At the 2024 Asia Pacific Triennale, this work stood out, matched by a few others, one of which was Bombay Tilts Down 2022 by the Mumbai filmmaking collective CAMP. Across several screens, footage shot by CCTV cameras at the highest points in Mumbai—one an illegal high-rise, another a skyscraper favoured by white-collar criminals—pan downwards towards the ground-hugging slums. The structures of inequality and the architecture needed to maintain it are profiled as if in sections of an archaeological dig. Accompanying sound includes stirring music, silences, and revolutionary poetry and song.
These strategies invite us to nuance the standard meaning of “introversion.” They are compelling and immersive, mix direct address and indirect appeal, and are at once theatrical and absorbing—subversion from the inside out.
Why think about such strategies here and now? To most Australians, the idea that we might live in an authoritarian society is simply inconceivable. Not so for Indigenous Australians. The historical record from Settlement/Invasion to the rejection of the Voice to Parliament just last year is plain. Archie Moore is one artist who has created a work that registers that racist record yet transcends its deadly confinement by framing it within a larger narrative, indeed, the largest: the movement of the world through time. This resistant practice steps beyond the world pictures in contention, showing them to be lesser in scope than their claims to totality. This a worlding strategy.
Moore’s installation kith and kin for the Australian Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale paired and contrasted black and white on several registers. At first look, it did so aesthetically, as every element in the room paired and contrasted the two colours, the two ends of an absent spectrum. The installation is grounded in a pool cut into the centre of the floor, its sides and base painted black. Filled with water, absorbing the colours around it, it reads as a black infinity that nonetheless captures whatever light falls on it, whatever movement of the air, whatever reflection of walls and ceiling the viewer sees. Country is like that, when thought about abstractly.
Above the pool, a suspended table contains uneven stacks of white paper, some blank, many printed. These are photocopies of official documents relating to the recording, studying, and supporting of incarceration, and the punishment of Indigenous Australians. Some members of Moore’s family are included. Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders constitute 3.8 per cent of the population of Australia. The Australian Bureau of Statistics tells us that, as of December 2024, of the 44,262 people in custody, 15,901 were Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders; among the 82,823 serving custodial correction orders, 22,148; and of the eighty deaths in custody in 2023 and 2024, twenty-four were Indigenous. The table’s blankness evokes this slow suffocation by bureaucracy, enforced by incarceration. It is a white city of black death. But its finality is fragile, because it floats above the black infinity below.
And because it is slowly overwhelmed by what surrounds it. The four walls and the ceiling are painted with blackboard paint. With chalk, Moore drew a family tree of relationships branching outwards and back to himself, each member named within a small box, as in an ancestral chart. Its reach, however, is much wider, its resonance much deeper. In his curatorial statement of 18 April 2024, Moore says: “the phrase ‘kith and kin’ now simply means ‘friends and family’. however, an earlier old english definition that dates from the 1300s shows kith originally had the added meanings of ‘countrymen’ and also ‘one’s native land’, with kin meaning ‘family members’,” a usage that “feels more like a first nations understanding of attachment to place, people and time.” To Country, in a word.
In the chalk boxes, he names his Kamilaroi and Bigambul ancestors, to the extent that he can, given gaps in the records, their omission from or evasion of the colonial gaze. And he takes the further step of adding in the names of other Indigenous peoples from across Australia, names given by the colonisers and their names. As the tree reaches into the ceiling of the pavilion, making it a sky of memory, he includes the names of Indigenous peoples from elsewhere, then of colonisers, reaching back to the African ancestors of us all. Two black holes indicate the limits of records and the fading of memories. They are black holes into which visibility is drawn while, at the same time, fresh energy bursts to flow across the whole.
A table loaded with white, printed papers and handwritten names on the surrounding walls. There is a conceptualist lineage here, not least Joseph Kosuth’s Investigations series, which he began in the late 1960s. Kosuth provided texts and images inviting studious reading and sustained reflection along certain lines of thought—mostly thinking about thinking and the usefulness and limits of words in such thinking. The presumed framework was Western philosophy, especially one focused on language use and meaning.
Moore echoes the aesthetic of language-based Conceptual and Minimal Art installations, especially at the central table. Benjamin Buchloh critiqued conceptual artists for adopting what he called an “aesthetic of administration”, a presentational style that echoed the coercive control by bureaucracies. Moore contrasts this with the dark walls of kith and kin, which, inscribed by hand, invoke much older practices of marking the world’s surfaces—indeed, this marking reenacts the origins of language as the naming of other beings. It pictures us in the act of naming ourselves. Humanity, not as a universal, abstract concept, but as individual beings and families of the same kind, kin and kith.
The installation also records Moore’s four-month mark-making performance. Working backwards from the clustered ceiling down through layers that open up connections as they approach the present—typical of looking back towards the density of the past, here a cloud or tree canopy, not a historical line disappearing into invisibility—Moore reserved the last empty box for himself, into which he inscribed, not his name, but “Me.”
His statement reminds us that Country is like this, when thought about in once mythical and concrete ways. Such grounding is available to all despite being subject to constant erosion. This is anti-colonial world picturing at its most resonant. A worlding that is way more expansive and open than anything the autarchies have been able to conjure.
When kith and kin was awarded the Golden Lion at Venice, the jury praised it in these terms: “This installation stands out for its strong aesthetic, its lyricism and its invocation of a shared loss of an occluded past. With its inventory of thousands of names, Moore also offers a glimmer of the possibility of recovery.” An evident appreciation of a country with a culture capable of producing artists who expose its most profound contradictions, a nation willing to support its artists as they share these challenges on a world stage.
