Australia has won gold at the Venice Biennale, the world’s oldest international art biennial, and “the Olympics of the art world”.
First Nations artist Archie Moore was named the recipient of the coveted Golden Lion for best national pavilion, marking the first time in history that an Australian has received the accolade.
The 54-year-old Kamilaroi and Bigambul artist, who lives and works in Brisbane, won for his monumental hand-drawn installation, kith and kin.
Over the past two months, Moore has transformed the archetypal white cube of the Australia pavilion into a giant, sprawling family tree, using blackboard paint and chalk.
The family tree, which is the centrepiece of the work, has been inscribed by hand and details the names of Moore’s real and speculative ancestors in an expansive genealogical chart spanning the estimated 65,000 years that Aboriginal people have lived on the Australian continent.
In awarding the Golden Lion, the Biennale jury commended Moore’s “quietly powerful” work, saying it “stands out for its strong aesthetic, its lyricism and its invocation of shared loss”, while also offering “a glimmer of possibility for recuperation”.
The title of the installation, kith and kin, draws on Old English terms for family and countrymen and extends the Aboriginal notion of kinship systems to include the “kith” of all humankind.
The artwork was commissioned by Creative Australia and its most senior Indigenous representative congratulated Moore and curator Ellie Buttrose on receiving what she describes as a “historic accolade”.
The executive director of First Nations Arts and Culture, Franchesca Cubillo, hailed kith and kin as an “extraordinary history painting” in which the artist “asserts Indigenous sovereignty and celebrates the ongoing vitality of First Nations knowledge systems and kinship”.
kith and kin covers all four walls of the pavilion, extending to the ceiling, and includes a floor work: a shallow reflection pool with an altar-like platform designed by Meriam Mir and Kaurareg architect Kevin O’Brien.
Above the water sits a waist-high platform on stilts — much like the city of Venice itself.
On top, are columns of gleaming white paper, which from above appear tessellated like a mosaic.
They include hundreds of de-identified coronial reports into the deaths of more than 560 First Nations people in custody since the watershed Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody was handed down in 1991.
If the work itself could speak, it might echo one of the key recommendations of the royal commission: that arrest be used as the last resort in dealing with Indigenous offenders.
In describing the work, Moore emphasised that despite a raft of diversionary measures recommended by the royal commission, Indigenous incarceration rates remain disturbingly high.
As if to illustrate the point, among the official documents platformed in the floor work are records pertaining to the incarceration of Moore’s own family. (A great-uncle was imprisoned in Brisbane’s notorious Boggo Road jail after he tragically, and accidentally, killed his own father in a dispute over wages.)
Visitors to the pavilion during vernissage — the official preview — repeatedly described the work as “moving”.
Arts Minister Tony Burke was no less complimentary.
“Archie’s work kith and kin shows the power of Australian art and storytelling going right back to the first sunrise”, he said in a statement.
“Australian stories help us to understand ourselves, know more about each other, and let the world get to know us. That’s exactly what this artwork does.”
The installation will be restaged at QAGOMA in Brisbane when the Biennale closes in November.
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