Archie Moore’s meticulous genealogy, kith and kin, is a memorial to Indigenous lives lost – but it’s also about global common humanity
Australia’s entry at Venice Biennale is a family tree going back 65,000 years
For the past two months, in the quiet, darkened room of the Australia pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Bigambul-Kamilaroi artist Archie Moore has been drawing by hand in chalk a vast and meticulous genealogy. But Moore’s work, kith and kin – Australia’s official entry in the 2024 Venice Biennale, which opened this week with the theme “Foreigners everywhere” – is about much more, and its grand scope reveals itself slowly.
Moore begins with his family tree. The chalk lines expand across and up the walls, back through time and space to encompass the thousands of generations that have gone before, and then they spill on to the ceiling where the ancestral names become like stars in an infinite night sky.
The work, kith and kin, is about 65,000 years of Aboriginal history and non-linear concepts of time and place. Moore, paraphrasing the anthropologist WE Stanner, calls it “the everywhen”. “The past, present and future share the same space in the here and now,” Moore says. “Stanner said ‘one cannot fix the dreaming in time. It was, and is, everywhen’.”
Beneath this teeming mass of lives is a white table neatly stacked with the records of hundreds of Aboriginal deaths. Among them are the redacted coronial reports of the 557 Aboriginal people who have died in police and prison custody since the 1991 royal commission handed down 339 recommendations designed to stop those preventable deaths from occurring.
“It is as many coronial inquests that we could source through each of the different states and territories,” the curator of kith and kin, Ellie Buttrose, says. “Anything that couldn’t be found is represented with a blank document because making those gaps visible is really important to this project in multiple different ways. “It’s about the tension between representation and abstraction. How do you represent these horrors? How do you do them justice? It’s very difficult with words or images, so the void plays an important role.”… “The past, present and future share the same space in the here and now,” Moore says. “Stanner said ‘one cannot fix the dreaming in time. It was, and is, everywhen’.”
The table sits within a pool of still water, serving as a shrine of remembrance and memorial for black lives lost to institutional violence and neglect. But the documents are hard to view. “You have to lean across the water to glimpse them,” Buttrose says, “and you see your own reflection as you do. You become part of the work; you have to look at yourself in the context of all this loss.”
Moore and Buttrose have been working in the pavilion for about two months. It’s rare for artists exhibiting at the Biennale to spend such a long time in advance, Buttrose says. But the work had to be inscribed on to the space. The site has been empty for most of the time. Their small team has been working with just the birds for company and the occasional boat puttering down the Rio dei Giardini beyond the window….
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