In kith and kin, Archie Moore wrestles with memory, history, racism, and Australia’s sense of national identity. The Indigenous artist’s Golden Lion-winning work for the Australian pavilion at the Venice Biennale echoes the smooth black exterior of the building (designed in 2015 by Denton Corker Marshall) with a deeply darkened space, dimly lit to reveal a ghostly, chalk-written family tree spreading across the walls and ceiling. Set within a pool of water in the center of the room, a massive table holds countless reams of official documents—mainly coroner’s reports of Indigenous deaths in custody—that form a city of white paper stacks, crudely lined with black marker redactions. The overall sense is of a community that collapses time, blending past, present, future, tragedy, abuse, and resilience—themes that Moore further explores in an accompanying book, which also demonstrates the importance of collaboration in his work.
Jillian Knipe: kith and kin confronts viewers with a minimal black and white setting. Entering from the outside is visually disorienting, as you move from white to black. It changes your pace. It changes your sense of time. The space is immediately aesthetically simple and sensorially complex. Can you talk about the intent behind these overall aspects of the show?
Archie Moore: I used low lighting to slow down and quiet visitors. I wanted them to see this as a shrine or a memorial—a place for quiet reflection and remembrance. The white area at the front becomes a space for your eyes to adjust from outside, before you go into the dark space. Once inside, it takes a few minutes before your eyes adjust again and before the chalked names of the family tree begin to appear on the wall. The effect as you look up to the ceiling is like the night sky—the stars and the dark clouds between the stars. These places are where my Kamilaroi people believed they went after they died.
I’ve done a family tree twice before, with names in white chalk on blackboard paint, referencing my school curriculum. We didn’t have any Indigenous history, nothing even about the local families of kids who attended the school. It was always about white settler colonialist ventures into farming, agriculture, and mining—as if history started with Captain Cook’s arrival. Obviously, black and white is also a racial thing. The names on the family tree are all handwritten as if by me, but I had other people copy my handwriting. It creates a sharp contrast with the typed bureaucratic documents, also black and white, in the middle of the space.
We set the huge collection of documents on a table surrounded by water, which is another common element of memorials. I left the window on the lower part of the wall open; it is normally closed during exhibitions. I wanted viewers to see the canal water as it relates to the body of water inside, and as it flows to the Venice lagoon, the Adriatic Sea, and out to everywhere around the world, enveloping the continent of Australia. I wanted to show how we’re connected between Venice and Australia and how, if we go back 3,000 years, we all find a common ancestor. It’s the idea that we’re all connected on Earth.
JK: I experienced that sense of connectivity between the still water inside and the moving water outside, and how it relates to memory and keeping things moving and alive. I also thought of Alfredo Jaar’s The Geometry of Conscience (2010), an underground memorial in Chile for the victims of the Pinochet regime that evokes ideas of burial and catacombs. That had me wondering about the location of your work. I understand what you mean about the sky, which immediately recalls nighttime in the Australian bush, where the stars are absolutely dazzling, but I’d like to know where the work is located in your imagination.
AM: I was thinking of cosmology and a vast abyss of time, of sitting in a huge network of relatedness spanning millennia. I am trying to make you feel immersed in and enveloped by the sense of all time. Aboriginal people have a nonlinear, more of a circular notion of time, where past, present, and future exist on the same plane, and that’s what the archive does as well. It is of the past, experienced in the present, and it will exist in the future, in a digital format or some other format we can’t fathom yet.
JK: I was drawn to the three black holes that appear as gaps among the names. They highlight interrupted lineage, smallpox, massacres, and lost records, but I also thought of them as being opposite to the hopefulness of the yellow sun in the Indigenous flag. They recall black holes in the outer galaxy, which slow time so significantly that it appears to stop.
AM: I had those thoughts, too, especially when I blurred the edge of the hole, which distorted the writing and made it look like it was bending the words, like how black holes bend time—though that wasn’t the main reason for the holes.
JK: The water also serves as a protective moat for the central sculptural piece, drawing connections to sacred burial ground access and to glass barriers that protect valuable artworks.
AM: The water is deliberately bigger than the table that holds the documents, to keep them out of reach. You really have to lean over to read the covers of the reports, like a gesture of bowing to show respect to the people who have passed. The reams of paper are stacked at different heights related to the year of that coroner’s report. It becomes like a three-dimensional bar graph representing the number of deaths each year. Some of those documents are blank because they weren’t in the coroner’s reports. We knew they existed, but we couldn’t access them, which raises questions about who has access to which archives. The blank documents relate to the black holes—they’re like gaps in the archive and gaps in the lineage.
JK: Some of the documents record Aboriginal surveillance by the state, but they mainly report deaths. My understanding is that things have worsened for Indigenous people since the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.
AM: Not one of the more than 300 recommendations has been adopted from the first report. It’s clear that they know what to do, they’re just unwilling to do it, so the indictment is on them. Asking why it’s continuing to happen is a kind of rhetorical question, because we know why it’s happening: two big factors in keeping Aboriginal people out of incarceration or the judicial system are better health and better education, and there’s not much movement on addressing those things.
JK: It appears like a mass graveyard, but also a model for an urban landscape. Did you model everything before you started to make it? What was it like to see the real thing once it was all in place?
AM: We worked with a graphic designer to do very precise 3D models of the space. The completed installation was exactly what we intended, to the point that it almost didn’t look real—especially the documents, which didn’t look like real stacks of paper at all. You experience other details that can’t be rendered and have much more to do with being in the space, like sound from outside, the air conditioning, and the light coming through the windows, which is different, depending on the time of year, time of day, if it’s cloudy or sunny.
JK: Can you explain your research for the family tree?
AM: The idea of the tree was to trace back 65,000 years. I looked at a lot of family documents in archives and at how the language changes to become European. If I go back to my great-grandmother, Queen Susan of Welltown, she had only one name: Susan. She was given the title “Queen” by the white people in charge because she was a something of an intermediary, though it was also probably patronizing. Other names in the records are very diminutive—like names you’d give to a kid or a pet—Tommy instead of Thomas, Billy instead of William. Earlier than that, there’s no name at all, just a description: Black male, full blown, half cast. These people could be my relatives, but I can’t ever know. Then, before that, there are singular, Indigenous names. Some are speculative, based on sounds within Aboriginal languages and avoiding sounds which aren’t, like the letter “v.” The process of Aboriginal naming was lost long ago. There are very few living Aboriginal languages left, and they’re mostly in the Northern Territory. So, one idea of the names in the family tree is to keep those words alive.
JK: There are many more people with Indigenous and non-Indigenous parents now. How does that sit within your community? Is there a feeling of not quite belonging to one culture or another?
AM: It’s like you’re in two worlds. People ask, “How Aboriginal are you?” or “You don’t look Aboriginal.” Here, people say that it doesn’t matter how much milk you put in the tea, it’s still tea. If people identify as Aboriginal, and they’ve got a connection in their genealogical lineage, they’ll be accepted by the community.
JK: There is still so much about blood and purity that exists today. As an adopted person, I’ve been exposed to all sorts of conditions and contradictions as to how I do and don’t belong. It seems to be a feature of white Western culture in general. I’m curious about your experience—Kamilaroi and Bigambul on your mother’s side, English/Scottish on your father’s.
AM: I grew up in a place that was pretty much all white people. My mother wasn’t really connected to the family, so I didn’t have the support I needed to understand. Instead, I believed the negative stuff that white people were saying about Aboriginal people, so I was not particularly proud of my heritage at that time. When I grew up, I moved to a place that was a bit more diverse, which changed everything.
JK: Can you talk about the aesthetics of the kith and kin book, and why your story “men in the house” is split up throughout the text?
AM: I wrote “men in the house” in the second person to implicate the reader in my memory. It didn’t really seem to have a beginning, middle, or end, so I decided to scatter it in little vignettes throughout the book. It’s a realistic take on how memory can come and go, and how something from 20 years ago will suddenly pop up in your mind. It also breaks up and balances the other, more serious essays. As for the book’s appearance, I wanted it to look like the Australian pavilion—the black box—and the white on black relates to the documents and walls inside.
JK: You maintain a strong sense of inclusivity in your way of working, and that comes across in the book, which includes contributions by individual team members.
AM: It’s always about personal stories, personal histories, and knowing that these things aren’t unique to me. Every Aboriginal person who sees kith and kin would be able to relate to the language in the show, would have seen documents related to their own family similar to those on the table—like the surveillance of Aboriginal people, especially under the Aboriginal Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act of 1897. That was supposedly about protecting Aboriginal people by removing them to reserves away from European influence, but it was really about taking them off their country and putting them somewhere else to control and restrict their freedom of movement.
JK: How did you select people to work with? Let’s start with curator Ellie Buttrose, who describes your work as “politically incisive and emotionally engaging.”
AM: People had encouraged me to apply for the Venice Biennale for quite a few years, and I just never felt ready. When the applications came around again, I heard a rumor quite late in the submission period about how the selection process was going to change to institutions picking the artists. So, I decided it was now or never to apply as an independent artist. I had to choose a curator, and I’d worked with Ellie on a previous version of the coroner’s reports at the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art. She is very intelligent, very switched on about what art is and what it’s for, so I asked her. She said yes and smashed out a submission in about a week.
JK: Architect Kevin O’Brien played a critical part in realizing the presentation of the work. Had you worked with him before?
AM: Yes, on a couple of projects. One was A Home Away from Home (Bennelong/Vera’s Hut), a full-size brick hut placed next to the Sydney Opera House for the 2016 Sydney Biennale. I re-created the hut built for Woollarawarre Bennelong, a member of the Wangal Clan and a central figure in Sydney’s early colonial history in the late 1700s. There were no drawings or paintings of it, just written descriptions, dimensions, and materials. While I knew that there would be one door and one window, Kevin knew which wall that window would be on in relation to the sun rising and setting. He also made the doorway a bit lower than the average height of a person, so visitors needed to bow as they entered the space—another gesture of respect.
The outside was based on Bennelong’s hut, but the inside was based on my grandparents’ home. They lived in poverty, in corrugated iron sheds with dirt floors. I was working with people who normally worked on film sets, and they wanted to age it to look like an old building. I disagreed. I wanted the exterior to look brand new, like it would have been when it was first built in 1790, and the inside to look like an old place. So, I used corrugated iron scrap, like from a garbage dump, which is a common material used by Aboriginal people to make shelters.
JK: Presenting it as a current-day construction avoids any sense of romantic, passive reenactment. It connects you with the present moment, and that carries through to the Venice work. Can you say more about this?
AM: I saw this idea in Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971), where Derek Jarman made the sets. In an interview, Russell was asked why he’d made the city look new, and he explained that in the 1400s it was a brand new city.
JK: There must be a big difference between showing work in Australia and presenting it on the “world stage” at Venice.
AM: There’s definitely a lot more attention around this show, more press and more people talking about it. The Venice Biennale is one of the longest running cultural events on Earth. I didn’t feel like it would be respectful to just bring something along, plonk it there, and leave, so we had about 50 locals working on the show.
JK: In the discussions that you and your team have had with visitors, has there been a pattern of viewer experiences or any sort of standout responses that have surprised you?
AM: Most people get wowed by the tree first. I guess they can see the amount of labor involved in all that writing on the wall. It’s quite vulnerable because you could rub it off if you wanted to. It’s kind of the same with the archives, of trying to erase someone from the picture, but there’ll always be a trace of that person. Some people said it was very moving, that they felt a big weight on them and got quite emotional. Some even said they cried while inside. But I’m not trying to make anyone feel bad about themselves. I’m just presenting material from the archives and from my own memories. It’s for you to look at, interpret, and respond how you want to. It’s just stating this is what’s happening in Australia. This is what happened to my family.
kith and kin remains on view in the Australia national pavilion through November 24, 2024.
