Kamilaroi and Bigambul artist Archie Moore will represent Australia at the Sixtieth Venice Biennale, becoming only the second Indigenous artist to be given charge of the country’s pavilion at the prestigious event, after Tracey Moffatt, who did so in 2017. Trevor Nickolls and Rover Thomas in 1990 became the first Aboriginal artists to represent Australia at the Biennale. News of Moore’s participation in the event was announced by the Australian Council for the Arts, the state agency tasked with awarding the commission.
“To have an esteemed First Nations artist such as Archie Moore represent Australia on this global platform is something that all Australians can take pride in and celebrate,” said Franchesca Cubillo, the council’s executive director of First Nations arts and culture.
Moore, whose practice investigates Aboriginal history through his own lineage and explores the modern First Nations experience in the context of Australia’s colonial legacies, has not yet publicly revealed his plans for the pavilion, but in a statement offered thanks for his supporters’ “tremendous belief in my proposed work for the Australia Pavilion at the Venice Biennale behemoth.” His 2022 work Inert State presented two hundred redacted coroner’s reports concerning the deaths of Indigenous people in custody, scattered in a pool at Queensland Art Gallery. The documents were dated from 2008 and beyond, 2008 being the year then–prime minister Kevin Rudd issued an apology to the Stolen Generations. In 2018, for United Neytions, installed at the Sydney International Airport, he created an assemblage of large hanging banners meant to celebrate “local indigenous people on whose traditional lands the airport (an international zone or ‘no man’s land’) lies.”
Ellie Buttrose, curator of contemporary Australian art at the Queensland Art Gallery’s Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, will organize the pavilion. “Artistically adroit and politically incisive, Archie is uniquely placed to confront Australia’s past and assert Indigenous sovereignty on a worldwide scale within the Australia Pavilion,” she said.