Embodying
archives:
on practice,
memory &
art objects


Nanette Orly,
Shivanjani Lal &
Moorina BoninI 

︎︎︎

recording with captions now available


(ONLINE EVENT)

Knowledge institutions such as universities and museums have long centralised discussions around history and cultural narratives through collection and contextualisation, separating cultural materials from their origin, purpose and intent. It is a common colonial practice that is still in place today.

How do artists challenge the role of museums in preserving culture and reimagine the act of collecting? Investigating the role contemporary artists have in examining, sampling and reclaiming stories, artists Moorina Bonini, Shivanjani Lal and curator Nanette Orly will discuss archives, art objects and decolonial strategies in each of their own practices.

This event will be Auslan Interpreted.


About the Host: 

Nanette Orly is a curator based on Wiradjuri country. She has curated exhibitions and public programs across a number of arts organisations in Australia including Firstdraft, The Lock-Up and Bus Projects. She was a successful participant in 4A Curators’ Intensive 2018 program and her writing has appeared in Vault Magazine, Art Guide Australia, un Magazine and Running Dog. She is currently the Assistant Curator at Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA) and Chairperson of Runway Journal.


About the speakers:

Shivanjani Lal is a twice-removed Fijian-Indian-Australian artist. She is a member of the indentured labourer diaspora from the Indian and Pacific oceans, she is tied to a long history of familial movement; her work uses personal grief to account for ancestral loss and trauma. She employs intimate images of family, sourced from photo albums, along with video and images from contemporary to the Asia-Pacific to reconstruct temporary landscapes.


Moorina Bonini is a proud descendant of the Yorta Yorta Dhulunyagen family clan of Ulupna  and the Yorta Yorta and Wurundjeri-Woiwurrung Briggs/McCrae family. Moorina is an artist whose works are informed by her experiences as an Aboriginal and Italian woman. Her practice is driven by a self-reflexive methodology that enables the reexamination of lived experiences that have influenced the construction of her cultural identity. By unsettling the narrative placed upon Aboriginal people as a result of colonisation of Aboriginal Australia, Bonini’s practice is based within Indigenous Knowledge systems and brings this to the fore.



Image credit:
Shivanjani Lal, Suuruu (2019), Installation view from Like This Incense Your Spirit Must Burn at Bega Valley Regional Gallery, image courtesy of the artist
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