Defying Empire: The Third National Indigenous Art Triennial

Exhibition Review Exhibition catalog: Tina Baum, Defying Empire: 3 rd National Indigenous Art Triennial . Canberra: National Gallery of Art, 2017. 160 pp. $39.95 (9780642334688) Exhibition schedule: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, ACT, May 26, 2017 – September 10, 2017

Larrakia/Wadaman/Karajarri peoples of the Northern Territory and Western Australia, is that, "We defy by existing," a pronouncement she repeated throughout the opening celebration. 5l three curators of the triennials have been of Aboriginal descent, demonstrating the NGA's commitment to promoting Aboriginal artists and Indigenous curatorial practice.Baum is the Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art at the National Gallery of Art and contributed to previous triennials, thus providing a degree of curatorial consistency.Artists in the show represent every state of Australia based on their language and people associations.Defying Empire mirrors both the scale of Culture Warriors and the geographic emphasis of unDisclosed providing space for artists to claim and proclaim their Aboriginality while eschewing the stereotypes of Aboriginal art.As Baum states, "When people think of Aboriginal artists, they think of bark painting and dot painting so we need to challenge that by featuring those artists among everyone else as well."Most artists in the exhibition utilize nontraditional mediums such as film, installation, sound art, and multimedia works.Baum's deliberate refusal to showcase the expected is a strength of Defying Empire and exhibitions like the National Indigenous Art Triennial.As Baum states, "They are contemporary artists who happen to be indigenous, who happen to be gay or lesbian who happen to be mothers, fathers, or brothers."Baum, like the exhibition overall, presents the artists' indigeneity as one, deeply felt, identity, among others.her home state.Thunder Raining Poison is composed of two thousand fetus-like glass-blown yams, tinted green, suspended in the air-poignant and breathtaking-and resembles an eerily beautiful storm cloud.Harding's installation of a room burnt black on the interior is a memorial to a teenage Aboriginal domestic servant who died when a fire broke out while she was locked inside her quarters.Each of these works requires physical and contemplative space unavailable in the main galleries, and their placement attempts to disseminate Defying Empire throughout the NGA.The works are labeled but more visual markers would be helpful to insure visitors do not bypass these important works.The main gallery space is expansive, fitting the scale required for each work, with a few deep-blue-hued galleries and one with a warm burnt umber color breaking up the massive white walls so typical of contemporary art spaces.
The exhibition was thoughtfully curated around seven themes: Forever Memory, paintings and traditional spears made by Ken's grandson (Figure 2).Harding's installation emasculates traditionally male-gendered objects such as nails, horseshoes, and other tools by molding their shapes into black silicon wax, rendering them harmless and flaccid.These objects reflect colonial efforts to emasculate Aboriginal men by eliminating their access to weapons-undermining their ability to provide food and therefore effectively subjugating entire Aboriginal communities.6"Kula Tjuta" means spear-making in Pitjantjara, a skill that Ken, as a senior man, teaches to the younger men in his community.The pairing presents weapons as purely symbolic and as important means of reinforcing deep ties to country, culture, and future generations.
Women are well represented in the exhibition, totaling thirteen of the thirty artists included, and their contributions were some of the most memorable in the Triennial.Yhonnie Scarce's work, detailed above, provides one notable example.Other examples consist of a thought-provoking film and installation by Julie Gough, Maree Clark's impressive traditional necklaces created on a wall-size scale, and beautiful traditional water design paintings by Nonggirrnga Marawili.Karla Dickens's three works are also particularly memorable for their scale and setting against burnt umber walls.Her Assimilated Warriors II (2014) references activists from the Aborigines Progressive Association active during the Great Depression through a looming installation of farm equipment hung with black business suits adorned by dangling woven strings (Figure 3). 7These works display a knowledge of history enacted through the suggestion of corporeality, provoking the viewer to imagine the bodies inside the  The works in Defying Empire are large and look contemporary in terms of spectacular scale and meanings that are not obvious at first glance.Overall, the exhibition could be compared in its impressiveness and diversity to other triennials and biennials, not only those of indigenous art.Drawing from different mediums and techniques, the works address temporalities outside their own, on the massive scale of modern work, but expressly without modernity's relentless pursuit of progress.Disregarding such ambitions, the artists of Defying Empire are free to explore the past as well as the future and deeply consider their own being in the present; thus fulfilling the mandate of contemporary art, as notably defined by Terry Smith as a theoretical framework for art after Modernism, which is with or between times.8It is virtually impossible to discuss a major exhibition of indigenous art without some reference to the dichotomous way that it is often discussed, for example traditional versus contemporary, remote versus urban.By organizing the galleries thematically, these dichotomies are subverted so connections rather than distinctions between works arise.
According to Baum, "All the artists in the exhibition draw from traditional knowledges some more deeply than others."The artists are contemporary people who are Aboriginal regardless of whether they live in remote or urban areas.Like all artists working now, they draw from a The first NIAT, Culture Warriors, was curated by artist and scholar Brenda Croft, then-Senior Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art.Culture Warriors provided an encyclopedic survey of Aboriginal art, with thirty artists representing equally urban and remote areas of Australia.The exhibition presented the artists as culture warriors, fighting for either preservation or reconnection with their respective cultures.The second NIAT, unDisclosed, organized by Curator Carly Lane, sought to correct the over-representation of geographically remote artists in Aboriginal art globally and nationally by focusing heavily on urban-based artists.

Figure 1
Figure 1Installation view, Defying Empire: The Third National Indigenous Art Triennial, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, ACT, photo courtesy of National Gallery of Australia.

Figure 2
Figure 2Installation view, Defying Empire: The Third National Indigenous Art Triennial, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, ACT, photo courtesy of National Gallery of Australia.
Recounting and Revival, Resistance and Refusal, Disrupting Invisibility, Asserting Presence, Rising Passion, and Bearing Witness.More than pithy phrases, these themes reinforce the continuity amid instability of Aboriginal cultures, and the curatorial staff's deep respect for traditional knowledge despite what one might expect from a show focused on urban-based artists.These short and deceptively simple phrases lend an intentional poetics to the exhibition.Defying Empire compels viewers to consider how each work relates to the specific and general themes.The Recounting and Revival gallery was perhaps the most remarkably curated, with Dale Harding's Body of Objects (2016) opposite Ray Ken's Kulata Tjuta (2016) Presence in Visual Culture http://contemporaneity.pitt.eduVol 6, No 1 "Boundless" (2017) | ISSN 2155-1162 (online) | DOI 10.5195/contemp/2017.232

Figure 3
Figure 3 Karla Dickens, Assimilated Warriors II, 2014, emu feathers, textiles, leather, metal, wood.Installation view, Defying Empire: The Third National Indigenous Art Triennial, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, ACT, photo courtesy of National Gallery of Australia.