Archie Moore - Australia at the Venice Biennale 2024
Dr Nick Gordon
The Australia Council for the Arts has recently announced that Archie Moore will represent Australia at the Venice Biennale in 2024. Here we take a brief look at Archie and his art.
If you’ve arrived at Sydney airport from overseas, you’ve probably walked beneath Archie Moore’s work United Neytions, a series of flags hanging in the International Arrivals Hall. The flags use symbols of 28 Aboriginal nations described by an amateur anthropologist, R.H. Mathews, in 1900. But Moore’s flags are deliberately ambivalent.
On the one hand, Mathews’ 28 nations were based on very little fieldwork and even less knowledge of Indigenous Australia. But by writing about Indigenous peoples as nations, Mathews implicitly, if naively, suggested ownership of land. He even created maps of each nation’s territory and its borders.
So for Moore, the flags point to the “issues of authorship in non-Indigenous representations of Aboriginal people: the ‘white experts’ who write black history.” And for United Neytions, Moore was also drawing on the role of misinformation or misunderstanding in the writing of Australian and Indigenous histories. He went so far as to adopt Mathews’ research methods: with “limited time to thoroughly research some of the national boundaries, when I have a creative block something close enough will suffice, overwhelmed with conflicting information - just choose any name for the area, delving into a field I have little experience and knowledge in.”
While Moore did use traditional symbols – many of them petroglyphs, body paint or shield designs used by the 28 cultural groups recognised by Mathews – it is unclear if these symbols were intended to convey something resembling a national identity. In this respect they represent the Indigenous peoples on whose land the new arrivals are about to walk, but they do so in a way that points to how symbols and understandings of Indigenous histories are problematic.
You can listen to Moore speaking about this work in this short video.
The concerns behind United Neytions run throughout Moore’s oeuvre, and throughout his career he has used a vast array of symbols of cultural identity: flags, skin colour, language, food, and ideas of home. Frequently Moore entwines these symbols with his own biography to reveal how lived experience of daily life relates to the more grandiose official and academic histories of Australia.
Some of his most recent works are large-scale architectural installations, such as Dwelling (Victorian Issue), 2022. This work is a recreation of the home the artist grew up in, with familiar objects and smells conveying his experience of childhood, poverty and also the sense of home’s safety. As Moore puts it, “I preferred being inside its ugliness to the ugliness of racism outside its walls.”
But the further you delve into this world, the more complex it becomes. Allowing us into this space – a realm of personal memory and lived experience – heightens the contrasts between the childhoods and living conditions of the typical art gallery visitor and the artist. The aim is not so much to elicit sympathy as it is to increase an understanding of how Australia’s modern history creates different experiences of contemporary Australia. Moore notes, “I have tried to place the viewer into my shoes, to experience my experience. It is impossible to know if another has the same experience as you — and this is a kind of metaphor for the failure of reconciliation… and more so personally, the failure of others to understand me.”
You can read more about Dwelling (Victorian Issue) in this discussion between Archie Moore and Paris Lettau.
Exactly what Moore will present in the Australia Pavilion in 2024 is of course a closely guarded secret, and much of it will be created in the coming year. We can anticipate, however, that Australian and Indigenous histories will be at the forefront, and that the works will be engaging, spectacular and accessible. Moore’s career to date suggest no less.
Moore, a Kamilaroi/Bigambul artist from Queensland, is the second First Nations person to represent Australia at Venice with a solo exhibition. (Tracey Moffatt, with My Horizon, was the first in 2017.) For the exhibition in the Australia Pavilion he’ll be working with Elli Buttrose, Curator of Contemporary Australian Art at QAGOMA, with whom he has worked previously.
The Venice Biennale runs from April to November in 2024. Limelight Arts Travel is running an 8-day residential-style tour to the Venice Biennale in early June 2024, for which you can already register your interest. We are also partnering with The Australia Council for the Arts to organise their Supporters’ Program to the Biennale.
DR Nick Gordon
Nick Gordon is a well-known lecturer on fine art and history, with a PhD and University Medal from the University of Sydney. He regularly offers popular lectures on art, history and culture, including for the Australian Decorative and Fine Arts Society (ADFAS).
Nick is a product manager with Limelight Arts Travel, designing our art, history and culture tours.