From fluent to Culture Warriors: Curatorial trajectories for Indigenous Australian art overseas

Abstract

In recent decades, Indigenous artists have been strongly represented in exhibitions of Australian art offshore. This article explores two such exhibitions: fluent, staged at the Venice Biennale in 1997, and Culture Warriors, shown at the Katzen Arts Center at the American University in Washington, DC, in 2009. These exhibitions took place during an era in which issues around Indigenous rights and recognition were frequently the subject of domestic public debate and policy turmoil. They have also been significant staging posts on Indigenous Australian art’s trajectory towards contemporary fine art status – something that, while no longer questioned in Australia, continues to be precarious overseas. By considering how both political and aesthetic concerns were addressed by Indigenous curators Hetti Perkins and Brenda L. Croft, this discussion sheds light on the ways in which emergent political meanings associated with Indigeneity have driven new kinds of institutional practice and international cultural brokerage.