342 research outputs found
Textiles and Tactility
No full textThe cotton and silk batik lengths created by the central Australian communities of Ernabella and Utopia, and screenprinted fabrics by Tiwi artists are held in renown and most commonly contemplated as representative examples of Indigenous textile art. [1] The Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara (Anangu) [2] women from Ernabella (Pukatja), a community of around 500 people at the eastern end of the Musgrave Ranges in northern South Australia, have developed a design tradition that defies conventional expectations of what Aboriginal art is, or should be. [3
home/lands
No full textInspired by the words of revered Indigenous leader Vincent Lingiari, ‘that land ... I still got it on my mind’, this exhibition reflects on the Gurindji Walk-Off, a seminal event in Australian history that reverberates today. The Walk-Off, a nine-year act of self determination that began in 1966 and sparked the national land rights movement, was led by Lingiari and countrymen and women working at Wave Hill Station (Jinparrak) in the Northern Territory.
Honouring last year’s 50th anniversary, curator and participating artist Brenda L. Croft has developed the exhibition through long-standing practice-led research with her patrilineal community and Karunkgarni Art and Culture Aboriginal Corporation. Lingiari’s statement is the exhibition’s touchstone, the story retold from diverse, yet interlinked Indigenous perspectives. Still in my mind includes photographs and an experimental multi-channel video installation, history paintings, digital platforms and archives, revealing the way Gurindji community members maintain cultural practices and kinship connections to keep this/their history present
Colour B(l)ind: Memory Practices in Brenda L. Croft’s Visual Art
No full textThe paper deals with the multimodal nature of the photographic series, Colour B(l)ind (1998) by the Australian Indigenous artist Brenda L. Croft. She appropriates Australian colonial photographic conventions of Whiteness in order to reinsert the absent traces of Indigenous and non-Indigenous encounters into Australian history. Brenda Croft’s strategic use of digital photography displaces colonial visual representations of “Aboriginality” through specific and localised artistic practices of memorization which variously alert Indigenous and non-Indigenous viewers to their reciprocal relations of affect and desire(s)
Authenticity and Appropriation in the Australian Visual Contact Zone of Brenda L. Croft
No full textIn the Australian contact zone, visual art has for a long time been represented as colonial property and contemporary Indigenous art has often been studied as an appropriation or worse a stealing of this property. According to this study, the alienable nature of visual technologies has been largely denied by neo-colonial discourses because it implies a relation with other users. The recognition of Indigenous contemporary visual art as legitimate and authentic would be an admittance of co-habitation and hybridity that needs to be erased so that the myth of terra nullius can take place (Goldie, 1989: 148-169). This article hopes to demonstrate that the study of the digital photographic art of Brenda L. Croft reveals that neo-colonial claims of property of contemporary visual technologies are based on the desire of creating a mythical distance between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian peoples. Therefore, the study of Indigenous artistic practices can further our understanding of Australian Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations because they act as practices of proximity which interrupt non-Indigenous claims of sovereignty and the denial of Indigenous/non-Indigenous co-habitation.Dans la zone de contact australienne, l’art visuel est depuis longtemps présenté comme une possession coloniale et l’art contemporain indigène a souvent été étudié comme une appropriation, ou pire, un vol. Selon cette étude, la nature aliénable des technologies visuelles a largement été niée par le discours néocolonial parce qu’elle implique une relation avec d’autres utilisateurs. Reconnaître la légitimité et l’authenticité de l’art visuel indigène contemporain serait admettre la cohabitation et l’hybridité qui doivent être effacées pour que le mythe de la terra nullius puisse opérer (Goldie, 1989 : 148-169). Cet article entend démontrer que l’étude de l’art des photographies numériques de Brenda L. Croft révèle que les revendications néocoloniales concernant la possession des technologies visuelles contemporaines sont fondées sur le désir de créer une distance mythique entre les peuples australiens autochtones et allochtones. Ainsi, l’étude des pratiques artistiques indigènes peut élargir notre compréhension des relations Indigènes/non-Indigènes parce qu’elles agissent comme des pratiques de proximité qui brisent les revendications non indigènes de souveraineté et la négation de la cohabitation Indigène/non-Indigène
Wave Hill/Victoria River Country
No full textWith a diverse career as an artist, researcher and independent curator, Brenda L. Croft has been creating multi-disciplinary, multi-platform work for more than three decades. In 2015 she received a National Indigenous Arts Award Fellowship from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Board of the Australia Council for the Arts in recognition of her practice. She is a member of the Gurindji/Malngin/Mudpurra peoples from the Northern Territory of Australia, and of Anglo-Australian/German/Irish heritage. Her artworks draw on personal and public archives and explore issues faced by contemporary Indigenous peoples and the ongoing impact of colonisation in Australia since 1788. Through her work she aims to give “a voice to the voiceless, making the invisible visible - listening, seeing, being and sharing.
For subalter/N/ative dreams, Croft has been working closely with her family and community at Wave Hill and Victoria River regions in the Northern Territory and dislocated Gurindji community members elsewhere. The timing of this exhibition has a many-layered significance for Croft; it is the 20th anniversary of the death of her father Joe, a member of the Stolen Generations, the 40th anniversary of the NT Land Rights Act and the 50th anniversary of the Gurindji Walk-Off from Wave Hill Station on 23 August, 1966. The Gurindji Walk-Off was a defining moment, not only for Indigenous peoples but in Australian history. A committed group of Traditional Custodians walked off one of the country's largest pastoral stations in a profound act of resistance and self-determination. It marked a nine-year long strike and engendered the birth of the national land rights movement.
Croft's work considers the ongoing legacies of colonisation; how many Indigenous peoples were dispossessed of their language, ceremony and cultural connections and how the imposed language and culture has been used to define, constrict and displace Indigenous people within their own lands.
In a brutally honest, immersive body of work, a series of self-portraits on country features Croft on traditional homelands and in displaced communities, looking straight down the barrel of the lens, defiantly present and unapologetic. Another series features images of the artist drawn from original wet collodian plates where she appropriates descriptors used for her father and others in her immediate and extended family - full-blood, half-blood, half-caste, quarter-caste, quadroon, abo. Her image challenges such debasing classifications used to subjugate Indigenous people now, as in the past, whilst also highlighting there is no single Indigenous way of being.
In shut/mouth/scream, Croft's face is dissected by the frame and starkly echoes an image of her paternal grandmother taken many years before during medical research. Trac(k)ed through the public archives, the latter image was located seven decades after it had been taken at Kahlin Aboriginal Compound in Darwin where Croft's grandmother and father had been taken in the late 1920s. Its reclamation, through Croft's visual call and response, is an angry howl at the abject treatment meted out not only to her grandmother and other family members, but to all Indigenous peoples impacted by authoritarian regimes, which continues to this day
shut/mouth/scream
No full textWith a diverse career as an artist, researcher and independent curator, Brenda L. Croft has been creating multi-disciplinary, multi-platform work for more than three decades. In 2015 she received a National Indigenous Arts Award Fellowship from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Board of the Australia Council for the Arts in recognition of her practice. She is a member of the Gurindji/Malngin/Mudpurra peoples from the Northern Territory of Australia, and of Anglo-Australian/German/Irish heritage. Her artworks draw on personal and public archives and explore issues faced by contemporary Indigenous peoples and the ongoing impact of colonisation in Australia since 1788. Through her work she aims to give "a voice to the voiceless, making the invisible visible" - listening, seeing, being and sharing.
For subalter/N/ative dreams, Croft has been working closely with her family and community at Wave Hill and Victoria River regions in the Northern Territory and dislocated Gurindji community members elsewhere. The timing of this exhibition has a many-layered significance for Croft; it is the 20th anniversary of the death of her father Joe, a member of the Stolen Generations, the 40th anniversary of the NT Land Rights Act and the 50th anniversary of the Gurindji Walk-Off from Wave Hill Station on 23 August, 1966. The Gurindji Walk-Off was a defining moment, not only for Indigenous peoples but in Australian history. A committed group of Traditional Custodians walked off one of the country’s largest pastoral stations in a profound act of resistance and self-determination. It marked a nine-year long strike and engendered the birth of the national land rights movement.
Croft's work considers the ongoing legacies of colonisation; how many Indigenous peoples were dispossessed of their language, ceremony and cultural connections and how the imposed language and culture has been used to define, constrict and displace Indigenous people within their own lands.
In a brutally honest, immersive body of work, a series of self-portraits on country features Croft on traditional homelands and in displaced communities, looking straight down the barrel of the lens, defiantly present and unapologetic. Another series features images of the artist drawn from original wet collodian plates where she appropriates descriptors used for her father and others in her immediate and extended family - full-blood, half-blood, half-caste, quarter-caste, quadroon, abo. Her image challenges such debasing classifications used to subjugate Indigenous people now, as in the past, whilst also highlighting there is no single Indigenous way of being.
In shut/mouth/scream, Croft’s face is dissected by the frame and starkly echoes an image of her paternal grandmother taken many years before during medical research. Trac(k)ed through the public archives, the latter image was located seven decades after it had been taken at Kahlin Aboriginal Compound in Darwin where Croft’s grandmother and father had been taken in the late 1920s. Its reclamation, through Croft’s visual call and response, is an angry howl at the abject treatment meted out not only to her grandmother and other family members, but to all Indigenous peoples impacted by authoritarian regimes, which continues to this day
"For the children...": Aboriginal Australia, cultural access, and archival obligation
No full textFor whom are archival documents created and conserved? Who is obliged to care for them and provide access to their content, and for how long? The state, libraries, museums and galleries, researchers, interlocutors, genealogists, family heritage organisations? Or does material collected long ago and then archived belong personally, socially, emotionally, culturally, and intellectually to the people from whom the original material was collected and, eventually, to their descendants? In a colonised nation, additional ethical and epistemological questions arise: Are archives protected and accessed for the colonised or the colonisers, or both? How are differences regarding archival creation, protection, and access distinguished, and in whose interest? Is it for future generations? What happens when archives are accessed and read by family members and/or researchers, and what happens when they are not? A focus on two interrelated stories – firstly an experiential account narrated by Brenda L Croft about constructive archival management and access, and secondly a contrasting example relating how the Berndt Field Note Archive continues to be restricted from entitled claimants – facilitates a return to three interrelated questions: for whom are archives created and conserved, who is obliged to care for, and authorise access to, them, and to whom do they belong
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No full text© 2021, L. Cassidy, D. Hannibal, S. Semple, B. McCowan. This is an author produced version of a paper published in AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PRIMATOLOGY uploaded in accordance with the publisher’s self- archiving policy. The final published version (version of record) is available online at the link. Some minor differences between this version and the final published version may remain. We suggest you refer to the final published version should you wish to cite from it
Still in My Mind: An Exploration of Practice-led Experimental Research in Progress
No full textThe author, an Indigenous woman of mixed heritage, aGurindji/Malgnin/Mudpurra person on her father’s side discusses her practice-led research project, Still in My Mind: Gurindji Experience, Location and Visuality. This project draws inspiration from the words of revered Gurindji elder Vincent Lingiari, profoundly reiterating a deep commitment to his Gurindji/Malgnin peoples and their homelands on Wave Hill in the Northern Territory
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