for Indigenous artists working today, and opens up a new line of sight, challenging the existing predispositions of Indigenous art that continue to permeate Australia’s increasingly digitised and intercultural landscape,’ said Clark.
Ali Gumillya Baker’s Bound / Unbound Sovereign Acts II Simone Ulalka Tur, 2015 touring in the exhibition Resolution; Pigment inkjet print; Collection National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 2016. Courtesy and © the artist.
It is just now, or always?
Photographs of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders have been around nearly as long as the camera although the early tone was more akin to documentary or ethnographic recordings.
The NGA says that the foundations of contemporary Indigenous photography were really laid in the late 1980s with a generation of politicised and provocative artists who documented their experiences around the events of the Bicentennial marking 200 years of European settlement.
Kelly Gellantly, Senior Assistant Curator, Australian Photography at the NGA, continued: ‘Post-1988 however, heralded a second wave of work in which the impetus had shifted. This version, embodied in the work of artists such as Brook Andrew, Destiny Deacon and Rea, explores Aboriginal experience and identity in a far more personal, yet no less political manner.’
She curated the first real survey of contemporary Indigenous photography, Re-take in October 1998. A few decades earlier, Mervyn Bishop was in many ways the trailblazer between documentary and finding an Aboriginal voice through images. The AGNSW takes a look at Bishop’s career as a press photographer alongside intimate moments with his family and friends.
At 17 Bishop got a cadetship with The Sydney Morning Herald; he was the first Aboriginal Australian to work on a major metropolitan newspaper and the first Aboriginal Australian to be a professional photographer.
Mervyn Bishop Cousins, Ralph and Jim, Brewarrina 1966, Art Gallery of New South Wales © Mervyn Bishop. Licensed by Viscopy, Sydney
According to Cara Pinchbeck, senior curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art at the AGNSW, he ‘played a major role in taking control of the lens and shifting the way Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have been photographed’ by creating images that aren’t intrusive, exotic or exploitative.
Today there are many Indigenous Australian photographers and photomedia artists, but as the curators of Resolution explain, these artists work across a broad range of media.
‘Perhaps as few as one third identify as specialist photographers or photomedia artists, an eclecticism which reflects the diversity and dynamism of contemporary practice. Similarly, the artists often possess complex cultural identities, which complicate any straightforward categorisation of their work.’
While that might complicate things within curatorial circles, as audiences and artists it is a more organic creative reality, and has greater capacity for contemporary connection. Gone are the days of the stereotypical dot painting as the sole pigeon-hole for Aboriginal artists.
The line up for the NGA’s Resolution: new Indigenous photomedia includes: Michael Aird, Tony Albert, Brook Andrew, Ali G. Baker, Daniel Boyd, Megan Cope, Brenda L. Croft, Nici Cumpston, Robert Fielding, Nicole Foreshew, Ricky Maynard, Danie Mellor, Steaphan Paton, Damien Shen, Darren Siwes, Christian Thompson, Warwick Thornton, James Tylor, and Jason Wing.
Tony Albert, Brothers (New York Dreaming) 2015, pigment inkjet print, stickers. In the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 2016. Courtesy the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney.
Reclaiming space
Over the last 30 years, the NGA has developed one of the truly great collections of Indigenous photomedia, an aspect of contemporary practice that Director Gerard Vaughan describes as ‘vital’. Touring it has also been vital.
Dr Rebecca Coates, Director of the Shepparton Art Museum said: ‘These conversations are more pertinent than ever today, at a time when Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians reflect on our past and present, working together towards a shared future. Resolution speaks to all of us, of all ages and backgrounds.’
Resolution features work made since 2011 from across the country, and creates an experience of photomedia and Indigeneity that is physical, embodied and thought-provoking. Not surprising, a great deal of the imagery being made turns to the body, and the body within the landscape.
Coates added: ‘It’s a thought-provoking exhibition, which reflects a multitude of self-determining Indigenous voices, and creates layers of meaning between works.’ It was Co-curated by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Art and Photography departments of the National Gallery of Australia.
Brenda L. Croft Self–portrait on country (Wave Hill), 24 June 2014 2014; Reproduced courtesy of the artist, Stills Gallery Sydney and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne.
Another partnership that develops storytelling was that between artist / curator Brenda L. Croft and the Karunkgarni Art and Culture Aboriginal Corporation. Her current exhibition reflects upon the Gurindji Walk-Off – a nine-year act of self determination that began in 1966 and sparked the national land rights movement.
Developed in a partnership between UNSW Galleries, UQ Art Museum, and Karungkarni Art and Culture Aboriginal Corporation, the exhibition touches on that trigger of memory through photomedia, and other art forms.
This notion of memory and empowered re-telling has become a consistent thread across the medium as it has matured. According to Kent Morris, curator of Reframed – another exhibition of contemporary Aboriginal photography that was presented by Sydney’s Incinerator Gallery in 2016 – the medium acts as a form of remembrance for First Nations people who have experienced varying degrees of forced separation and loss.
‘Because of fragmented histories or disconnection from family and culture, many Aboriginal people have a strong connection to photography,’ she told Art Guide Australia. ‘Photographs are like gold. They’re shared and they’re treasured because getting the family back together through photos and understanding your history through these photos is so crucial for so many of us.’
Reframed included: Paola Balla, Bindi Cole Chocka, Michael Cook, Genevieve Grieves, Dianne Jones, Kent Morris, Steaphan Paton, Steven Rhall, Warwick Thornton, James Tylor, Peter Waples-Crowe, Arika Waulu, and Raymond Zada,
What all these exhibitions demonstrate, is that Indigenous artists working in contemporary photomedia genres challenge the status quo by representing their cultures, their people, and most importantly themselves, in a fresh light. By taking up the camera themselves, they have not only reclaimed that documentary space, but have given it renewed currency in our times, extending it well beyond our stereotypical expectations of narrative, medium and mostly, what contemporary indigenous art looks like.
Resolution: new Indigenous photomedia
Shepparton Art Gallery, Victoria
25 August – 29 October 2017
Resolution has been presented in three other Australian venues over the last 12 months, including Tweed Regional Gallery (QLD), Perc Tucker Art Gallery (QLD) and Araluen Art Centre (NT).
Still in my mind: Gurindji location, experience and visuality
UQ Art Museum, Brisbane (in partnership with UNSW Galleries)
Curated by Brenda L. Croft
12 August – 29 October 2017
Mervyn Bishop
The Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney
24 June – 8 October 2017
Tracey Moffatt: My Horizon
Australian Pavilion, Venice Biennale, Italy
10 May – 29 November 2017
Tarnanthi: Festival of contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art
Art Gallery of South Australia, and other venues
13 October 2017 – 28 January 2018.
