Exhibition Texts

“The Tiwi Islands have been the home of my people for thousands of years. When we connect through ceremony by dancing and singing, we also connect with the land. It makes us feel strong.”
— Pedro Wonaeamirri for Jilamara Arts & Crafts Association

YOYI means dance in Tiwi and is a collaborative film made by 30 artists who work at Jilamara Arts & Crafts Association on remote Melville Island, Australia. Jilamara refers to an ochre body paint design and is the eponym for the Tiwi-run and owned arts organisation, incorporated in 1989, composed of Aboriginal artists from the Milikapiti community. Encompassing courses, workshops, training, career support and representation, Jilamara is a community of around 60 artists who often work in ochre painting, carving and screenprinted textiles.

YOYI (2020) is a collective portrait and an archive of cultural practices for future generations. Self-directed by the artists, the film celebrates the performative foundations of Tiwi artmaking. To the constant rhythm of clapping and singing, YOYI shows individual artists wearing ceremonial garments and Jilamara while performing their totem dances. In doing so, they refer to Country – their land and their spiritual identity. YOYI is a contemporary artwork, community archive and celebration of culture shared through the medium of film.

Eva Koťátková’s sculptures, texts and performances investigate how individuals and groups are silenced, discriminated against or policed by states and institutions. As founder of the platform Institute of Anxiety, Koťátková is interested in the concept of health and illness in relation to social, political and ecological forces.

Confessions of a Piping System (2019) features an array of protest slogans and cutouts protruding from a cage like environment, evoking entrapment or powerlessness. The slogans address mental and physical issues in relation to work and other normative pressures of contemporary life. They are extracted from interviews the artist held as part of her research. Declaiming these slogans throughout the exhibition, performers amplify the voices of affected groups. Laying within the cage, their posture captures helplessness and unease, the often-unspoken burdens that everyday structures add to how we feel, experience and connect in this world.

Performers will regularly activate the work on Thursdays, 17:00–19:00.

“The materials in Missile Park, corrugated zinc, bitumen paint and shellac reference the nuclear testing and the cover up of Aboriginal deaths.”
— Yhonnie Scarce

Missile Park (2021) takes its name from the tourist site in Woomera, southern Australia, which presents the history of nuclear rocket testing in the region. The installation encompasses three sheds that are scaled down replicas of the temporary housing built by the British military to support an extensive atomic programme in the 1950s and 1960s. The programme forced Yhonnie Scarce’s extended family, who are members of the Kokatha people, to leave their land. This displacement created not only immediate upheaval but also lasting trauma, as health issues due to radiation poisoning have been passed down through generations – the result of ongoing colonialisation and disregard for the people’s attachment to their ancestral homeland.

Inside the sheds, openings made by nails let light onto 20 spherical orbs with stem-like protrusions. These glass objects recall bush plums – a native food that grows on Kokatha land – but also bombs, dynamite or even human foetuses, referring to both the horror of nuclear testing and its lasting consequences.

“What happens when the garbage of the post-colonial economy ends up on a creatively rich piece of land? A graveyard of barrels, car wrecks and electronic parts from which creators draw their materials, offering a post-apocalyptic vision of the world.”
— Giscard Bouchotte

Pierre Adler, André Eugene and Reginald Sénatus (Redji) are three individual artists living in a thriving community of makers in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. In 2000, André Eugene opened his studio as a Musee d’art (art museum) in the neighbourhood of Grand Rue, a disadvantaged area filled with street vendors and car repair shops. A group of former woodworkers, carvers and artists began a loose collaboration that led to the dynamic community Atis Rezistans (Resistance Artists).

The artists share a commitment to society and politics. They explore the legacy of the Haitian revolution, practices of voodoo and the Creole language. Originating in practices of recycling and repair, their works are marked by a fusion of material, style, beliefs as well as the use of humour. Some works repurpose and upcycle everyday materials – car and truck frames, metal scraps, nails, old shoes and even skulls. They draw from the industrial area of Grand Rue while experimenting with inventiveness and recombination. The works in this room enact makeshift techniques of assemblage that convey the energy of reinvention that drives their community.

“Creating GABAN in collaboration with Berlin-based creatives empowers a space that speaks back to the complex and traumatising museological ethnographic gaze. It is urgent that we activate radical self-love and control over how we reimagine powerful objects trapped within this system.”
— Brook Andrew

Brook Andrew is an Australian artist, curator and writer with matrilineal kinship from the Wiradjuri Indigenous nation. His practice aims to recentre Indigenous ways of being by imagining alternative futures. GABAN (2022) is a post-traumatic play set in an anthropological museum that summons a number of interlinked stories. Unfolding within Indigenous Australian understandings of time, the play – whose title means “strange” in Wiradjuri – aspires to create a space for murungidyal (healing) and a world beyond colonial trauma.

GABAN follows a number of powerful objects – based on cultural objects in museum collections – with both traumatic and empowering histories. For instance, the character MASSACRE is based on a letter written in 1854 by a white man, James Dixon, describing the slaughter of Aboriginal people in the Western District of Victoria. Shot in various institutions in Berlin and presented as a video installation – with live performances in September 2022 – GABAN aspires to reveal new pathways of intersecting histories to challenge prevailing narratives.

Paschal Daantos Berry: Dramaturg
Gary Stewart: Editor
Mouna Assali: Videographer
Brook Andrew: Videographer
Cammack Lindsey: Sound
Layana Flachs: Make-Up and Costume
Cherie Schweitzer: Production Manager
Magnus Elias Rosengarten: Stage Manager
Dr. Jessica Neath and Cheralyn Lim: Research (Brook Andrew Studio, Melbourne)

Cast
Aaron Reeder: MEMORY
Budi Miller: TREE
Dena Abay: EVIDENCE
Kameron Locke: PHOTO
Savanna Morgan: JUDGE
Joni Barnard: MASSACRE
Oumou Aidara: GUILT
Astan Meyer: GUIDE
Mohamed Boujarra: PUBLIC
Céline Rodrigues Monteiro: PUBLIC
Jota Ramos: PUBLIC
Black Pearl: PUBLIC
Marque-Lin: PUBLIC
Mmakgosi Kgabi: WITNESS
Kevin Bonono: MUSEUM

In the 1960s and 1970s, artist Lygia Clark took an interest in how art can be used as a form of healing and psychotherapy. With Relational Objects from the 1960s, she sought to treat participants, her “clients” as she called them, in individual therapeutic sessions. Clark used everyday objects such as plastic bags, seashells or stones in nets directly on client’s bodies. Her Camisa de forca (Straightjacket) (1969) is accompanied by a series of photographs depicting an activation of the work. The woman in the pictures tries to push along either end of the jacket, which is weighed down by stones, as if she were trapped. For Rede de elasticos (Elastic Net) (1974), Clark turned to participatory group forms and invited participants to engage with structures made of elastic bands. Participants could physically connect and feel themselves as a single, collective body.

“The Ládjogahpir today may be regarded as a symbol of a new decolonial feminism, forwarding amessage from our foremothers who live beside us. There is something utterly unique and powerful when Sámi women today wear this hat.”
— Outi Pieski and Eeva-Kristiina Nylander

Outi Pieski’s installation is part of the archival project The Ladjogahpir – The Foremothers Hat of Pride (2017–2021), which is conducted by the artist with the researcher Eeva-Kristiina Nylander. It is dedicated to a traditional Sámi women’s headpiece, the Ladjogahpir. Aiming to preserve and revive Sámi culture, the project focuses on the history of this hat, worn originally by Indigenous inhabitants of what is now northern Norway and Finland. Initially a fertility symbol, the wearing of Ladjogahpir was banned by 19th-century Laestadian priests, who interpreted the headwear’s protrusions and ritual functions as demonic. A large number of hats were subsequently destroyed. As a result of this colonial erasure, very few traditional Ladjogahpirs now remain in Sámi lands. Pieski and Nylander began inviting Sámi women to re-create these hats in workshops. In doing so, they work to repair and revive this important element of the Sámi culture. Bridging handicraft, archaeological research and social activism, their project also forms an inventory of the Ladjogahpirs as they exist in collections and archives. The rare artefacts on display here are on loan from the Museum of European Cultures in Berlin.

“Uwa ngangkari kutjara ngali tjunguringkula palyanu. Wangka! ‘Pula ngangkari kutjarangku palyanu!’ Ngalimpa waakanguru-li ngali tjunguringkula palyanu ngalimpa walka.”

“Yes, we two ngangkari painted these together. Say ‘those two ngangkari have done these!’ Our paintings were done from our shared experience of working together as ngangkari.”
— Maringka Burton

Ngangkari Ngura (Healing Country) (2021) is a collaborative painting by two respected Pitjantjatjara artists. Working at Iwantja Arts in the small Anangu community of Indulkana, Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY Lands), South Australia, Betty Muffler and Maringka Burton are ngangkari, traditional healers. Ngangkari are highly regarded and have looked after people’s physical and emotional health for thousands of years.

Ngangkari Ngura (Healing Country) shows the landscape and waterways of Country as a site of healing. Country is a term that not only refers to a specific place but encompasses ideas of ancestral homeland, spirituality, language, identity and kinship. Colonialism, including the history of British nuclear testing, has damaged these lands. Muffler and Burton paint Tjukurpa – the creation stories and ceremonial designs to repair Country. Muffler paints the Emu Tjukurpa, a bird, and the movement of water. She also depicts the eagle spirit which belongs to her father. Like water, the eagle assists in bringing the spirits back to good health. Burton paints Anamara Piti, the creation story from her birthplace, about the caterpillar bringing life to the land and its people.

“Under water the world and perception is different, we feel pressure on the organs while being weightless at the same time – it is as if we perceive multidimensionally for the very first time.”
— Anne Duk Hee Jordan

Anne Duk Hee Jordan’s work explores post-human perspectives on ecology, technology and interspecies relations. Most recently, Jordan has been investigating the deep sea as a site beyond human imagination. Although inextricable from human activity through chemical spills, plastic waste and material transfer, it persists as a site that humans cannot fully see or conceptualise.

Worlds Away (2022) simulates a deep-sea environment, wherein otherworldly creatures glow with photoluminescence. Inspired by phytoplankton – self-feeding microscopic marine algae that dwells in ocean and freshwater ecosystems – the roomfilling installation is an immersive environment suggestive of the vertigo of floating in water. Jordan investigates how new forms of interspecies kinship can occur well beyond the reach of the destructive aspects of human activity.

“Upon entering the old hospital building, you get the feeling of segregation from the colonial era that transpires through the architecture itself.”
— Mohamed Bourouissa

In this video installation Mohamed Bourouissa investigates the garden of a mental hospital in Blida, Algeria. Tended to by patients, it is a site of collaboration and community where traumas are dispersed, germinated and healed. Psychiatrist and writer Frantz Fanon worked in this hospital from 1953 to 1956, where he witnessed the inherent structural issues at play. He did not believe in treating patients suffering from colonial alienation with methods imported by the same colonialists.

In conversations with Bourouissa, Bourlem Mohamed, a patient, describes his traumas: how French officers tortured him and the whispering of the ghosts. Admitted to the hospital in the 1960s, he benefited from Fanon’s reforms and took to gardening as a form of occupational therapy, linking botany, resilience and healing. In this installation, Bourouissa makes precise visual references that echo the video. The yellow carpet represents the blooming of acacias in the Algerian winter, following their migration from Australia through colonial-era expeditions. The strelitzia – also known as bird of paradise flower – originated in South Africa and embodies another pattern of displacement and resilience.