4 days ago
Australia's dark past woven through powerful exhibition
Sandra Aitken's woven baskets greet visitors entering the atrium of a beloved arts museum, survivors of a brutal regime which tried to unravel their possible existence.
Each of the four pieces serve as storytellers of a culture once silenced.
They form part of a powerful exhibition aimed at confronting the dark heart of Australia's colonial history while celebrating the richness and resilience of Indigenous cultural traditions.
The exhibition - 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art - features hundreds of works, including rarely seen pieces, which mark the grand reopening of Melbourne University's Potter Museum of Art.
Aitken, a Dhauwurd Wurrung Gunditjmara artist, says the exhibition is incredibly important.
She continues to teach and practice the basket-weaving technique of the Gunditjmara people, a cultural tradition nearly lost after colonisation.
Her great-great-grandmother used the technique in the 1800s to trap food such as fish and eel. She passed her knowledge down her family line until it was forbidden.
"My grandmother wasn't allowed to teach my aunty how to weave. It was almost lost," she said.
Her aunty relearned the craft over decades, but when it came time to pass it on, she couldn't.
"She said the government would come and take us away from there. We ended up getting her to show us, but it was behind closed doors and windows."
Aitken's work is one of 400 pieces by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists included in the collection, which spans three levels.
Co-curated by Marcia Langton, Judith Ryan and Shanysa McConville, the exhibition does not shy away from brutal colonial history, but also offers new insights into the first art of the country.
"Beginning the exhibition with the womens' weaving in the atrium, we are looking at the story now," Ms Ryan told AAP.
"We wanted it to be truth telling, anti-colonial. We wanted to take things further and to destroy and subvert stereotypes."
The exhibition includes pieces by William Barak, Lin Onus, Albert Namatjira, Rover Thomas and Emily Kam Kngwarray, with the majority on display drawn from the university's collections.
"It's about encompassing the whole gamut of what First People make in Australia and there is no prediction of what First People's art should look like or mean."
Marking the museum's reopening on May 30 during Reconciliation Week after a six-year renovation, the Potter Museum of Art will welcome the public to the exhibition running until November 23.
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