‘Country’ is the term used by First Nations to describe the land that spiritually connects Indigenous Australians. It is a word that encompasses not just the vast rugged terrain beneath their feet, but the water, the customs, the laws that govern, and the collective memories that stretch back 65,000 years through tribal songlines.
‘Our country is a very big story,’ wrote the Waanyi author Alexis Wright in her novel Carpentaria; and it is this concept of place, in which history and myth are interwoven, that Archie Moore explores in his exhibition kith and kin in the Australia Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale.
The artwork, which won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation, is political and deeply personal. Moore is of the Bigambul and Kamilaroi nations, whose lands are in south-west Queensland and New South Wales. An account of the impact of genocidal conquest on Australia’s Indigenous population, kith and kin is part of an ongoing narrative by the artist that combines reportage, folklore and science fiction to articulate the long-denied fact of Aboriginal sovereignty.