ABSTRACT
This chapter foregrounds motherhood and storytelling in curatorial practice, in order to acknowledge the ancient, deeply imbricated relationship between mothering and Country in Aboriginal Australia, and to begin to articulate a feminist curating in solidarity with Indigenous matriarchies. How can curators, including feminist curators, listen to, learn from, and amplify Indigenous curatorial and artistic practices without recourse to extractive or re-traumatizing methods? How can feminist curators be “good relations,” in the words of Aileen Moreton-Robinson, a Goenpul woman of the Quandamooka people of Moreton Bay, and author of Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism, to others, to Country, and to more than human beings? This essay unspools these questions through a close reading of one exhibition, Dale Harding: Through a lens of visitation, held in 2021 at the Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) and curated by Hannah Mathews, and by attending to the strategies of relationality and concealment used in the display of works by the artist D Harding and their mother Kate.
