On Thursday morning, queuing up at the press desk outside the Australia Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia (running until November 24, 2024), I overheard the press officer sharing her experience with another journalist. She recounted how, after the completion of the pavilion and before its official opening, she revisited it, taking a moment to absorb it all and reflect. She admitted feeling a surge of emotions.
Without yet seeing the pavilion myself, I empathized with her, understanding the stress of overseeing an artist's site-specific work and managing a major international event. Little did I know, her emotional reaction was far from exaggerated.
Commissioned by Creative Australia and curated by Ellie Buttrose, "Kith and Kin" by First Nations artist Archie Moore evokes powerful emotions that ebb and flow like the waters surrounding Venice, like the vast oceans that connect us all.
Stepping into the Australia Pavilion, visitors are confronted with a table covered with stacks of documents surrounded by water. The pavilion appears to be engulfed in darkness, leaving visitors feeling disoriented. Yet, soon, clarity emerges. Like stars in the night sky, markings on the black walls reveal themselves to be not celestial bodies but rather names, words sourced from archives, newspapers, and governmental records.
Among them are family names, racist slurs, and kinship terms from the Gamilaraay and Bigambul cultures. Moore utilized the walls and ceiling of the pavilion as colossal blackboards, meticulously inscribing a genealogical tree (and giving us at the same time a history lesson, as if we were in school, hence the chalk and the blackboards). Over the past months, the artist painstakingly hand-drew this chart in white chalk across the five-meter-high black walls, spanning a length of 60 meters, illustrating his lineage across more than 2,400 generations and over 65,000 years.
Drawing from his Kamilaroi, Bigambul, British, and Scottish heritage, the installation embodies Moore's lifelong exploration of history and identity, themes central to his artistic journey spanning over three decades.
Through his work, Moore brings international attention to the resilience of First Nations kinship, despite enduring systemic injustices since the British invasion in 1770.
In the worldview of First Nations Australians, among the longest-continuous living cultures in the world, time isn't linear; rather, the past, present, and future coexist.
By consolidating tens of thousands of years of kinship onto a single continuum, Moore brings this understanding into sharp relief for audiences. It's precisely this visualization of vast spans of time and interconnectedness that evokes overwhelming emotions.
However, within this continuum, there are occasional gaps - ruptures signifying the fracturing of families due to massacres, diseases, and the deliberate destruction of records. Moore's choice of materials - delicate chalk on a blackboard - speaks to the inadequate dissemination of First Nations histories.
For linguists, there's an interesting observation here: the chart also serves as a stark representation of the decline of First Nations Australian languages and dialects under colonization.
Over 254 years, the number of languages plummeted from as many as 700 to around 160, due to bans on native language use, land dispossession, and colonial warfare. In contrast, Moore engages in language preservation through his inclusion of Gamilaraay (the language of the Kamilaroi nation) and Bigambul kinship terms.
Amidst the bustling chaos of the Giardini, the Australia Pavilion emerges as a sanctuary, a haven amidst the storm.
Described by Moore as "a memorial dedicated to every living thing that has ever lived," it serves as a space for quiet contemplation on the past, present, and future.
The reflective pool serves indeed as a poignant memorial honoring the ongoing injustices suffered by First Nations peoples (it is also a reference to his 2022 piece "Inert State," for which Moore scattered redacted coroner's reports about the death of an Indigenous person in a pool in Queensland Art Gallery, highlighting Indigenous deaths in custody since 2008, the year in which the then prime minister, Kevin Rudd, issued the apology to the stolen generations).
Suspended above it are over 500 stacks of documents, primarily coronial inquests into the deaths of Indigenous Australians in police custody (one of the sources for this research is The Guardian Australia's database Deaths Inside). Despite comprising just 3.8% of Australia's population, First Nations Australians represent 33% of its prison population, marking them as one of the most incarcerated groups globally.
Surrounded by the sprawling family tree, viewers are reminded that these reports aren't mere statistics; they represent individuals - children, siblings, cousins, parents, and grandparents The names were redacted out of respect for the deceased, while the blank reams of paper symbolize the countless inquests that remain inaccessible to the public.
Their reflections on the water link them to the vast family tree on the walls, emphasizing the interconnectedness of these lives and their enduring impact.
Interwoven with the contemporary coroners' reports are historic documents bearing specific references to the artist's own family. These include records of a court conviction involving Moore's great uncle, who accidentally killed his father during a dispute over meager wages, as well as reports by the Protector of Aboriginals denying Moore's grandparents the rights enjoyed by non-Indigenous citizens, such as freedom of movement.
These bureaucratic documents serve as tangible evidence of the impact of pernicious laws and government policies imposed upon First Nations peoples, underscoring the profound connection between the current epidemic of incarceration and historical injustices.
While many of the narratives depicted in "Kith and Kin" are deeply personal to the artist's family, they resonate with similar stories echoed around the world. Through this lens, Moore illuminates our shared ancestry and humanity, emphasizing the interconnectedness of people, place, and time.
In a way the installation in the pavilion is like a modern and minimalist Sistine Chapel, infused with a profound sense of physical and emotional anguish. Instead of elaborate frescoes adorning the ceiling, stark black walls stretch upwards, serving as canvases for Moore's genealogical tableau. Each stroke of chalk, meticulously applied by hand (a time-consuming process that required a lot of physical strength as well), echoes with the weight of centuries of suffering and resilience. In this solemn space, the air is heavy with the collective sorrow of generations, inviting visitors to bear witness to the legacy of injustice and the strength of the human spirit.
"Kith and Kin” resonates strongly with the overarching theme of this year's Biennale - "Foreigners Everywhere," curated by Brazilian Adriano Pedrosa, director of MASP, the São Paulo Museum of Art. In Venice, First Nations peoples may be perceived as foreigners, but this genealogical exploration brings us all together, emphasizing our common humanity rather than our differences. It speaks indeed to the universality of human experience, transcending cultural and geographical boundaries.
The names etched upon the walls form indeed a constellation, a celestial map hinting at the resting place of ancestors. Dante emerged from the Inferno to behold the stars once more, here instead visitors are invited to enter this space, to contemplate another kind of constellation, to pay homage, and perhaps even shed tears at the breadth of humanity's experiences, while considering the common ancestors of all humans.
Curator Ellie Buttrose observes that, by reaching back through the annals of time, "Kith and Kin" encompasses the common ancestors of every human and living entity - a poignant reminder of our shared kinship responsibilities to one another. Overwhelmed, with your head spinning from the weight of this realization, visitors will therefore grasp a profound truth - we are all interconnected, woven together in a vast and intricate tapestry of existence.
Among the many pavilions at this year's Biennale, none stirred emotions quite like this one, earning it the prestigious Golden Lion for Best National Participation. This historic accolade marks the first time an Australian artist has received such recognition; Moore is also the second solo First Nations artist to represent Australia at the world's oldest international contemporary art event (Tracey Moffatt did so in 2017). In their motivation, the jury members highlighted how Moore's work "stands out for its strong aesthetic, its lyricism, and its invocation of shared loss for occluded pasts. With his inventory of thousands of names, Moore also offers a glimmer of possibility for recuperation."
On receiving this award today, Archie Moore stated: "As the water flows through the canals of Venice to the lagoon, then to the Adriatic Sea, it then travels to the oceans and to the rest of the world - enveloping the continent of Australia - connecting us all here on Earth. Aboriginal kinship systems include all living things from the environment are in a larger network of relatedness, the land itself can be a mentor or a parent to a child. We are all one and share a responsibility of care to all living things now and into the future."
The Australia Pavilion at the Biennale Arte 2024 is commissioned by Creative Australia, 20th April - 24th November 2024.
Image credits for this post
1 - 10 and 12. Archie Moore, kith and kin 2024, Australia Pavilion at Venice Biennale 2024. Photographer: Andrea Rossetti © the artist. Image courtesy of the artist and The Commercial
11. Installation view, Australia Pavilion. Photographer: Anna Battista
13. Archie Moore, Ellie Buttrose and Adriano Pedrosa, The 60th International Art Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia, Award Ceremony, 20th April 2024, Photo: Andrea Avezzù, Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia
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