Australian artist unveils the world’s biggest hand-drawn family tree at the Venice Biennale

by Admin
April 19, 2024

In the south of Venice, Italy, along one of its many famed canals, sits a large cube-like building designated “Australia”. Inside, thousands of rectangular white boxes map more than 2,400 generations in what must be the most expansive family tree ever drawn by hand.

The vast chalk drawing is the centrepiece of Archie Moore’s installation, kith and kin, Australia’s representative exhibition for the 60th Venice Biennale, which opens to the public today. It’s the world’s oldest, if not foremost, contemporary art biennial.

The title of the installation refers to the Old English term that denotes one’s family and countrymen, which has particular resonance for the Bigambul and Kamilaroi artist in this work, centring the notion of Country alongside the First Nations concepts of extended family and community.

The family tree covers the 5-metre-high and 60-metre-long walls of the pavilion.(Supplied: Venice Biennale/Andrea Rossetti)

In the darkened space of the pavilion, it’s easy to imagine you’re under the night sky, such as you find in the Australian bush.

Curator Ellie Buttrose has likened it to a “celestial map”, except in this low-light vision of the cosmos, the stars are the names of Moore’s real and speculative ancestors.

Just as Moore’s ancestors read the stars, so did they populate the dark matter between the stars with epic origin stories.

But there are gaping holes in Moore’s genealogical chart, representing gaps in cultural knowledge and oral history that could not be passed on due to colonisation, massacres, epidemics and even natural disasters.

It’s an intentionally incomplete family tree — distilling some 65,000 years of ancestry into a single artwork now on display on the Rio dei Giardini.

Archie Moore has turned the Australian pavilion at this year’s Biennale from white cube to Blak monolith.(Supplied: Venice Biennale/John Gollings)

From white cube to Blak monolith

Like embassies or diplomatic missions, friendly nations — 86 in total — are invited to install the work of their representative artists in their national pavilions for the duration of the Biennale, in a park set aside for the purpose, the Giardini, just off the Grand Canal.

The traditionally white cube of Australia’s pavilion has disappeared under litres of blackboard paint, and the inside is redolent of chalk dust.

There are more than 500 reams of documents included in the exhibition.(Supplied: Venice Biennale/Andrea Rossetti)

Moore’s drawing covers all four walls and the ceiling of the pavilion with names of both real and hypothetical ancestors. In the centre, hundreds of piles of gleaming white documents are arranged meticulously on a table.

Among them are coronial reports with names redacted: The official proceedings of inquests into the hundreds of Indigenous deaths in state care since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody delivered its final, multi-volume report in 1991.

A dark horse

When it was announced that Moore had been selected to represent Australia in Venice, some observers questioned the decision.

But while the sceptics twittered, the characteristically unassuming artist quietly continued work on kith and kin, which he has painstakingly installed over the past two months by hand in the monolith of the Australia pavilion.

Moore is an introvert. Across his 30-year career, he has built a reputation for creating subversive work that sometimes flies under the radar of the mainstream art world. But that’s what he does best — he lets the work speak for itself.

And speak it does, sometimes acidly, but with tongue firmly planted in cheek and lashings of self-deprecating black humour.

Although Moore is something of an outlier, he has produced consistently strong and increasingly ambitious work over the past decade since a cruel joke turned inward won him the University of Queensland’s National Artists’ Self-Portrait Prize in 2013.

He entered a taxidermied black dog — of the breed known for turning on their owners or small children — as his self-portrait for the invitation-only $50,000 prize. (If you look closely, the collar tag reads “Archie”.)

Archie Moore’s prize-winning self-portrait (pictured) makes for a searing commentary on racism.(Supplied: The Commercial/Carl Warner)

The dog’s fur wasn’t lustrous enough so Moore darkened it with black shoe polish, like the punchline to some racist joke.

It’s a biting crystallisation of Moore’s rage at the racial abuse, the not-black-enough colourism and punch-down lateral violence he experienced firsthand, growing up in Australia with mixed Indigenous and non-Indigenous heritage. (His mother’s lineage is Bigambul and Kamilaroi, while his father is of Scottish and British descent.)

Making his mark

For those who have followed Moore’s trajectory closely, his selection as Australia’s representative artist at the Venice Biennale comes as no surprise.

At 54, he is one of a growing crop of gen X artists to represent Australia in the Biennale d’Arte, a highly-prized distinction even among the most cynical of practitioners.

He is also only the second First Nations artist to solo-represent Australia in the 25 years of national participation.

Ellie Buttrose, pictured here with Archie Moore, says kith and kin is a poetic and timely reminder of our common humanity.(Supplied: Venice Biennale/Andrea Rossetti)

Previous representatives include Marco Fusinato, whose work Desastres offered a piercing and at times harmonic wall of noise in a daily ritual of showing up — all 200 days of the Biennale in 2022. Then there was Angelica Mesiti, who orchestrated a musical score based on a poem by David Malouf in 2019; Tracey Moffatt, who dreamt up sepia-toned visions of exile and longing in 2017; and Fiona Hall, who was the first to present in the new pavilion in 2015 with a work that has been described as a wunderkammer in camo, patrolled by stray camp dogs.

Sharing kith and kin

The Australian pavilion is nestled behind those of Great Britain, France and the United States, adjacent to Czechia and Uruguay, and backs onto Israel. Its black steel exterior makes a bold statement about the island nation’s modernity. (Aboriginal artist and activist Richard Bell once ridiculed it as a “black box for white art”.)

Inside though, it is a tabula rasa — a blank slate. Every representative artist since it opened in 2015 has had to integrate their work or at least fill the space within the architectural box.

None has made their presence felt more visibly than Moore, with his hand-drawn family tree that unfurls on the walls of the Australia pavilion.

Archie Moore has described the exhibition as a space for “quiet reflection and remembrance”.(Supplied: Venice Biennale/Andrea Rossetti)

It contends with the overall theme of the Biennale, curated by Brazil’s Adriano Pedrosa: “Foreigners everywhere.”

None too subtly, in Moore’s expansive family tree, the borders disappear and we are all either “kin” — blood relatives with mutual descent from a common ancestor — or “kith” — a community with a shared responsibility for Country.

It’s a poetic and timely reminder, according to Buttrose, of our common humanity.

kith and kin is at the Australia pavilion, Giardini della Biennale, as part of the Venice Biennale until November 24.

Daniel Browning received a partial travel bursary from Creative Australia to participate in the public program for the Venice Biennale.