A spirit of linkage, synergy and energy churned up in Adelaide in the 1970s, generating the birth of Artlink and an ever-building wave carrying it to the present day.
Ian North
Editors: Clothilde Bullen, Wardandi/Yamatji/French/English heritage, is Curator, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Collections and Exhibitions, Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia. James Tylor is a visual artist of Kaurna/Maori/European heritage.
This edition, representing the perspectives of the southern language groups of Australia, focuses on Indigenous sovereignty through the actions of cultural producers working to decolonise our Western-based cultural institutions and art practices. Decolonisation is addressed in a multitude of ways, starting with the decolonisation of the self, and the ways in which we narrate the impact on the lives of First Nations peoples of centuries of generational trauma, following European colonisation, acts of genocide and the enforced cultural assimilation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. It takes on the challenge of reinvigorating tradition, language and cultural values as protocols for leadership, centred on the critical agency of First Peoples.
Above: Jonathan Jones, barrangal dyara (skin and bones), Kaldor Public Art Project 32, Royal Botanic Garden, Sydney, 2016. Cover image: (detail) Ali Gumillya Baker, sovereignGODDESSnotdomestic (1), 2017, digital print, light box. Courtesy the artists
