Grounded in Place: Dialogues between First Nations Artists from Australia, Taiwan, and Aotearoa

Abstract

This paper introduces “Grounded in Place: Dialogues between First Nations Artists from Australia, Taiwan and, Aotearoa,” a special issue of Pacific Arts. It provides background information about the October 2021 online symposium of the same name, which brought together nineteen First Nations artists, filmmakers, and curators, along with non-Indigenous scholars and museum professionals, from Australia, Taiwan, Aotearoa New Zealand, and the Philippines. The symposium explored the relationships that First Nations creative practitioners in the Indo-Pacific region have to the land and sea. Each symposium speaker discussed their creative practice in relation to their panel’s theme: history and sovereignty, land and community, site and materials, or place and space. The journal issue comprises written and visual essays, an interview, poetry, and reflective pieces from symposium participants. The contributions are based on the participants’ presentations and have been expanded. While acknowledging the different political, social, and environmental contexts of each contributor, as well as their highly distinctive perspectives and creative approaches, some common themes have emerged in this volume, which the guest editors outline in this introduction. These centre on First Nations Peoples’ complex relationships with land and water as sites of appropriation and struggles for sovereignty, as sources of learning and creative production, and as places of ancestral being and continuous belonging, community, and culture. The introduction provides a brief overview of each contributor’s essay, as well as background on the collaboration between the institutions that convened the symposium: Queensland University of Technology, Taiwan’s National Museum of Prehistory, and Aotearoa’s Govett-Brewster Art Gallery | Len Lye Centre. It also fleshes out some of the similarities between the countries’ histories, particularly the ongoing effects of colonisation upon their respective First Nations Peoples.