My country, I still call Australia home: Contemporary art from Black Australia

Director’s Message The Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art is delighted to present ‘My Country, I Still Call Australia Home: Contemporary Art from Black Australia’. This landmark Collection-based exhibition, drawn from over three decades of research and Collection-building, highlights the brilliance and diversity of contemporary Indigenous Australian art practice, including sculpture, print, painting, photography, video art, installation and more. My country : this is how many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists title their works. It’s a simple and assertive statement about their resolute connections to their lands and we use it here in the exhibition title to recognise and celebrate these profound bonds. The second part of the title, ‘I Still Call Australia Home’, alludes to both the original 1980 Peter Allen song and its cover version by Indigenous hip-hop artists The Last Kinection but, even more importantly, it suggests the resilience of Indigenous Australian people. It also acknowledges the vital roles of art and music in Indigenous Australian societies: carrying oral histories, conveying ideas of country, and highlighting contemporary experiences. In this exhibition, country becomes an avenue for the exploration of history and contemporary political and social issues, as well as physical country itself, through three central themes. ‘My history’ offers Indigenous perspectives on Australian history; ‘My life’ addresses the political and the social; and ‘My country’ relates to the physical country, the crux of which is a salon- style installation of paintings, designed to map some of the key art-making Indigenous communities from western Queensland to Western Australia. These themes are further explored in the accompanying film program, My Life as I Live It: First Peoples and Black Cinema, and in the essays and Chris Saines CNZM Director Arthur Koo-ekka Pambegan Jr Wik-Mungkan people QLD Flying Fox Story Place (detail) 2002–03 Carved milkwood ( Alstonia muellerana ) with synthetic polymer paint and natural pigments Commissioned 2002 with funds from the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Grant 9