Australia has announced that Archie Moore, a Kamilaroi and Bigambul artist based in Redlands, Queensland, will represent the country at the 2024 Venice Biennale, which is due to open in April of that year.
Moore will be the second Aboriginal artist ever to represent Australia at the Biennale in a solo presentation, after Tracey Moffatt in 2017. Ellie Buttrose, a curator of contemporary Australian art at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, will organize Moore’s pavilion.
Moore’s work has frequently tackled issues related to Aboriginal history, misinformation about it, and the ways that objects can signify aspects of one’s identity. Among his most notable works is a 2018 commission for the Sydney International Airport known as United Neytions, which features a grouping of large hanging flags intended to celebrate “local indigenous people on whose traditional lands the airport (an international zone or ’no man’s land’) lies,” as Moore once wrote.
At the Venice Biennale, Indigenous peoples are gaining greater visibility in the national pavilions, which are separate from the main show of the world’s top art exhibition. In 2019, the collective Isuma became the first Inuit artist group to represent Canada, and in 2022, the Nordic Pavilion, which historically has gone to white artists from Sweden, Norway, and Finland, was done by three Sámi artists and rechristened in that people’s name.
“Thank you all for your tremendous belief in my proposed work for the Australia Pavilion at the Venice Biennale behemoth,” Moore said in a statement.