The Venice Biennale is one of the major art and cultural festival held throughout the year.
Alex Marshall reported a week ago how, “Archie Moore, an Indigenous Australian artist… created an installation including a monumental family tree, [that] won the top prize.” Artists from 85 countries competed for this coveted prize. Moore’s piece was called “kith and kin.”
Marshall writes how, “Moore [drew] a family tree in chalk on the walls and ceiling of the Australia Pavilion. The web of names encompasses 3,484 people and Moore says it stretches back 65,000 years… In the center of the room is a huge table covered with stacks of government documents relating to the deaths of Indigenous Australians in police custody.”
The chair of the selection committee praised Moore’s work for “its invocation of shared loss for occluded pasts.”
Occluded is an interesting word. It means to “stop, close up, or obstruct.” What Moore’s did was bring attention to how entire cultures, lives, and elements of our past can be occluded and there is power in naming this truth and to bring that past into the present. Because if we think about, we all have occluded pasts that perhaps deserve an invocation.
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