Who’s Afraid of Colour?, National Gallery of Victoria, 2016-2017; installation view. Courtesy of the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne. Photo: Wayne Taylor.

Nevertheless, Australian Indigenous women artists have worked hard to earn their growing recognition, marked by a number of significant milestones including Emily Kam Kngwarray, Yvonne Koolmatrie, and Judy Watson representing Australia at the Venice Biennale in 1997; the first sale for over $1,000,000 at auction of Kngwarray’s Earth’s Creation in 2007; and this year, the selection of Tracey Moffatt to represent Australia in the first Indigenous woman’s solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale.

The large-scale exhibition at the NGV presents the full spectrum of contemporary Australian Indigenous art. Numerous woven baskets, necklaces, ceramics, and string bags—objects that might be considered craft in other contexts—are all included, and rightfully so, since craft and utilitarian works are defined as art objects in the Indigenous art discourse. Across most Indigenous cultures, the act of making art objects and paintings using traditional methods is a way to enter into Dreamtime, a nonlinear, expansive dimension of space and time wherein the landscape, objects, animals, and human beings were once created, and where all ancestors and events continue to exist throughout time. Howard Morphy describes how across Indigenous cultures, “Art established a line of connection with the foundational events and enabled people to maintain contact with the spiritual dimension of existence… [Art] keeps the past alive and maintains its relevance to the present.”[4]

Nyapanyapa Yunupingu. Pink Diptych II, 2015; earth pigments on stringybark (Eucalyptus sp.); 59.1 x 31.1 in. Courtesy of Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre, Yirrkala, and the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne.

The permission to depict one’s Dreamtime is inherited from one’s elders, therefore the content and form of an artwork is not solely the unique vision of one artist, but rather a deeply personal ancestral inheritance of knowledge, history, culture, identity, and spirituality. While the artworks embody this multivalence, the specific inheritance disallows an artist from painting another’s Dreamtime. Jenny Crompton’s Sea Country Spirits (2015–16) are sculptures made of bone, driftwood, and seaweed hung from the ceiling under theatrical lighting. They magically animate the spirits of the ocean, sky, and land from her country of Wathaurong, and thus belong to her.

Many paintings on view continue the practice of painting as a form of conceptual mapping of geographical and social structures. Wintjiya Napaltjarri’s Watanuma (2008) depicts a scene where a group of ancestral women have gathered to perform songs and dances. Encoded by the use of her ancestor’s traditional symbols—a “U” stands for a seated woman, and small circles for the burrowed holes of flying ants—the abstracted visual language describes the scene in rich detail.

Emily Kam Kngwarray. Anwerlarr Anganenty (Big Yam Dreaming), 1995; synthetic polymer paint on canvas; 114.6 x 315.7 in. Courtesy of the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne. Licensed by VISCOPY, Australia.

Anwerlarr Anganenty (Big Yam Dreaming) (1995) by Emily Kam Kngwarray is perhaps the most iconic, and certainly the largest, of the numerous contemporary paintings in the show. The black-and-white epic stretches over 26 feet long in one continuous brush stroke and recalls those used in body painting. Though the gesture can be read to represent the jumbled vines of the yam plant, or as an agricultural map, the work’s expansive neural cloud feels more like an intimate portrait of the universe. The “masterpiece” was created just one year before the artist passed away at eighty-five years old. In the eight years that Kngwarray painted, she made over 3,000 pieces to support her extended family, and eventually became one of the most prominent Australian Indigenous artists. Though she knew nothing of the international art world, Kngwarray’s story is exemplary of a later stage of Indigenous survival: Over the last few decades, growing market demand has created art-based economies in many Indigenous communities, securing both cultural and financial futures.

Yhonnie Scarce. Blood on the Wattle (Elliston, South Australia 1849), 2013; installation view, Who’s Afraid of Colour?, 2016-2017. Courtesy of the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne. Photo: Wayne Taylor.

While the presence of a female Indigenous artist’s work in a major national gallery is already a political gesture, overtly political pieces are included in the show too. Judy Watson’s Black Ground (1989) and Yhonnie Scarce’s Blood on the Wattle (Elliston, South Australia 1849) (2013) expose the enduring pain of many Indigenous massacres. Intentionally hung next to E. Phillips-Fox’s colonialist painting, Landing of Captain Cook at Botany Bay, 1770 (1902), is Julie Gough’s sculptural piece Imperial Leather (1994). What first appear to be dozens of soap on a rope hanging in a Union Jack formation reveal themselves as wax casts of the same Indigenous face hung from small nooses.

The accumulation of stories and the sheer cacophony of loss barrels into a heart-wrenching, multi-channel video piece, We All Need Forgiveness (2014), by Bindi Cole Chocka. Made in response to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s apology to Indigenous people in 2008, the moving piece puts viewers face-to-face with dozens of Indigenous Australians repeating, “I forgive you,” over and over again. Some have tears in their eyes, while some have smiles.

Bindi Cole Chocka. We All Need Forgiveness, 2014; installation view, Who’s Afraid of Colour?, 2016-2017. Courtesy of the Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne. Photo: Wayne Taylor.

The artists in Who’s Afraid of Colour? share countless stories of human survival—born from harsh natural conditions, and often in the face of extreme injustice. Australian Indigenous survival is defined by adaptation to the unknown, but also by an unwavering connection to land and culture. With regards to the recognition of their artwork, as Morphy puts it, the struggle “has been partly about definition, about the right to be defined in terms of its own history rather than according to Western preconceptions.” To all of the Australian Indigenous women artists: We see you, as you are. It is a privilege to bear witness to your long-overdue celebration. Thank you.

Who’s Afraid of Colour? is on view through April 18, 2017.

[1] http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/essay/whos-afraid-of-colour/

[2] Howard Morphy. Aboriginal Art (London: Phaidon Press, 1998), 5.

Rotimi Fani-Kayode. Nothing to Lose IX (Bodies of Experience), 1987; C prints; 49 x 41 cm. Courtesy of the Artist, Autograph ABP, and nGbK, Berlin.

Mysti is an emerging, U.S.-born performance-based artist interested in “queering theory,” while art star Danh Vo was born in south Vietnam and became a political refugee when his family fled in a handmade boat and was later rescued at sea before settling in Denmark. But both have fathers who were disappointed when their sons decided to become artists. These kinds of divergent yet overlapping narratives are echoed again and again in the transgressive, queer-centric exhibition, where father figures of all kinds are revered and rejected through entirely individual gestures.

At the entrance to the exhibition, the patrilineal status quo of identity is confronted by two self-portraits by Juliana Huxtable, Sympathy for the Martyr (2015) and Lil’ Marvel (2015). Rather than clinging to identity, Huxtable molds it like putty in her hands, shapeshifting into a superheroine or trans-Christ. Her self-aware, Cindy Sherman-like transformations are otherworldly but human, and thus gloriously imperfect. Much like Sherman’s earliest works, the tension between self-determination and others’ projections is well crafted. At the far end of the gallery, Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s performative images Under the Surplice (1987), Nothing to Lose IX (Bodies of Experience) (1987), and Bronze Head (1987), made nearly three decades earlier, critique the limitations of cultural inheritance through the lens of a queer, HIV-positive Nigerian expat.

Juliana Huxtable. Sympathy for the Martyr, 2015; 70 x 100 cm. Courtesy of the Artist and nGbK, Berlin.

Domestic Wish Machine (2015), by Lea St., consists of a few dozen crude salt-dough sculptures rendered in the style of the lost German decorative art form traditionally made by male master bakers. Grouped on high tables are a sausage imprinted with the word “success,” a slice of blueberry pie with “punishment,” a phallic banana with “effort,” as well as a delicate, scarecrow-like hand with “thank you,” and more. Loaded words and equally loaded symbols enter into a slippery free-association game between food and the body—between shame and desire.

Lea St. Domestic Wish Machine, 2015; installation view, Father Figures Are Hard to Find, 2016. Courtesy of Lea St., Heit, Berlin, and nGbK, Berlin.

In a viewing room wrapped entirely in denim, Konrad Mühe’s Fragen an Meinen Vater (Questions to My Father] (2011) is a painstakingly assembled video of clips of the artist’s deceased father, legendary German actor Ulrich Mühe. This postmortem interview is at once comical and devastating, weaving iconic soundbites from film and TV such as, “Death tells us things that are difficult to talk about” and “Please forgive me.” The father’s unwitting monologue to his alienated son invents a conversation many wish to have, and cannot, but its construction further exaggerates his absence.

Sarah Ancelle Schönfeld’s separate small room within the exhibition touches upon illness and how it tests and redefines a father-daughter relationship. Things That Are Not There (2016) was made collaboratively with her father Oskar Curter during weekly visits. A dripping IV infused with anti-psychotics creates a pool on the floor, which reflects a small projection of Curter. A classical watercolor still life of a teapot and a few cups, painted by Curter, hangs on the wall. The rhythm of the drips recalls the uncomfortable, temporal limit built into all relationships.

The curators installed John Waters’ words about his father in vinyl lettering near the exit: “We worked out all our issues, and the issues we didn’t work out I turned into a career.” Even in rejection of the biological, historical, symbolic, or holy father, he is still here, and maybe that’s not always a bad thing. Each of the artists in Father Figures Are Hard to Find has insufficient role models, but out of this lack they empower themselves. Their sensitive questioning acknowledges that there is no “me” without “him,” and confirms the extent to which this shapes them as artists and human beings, a space that can be perpetually reimagined.

Father Figures Are Hard to Find is on view at nGbK through May 1, 2016.