The blak matriarchy

The blak matriarchy

Event status:
CLOSED
Dates:
20 May – 30 July 2017
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Real Blak Tingz responds to the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Referendum by activating the galleries of the Koorie Heritage Trust through an elixir of portraiture, projection and sculpture.

The work is manifested through art as resistance and anchored by memory, celebration, critique of power and decolonial imaginings.

Download the catalogue here.

Real Blak Tingz (Gabi Briggs x Arika Waulu) is a collective that aims to destabilise the patriarchal society and its perpetual power structure that exists illegally on the land mass of so-called Australia. They aim to destabilise it by reinstating a decolonial, powerful Sovereign Blak Matriarchy that resists the oppression that the colonial patriarchy imposes upon us, our Blak bodies and our kin. They do so by intervening within public spaces and in the gallery through the act of curating and working with projection, video, photography, performance, fore-mostly as storytellers, then as artists.

Gabi Briggs is a sovereign Anaiwan and Gumangier kajira (woman) who documents her body and how it occupies places and the viewer’s gaze (you). She does so in order to examine power, privilege, and the colonising and politicising of her body and narrative. Forever complexed and possibly hoodwinked, Briggs looks to the arts as a place to have agency, to decolonise and to find absolute autonomy and sovereignty.

Arika Waulu, Brayakaloong, Yigar and Tjapwurrung woorcut – djeetgun garawangoo, borun garawangoo. Ngatanwarr Kooloyn Meerta Ma-na weein Keerna Poopoop Alam meen Wayok Leekatyoong Paleep

Arika Waulu is a sovereign multimedia experimentalist and activator, based in Narrm-melbourne, who uses video, moving and still images that are predominately displayed as projection installation. In 2016 Arika produced a night for emerging Indigenous performers for Gertrude St Projection Festival in Fitzroy, and has been producing/curating programs focusing on reviving cultural practice through community-based projects.