INDIGENOUS_Visualising Sovereignty
Issue 41:3 | December 2021
This issue is a dynamic response to Tuscarora artist, curator and scholar Jolene Rickard’s theory of ‘visual sovereignty’, a vital, non-Western / Hodinöhsö:ni approach to thinking through Indigenous contemporary art. Co-editors Ali Gumillya Baker and Paola Balla engage with Rickard’s ideas in an Australia-Pacific context, inspiring a series of essays and images by emerging and established First Nations writers and artists. These creative forms span the visual, poetic and performative: they articulate powerful expressions of relational sovereignty, political autonomy, renewal and survival strategies in diverse manifestations of visual sovereignties.
In this issue
My formal arts education began in a strange place: the Elisabeth Murdoch building at the University of Melbourne where I took an art history elective. Built in 1885 by Joseph Reed, the Gothic architecture reinforced the rigid authority of the colony. Glaringly elitist, it resembled both church and orphanage. It was full of confusing hallways, which remained impossible to navigate. Inside its constructed edifice, middle-aged white men in paisley shirts lectured, with exotic hand gestures, on First Nation artists (when they were spoken of at all). And white women in the faculty asserted a self-righteous paternalism that was far worse.
I paint my face as my mother’s mothers have done before me
In this new ritual sitting on my bedroom floor
We name each pigment after revolutionaries
Because I am my mother’s daughter
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