NAIDOC Week at the NGV (4-11 July)
As Australia celebrates NAIDOC Week, the NGV highlights the work of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people currently on exhibition and explores many of these works with a program of online talks, videos, virtual exhibition tours, essays and activities that celebrate this year’s theme: Heal Country!
For more information about NAIDOC Week events at the NGV visit the website HERE and see further details on the current and upcoming exhibitions below.
MAREE CLARKE | ANCESTRAL MEMORIES
UNTIL 3 OCT 2021
Maree Clarke: Ancestral Memories is the first major retrospective of Melbourne-based artist and designer, Maree Clarke, who is a Yorta Yorta / Wamba Wamba / Mutti Mutti / Boonwurrung woman. Clarke is a pivotal figure in the reclamation of south-east Australian Aboriginal art and cultural practices and has a passion for reviving and sharing elements of Aboriginal culture that were lost – or lying dormant – as a consequence of colonisation.
Covering more than three decades of artistic output, the exhibition traverses Clarke’s multidisciplinary practice across photography, printmaking, sculpture, jewellery, video, glass, and more. Documenting Clarke’s life as told through her art, the exhibition includes rarely-seen black-and-white photographs that bring to life key figures and events in Melbourne during the 1990s, through to her most accomplished and critically-acclaimed work of recent years, including major mixed media installations, contemporary jewellery incorporating kangaroo-teeth, river reed and echidna quills, through to lenticular prints and photographic holograms.
BIG WEATHER
UNTIL 6 FEB 2022
Big Weather is a NGV exclusive exhibition exploring the sophisticated appreciation of weather systems that exist within Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural knowledge. The exhibition highlights the role of Indigenous artists and designers in sharing stories and ceremonies connected to weather, ensuring they live on in future generations.
Big Weather will present works by over 50 important artists from the NGV Collection across media, encompassing painting, photography, weaving and sculpture. The exhibition will showcase works by artists from diverse Indigenous communities with many presenting unique interpretations of Ancestral spirit beings who bring the rain, hail, and seasonal storms that feed into our rivers to revive the landscape and nourish our wildlife.
An exhibition highlight will be the recently acquired work by Wiradjuri artist Karla Dickens who responds to the destructive bushfire event in the summer of 2019/20 by drawing on humour to emphasise the devastation in a work titled We are on fire (not in a sexy way) and Stolen Climate by Clinton Naina which links the effects of Climate Change to the ongoing impacts of colonisation.
ROSALIE GASCOIGNE | LORRAINE CONNELLY-NORTHEY
8 OCT 2021 – 20 FEB 2022
Uniting two important Australian artists for the first time, Rosalie Gascoigne | Lorraine Connelly-Northey brings attention to the shared materiality at the heart of the practices of both Rosalie Gascoigne (1917–1999) and Lorraine Connelly- Northey (b. 1967) and their transformative use of found and discarded objects to create surprising and beautiful works of art.
Born in 1962 and raised at Swan Hill in western Victoria, on Wamba Wamba traditional lands, Connelly-Northey is influenced by an amalgam of her father’s Irish ancestry and mother’s Waradgerie (Wiradjuri) heritage. She utilises materials often associated with European settlement and industrialisation and repurposes them into sculptural works that reference little-known traditional weaving techniques and Indigenous cultural objects, such as kooliman and dilly bags. Through her work, Connelly-Northey explores the dynamic and resilient nature of both her Country and Aboriginal heritage.
The exhibition includes works by both artists held in the NGV Collection as well as works from major public institutions and private collections around Australia.
BARK LADIES
19 NOV 2021 - 1 MAY 2021
Bark Ladies is an exhibition that celebrates the NGV’s extraordinary collection of work by Yolngu women artists from the Buku Larrngay Mulka Centre (Buku), in Northeast Arnhem Land. Buku is the Indigenous community run art centre located in Yirrkala, a small Aboriginal community, approximately 700 km east of Darwin. Work by women from the Yirrkala region has been developing an appreciative audience, both nationally and internationally.
For more than two decades the NGV has been acquiring important works on bark by women artists from Buku, who before 2000 seldom painted on bark or made larrakitj (painted hollow poles). Bark Ladies is an important exhibition that brings together great singular master artists sharing their important stories with a Melbourne audience.