ABSTRACT
This chapter is about the importance of national Aboriginal art fairs: Desert Mob, Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair (DAAF), Revealed, and more recently, Tarnanthi, the AIATSIS Art Markets, the National Indigenous NAIDOC Art Fair and others. These key national art fairs present an Aboriginal art market not in decline nor in crisis but alive and thriving with a distinctive agency and vitality unique to the sector. Densely peopled and populated, not only by the life of art objects, but by Aboriginal artists, community members, remote art centre staff, art industry members, politicians, academics and more, Aboriginal art fairs present artists talks, dance performances, master classes, as well as art, generating spaces of thick cultural production and value in the making. This chapter explores how national art fairs contextualise Aboriginal art in sentient and vitally embodied terms, attesting to country, to place, to lifeworld and making this vitality into an experience and encounter.
Chapter 18
Through two detailed case studies of exhibitionary projects by three pioneering Indigenous curators, this chapter seeks to demonstrate that Indigenous curation is not only an important political act of recognition and visibility, it is also deeply indebted to Indigenous cultural practices that draw on invocations of the ceremonial, extra-discursive meaning and practice, a deep responsiveness to place and declarative stances that foreground Indigenous perspectives. Through projects situated within high-prestige sites of national, international and contemporary value, this chapter offers an expansive model of Indigenous curation that has been developing over three decades, although its genealogy is demonstrated to be much longer. This chapter will consider the methodologies of Indigenous forms of curation and interrogate the work of pioneering curatorial figures whose distinct exhibitionary projects have instrumentalised Indigenous curation as a polemical strategy of political activism and a broader platform of social and cultural practice. These case studies reveal the ways in which exhibitions have both created new and broadened complacent formulations of history, identity, museology and contemporaneity.
