Two Exhibitions Resignify Aboriginality and Photographyin Australia's Visual Lexicon
Year: 2008
Type: article
Abstract: ABSTRACT Photography has long been central to the construction of Aboriginal peoples in the Australian national imaginary. In the last 20 years, the social role of photography has shifted: from origins in scopic regimes that racialized and dispossessed Aboriginal peoples to an era of contemporary reappropriation, recontextualizing colonial archives, and producing new Indigenous high art photography. Photographs are no longer stable, visible testimony of Indigenous peoples' presumed imminent decline or innate savagery but are, rather, colonial objectifications now available for resignification as evidence of kinship networks, land claims, and local knowledge systems. In July 2006, two exhibitions were spearheading these important transitions. “Colliding Worlds” opened at Melbourne Museum, and “Michael Riley: Sights Unseen” premiered at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) in Canberra. Together, these exhibitions destabilize historical legacies of the visual in Australia's national imaginary, resignifying photography as a medium of new knowledge production, aesthetic expression, and social change.
Source: American Anthropologist
Author: Sabra Thorner
Institution: New York University
Language: English
Topic: Photographic and Visual Arts
Subfield: Museology
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2132442571