A Flinders University Museum of Art exhibition in partnership with Unbound Collective. 20 Nov 2024
The Letters Patent establishing the Province of South Australia, issued by King William IV on 19 February 1836, included the following clause:
Provided Always that nothing in those our Letters Patent contained shall affect or be construed to affect the rights of any Aboriginal Natives of the said Province to the actual occupation or enjoyment in their own Persons or in the Persons of their Descendants of any Lands therein now actually occupied or enjoyed by such Natives. [emphasis added]
This year marks the tenth anniversary of the Unbound Collective’s landmark activist exhibition SOVEREIGN ACTS | Decolonising Methodologies of the Lived and Spoken at the former artist-run space, Fontanelle Gallery and Studios, in Bowden in 2014. To celebrate that pivotal event and the many exhibitions and research projects the Collective has produced since, the Flinders University Museum of Art is showing the Collective’s latest iteration, entitled Sovereign Acts | Love Praxis.
The banner Occupied and Enjoyed showing now at the FUMA gallery entrance was created for the 2014 exhibition to draw attention to the failure of the South Australian colonists and subsequent governments to honour the provision in the Letters Patent that required them to respect the rights of the Indigenous people of the new province, and it was displayed on a flagpole above Fontanelle Gallery as an act of reclamation.
Installation view: Sovereign Acts | Love Praxis: Unbound Collective, 2024, featuring Archive Performance Skirts by Unbound Collective, Natalie Harkin and Seana O’Brien, 2019, racist texts by Ali Gumillya Baker, 2014, and performance stills from SOVEREIGN ACT IV| OBJECT at the Art Gallery of New South Wales by Tristan Derátz, 2019; Flinders University Museum of Art, Adelaide © the artists, photo: FUMA
The Unbound Collective comprises four senior members of Flinders University’s academic staff: visual artist Dr Ali Gumillya Baker (Mirning); performance poet Dr Faye Rosas Blanch (Mbararam, Yidinyji); poet Dr Natalie Harkin (Narungga); and actor, singer and Flinders University’s Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Indigenous), Professor Simone Ulalka Tur (Yankunytjatjara). They all have multiple roles, describing themselves as a group of activist-led creative arts practitioners and scholars. Baker and Blanch teach an Indigenous Studies program (the students of which are mainly non-Indigenous) and Harkin is the holder of an Australian Research Council grant for the investigation of the history of Aboriginal female forced labour.
They indicate that, “their individual and collective work centres on ethical practice and responsibility, using memory and storytelling to critically engage with colonial sites of power and knowledge production, such as universities, galleries, libraries, archives and museums.”
This FUMA exhibition includes some works from the inaugural exhibition and some new and more recent works, as well as some photographic and video documentation of performances and exhibitions over the intervening years.
Installation view: Sovereign Acts | Love Praxis: Unbound Collective, 2024, featuring For All Our Women of the Sun by Natalie Harkin with Unbound Collective, 2021, SOVEREIGN ACTS – ACT II by Unbound Collective, 2015, and Archive Fever Paradox [2] / Whitewash-Brainwash by Natalie Harkin, 2014; Flinders University Museum of Art, Adelaide © the artists, photo: FUMA
Each artwork exposes an aspect of the treatment of Aboriginal people. For example, Racist texts (2014) by Ali Gumillya Baker comprises several tall stacks of discarded anthropology and history textbooks produced over many decades that she considers dehumanise, devalue or ignore Aboriginal people and their culture or suggest that they are an inferior race. Such books have shaped the thinking of the Australian population and reinforced the racism which remains persistent.
Natalie Harkin’s Archive Fever Paradox [2] / Archival Basket (2013) is a small basket woven from copies of letters sent by the Aborigines Protection Board to her grandmother and great-grandmother. The letters are reprinted on Ngarrindjeri banana leaf paper, and the work thus appropriates a sample of the official correspondence that structured the lives of Aboriginal people and converts it into a traditional, useful household commodity.
Detail: Unbound Collective, Natalie Harkin and Seana O’Brien, Archive Performance Skirts, 2019, calico, poems and archival material on banana leaf paper, marine ply and bamboo, foliage, incandescent bulb with wiring, variable sizes. Commissioned by the Migration Museum for Tarnanthi, Sovereign Acts IN THE WAKE; Flinders University Museum of Art, Adelaide © the artists, photo: FUMA
Archive Performance Skirts (2019) by Natalie Harkin and Seana O’Brien comprises four skirts constructed from copies of old archival records relating to Aboriginal people, exhibited here as artworks and worn by members of the Collective during their live performances.
Bush Camp by the Collective is a replica of a typical bush camp, shown together with Simone Ulalka Tur’s family photos. Poetry by Natalie Harkin and Faye Rosas Blanch is also featured — Blanch’s poem My Pen is My Weapon makes clear that they use the written and spoken word as a peaceful but powerful tool in their work.
Installation view: Sovereign Acts | Love Praxis: Unbound Collective, 2024, featuring Fork and Spoon by Ali Gumillya Baker, 2014, and Bush Camp by Unbound Collective, 2014; Flinders University Museum of Art, Adelaide © the artist, photo: FUMA
Amongst their many exhibitions, they contributed to the 2015 and 2019 Tarnanthi Festivals of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art, and they performed at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2019 and at the 2023 TarraWarra Biennial. The video-work PERMEATE | mapping skin and tides of saturated resistance was presented in ‘unsettling Queenstown’ at the Australia Pavilion for the 18th Venice Architectural Biennale.
The exhibition includes photographic records of their performance at the AGNSW where they entered a section of the gallery housing artworks produced by prominent colonial artists — in effect a colonial archive — and they projected onto those artworks texts that questioned colonisation and the representation of Aboriginal people and culture. One text projected onto a landscape painting reads, ‘Not your terra nullius’. Such a performance is a form of protest and disruption, a re-conception of the use of the exhibition space and a challenge to the AGNSW’s institutional authority.
The Collective’s work, which is often site-specific, thus questions the very idea of the historical record and the way in which peoples of all cultures are identified, evaluated, categorised and racially or ethnically stereotyped and their cultures appropriated, misread or expunged. The decolonisation process involves challenging such institutional recording and archiving.
The Collective’s members believe that working as a collective gives them strength, and they also work collaboratively with other artists, for example, violinist Kaitlin Inawantji Morrison who participates in some of their performance works, and Freddy Komp, whose Fire Pods comprises a bunch of flame tree seed pods with glowing red LED lights inside, which was shown in the 2020 Sydney Biennale. They work closely with the Indigenous communities in locations where they are exhibiting.
The Collective’s intention is to expose the treatment of Australia’s Indigenous communities since colonisation, to challenge and explore the immense archive of material on Aboriginal people held in government institutions, and to reposition those communities as no longer ‘bound’ by colonising political and social structures, perceptions and discourse. They see the retrieval and promotion of Indigenous cultural practices through art as a powerful and empowering strategy for decolonisation and the assertion of sovereignty.
A unique and important feature of the Unbound Collective’s work is that it connects the individual members’ teaching and research with their artmaking and exhibiting — their modes of research, teaching and practice are integrated into a whole. Their art is educational and their research underpins and informs their artmaking, rendering their artwork a form of research practice. They linked their work to their individual doctoral research, and their work is informed by critical race theory and the work of activists in other countries.
The body of artwork and research the Unbound Collective has produced is immensely significant and their ground-breaking approach to the combination of teaching, research and artmaking provides a valuable model for decolonising action and for audience engagement and teaching. This exhibition encourages and rewards the deepest consideration.
An edited book of essays reflecting on the work of the Unbound Collective, including a catalogue of their exhibitions and performances over ten years, is being published by Wakefield Press for release in 2025.
Chris Reid
When: 30 September - 13 December 2024
And 17 February - 11 April 2025
Where: Flinders University Museum of Art, Flinders University, Bedford Park
More info: flinders.edu.au
Ali Gumillya Baker and Jenny Baker, Occupied and Enjoyed, 2014, canvas and felt.
Sovereign Acts | Love Praxis: Unbound Collective, 2024.
Flinders University Museum of Art, Adelaide © the artists, photo: FUMA
