Daisy and Heather discuss race: Curating Feminist Friendship
Lecture by Dr Natalie King OAM, organized by the Institute von Art Theory and Cultural Studies as well as the Institute for Education in the Arts.
How can we form interdependencies with First Nations’ artists as curatorial allies? What is the role of care and walking side by side between curator and artist? Can togetherness and female friendship counter rigid institutional hierarchies that are embedded in museums, biennales and exhibition making? What kind of Indigenous epistemologies can be deployed to ensure we collectively shift from ‘I’ to ‘we’?
This presentation focuses on three curatorial case studies of working/walking with Indigenous artists: Tracey Moffatt in the Australian pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale, Destiny Deacon at the Biennale of Sydney 2024 and Sharjah Biennale 2023 as well as Natalie’s recently published monograph, Do you believe in love?, on Kaylene Whiskey, who lives in the remote Aboriginal community Indulkana, APY Lands.
Dr Natalie King OAM is an Australian curator, scholar, writer and former Enterprise Professor of Visual Arts at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her research focusses on multispecies assemblies, feminism and Indigeneity from the Global South and the Himalayas. She has curated three national pavilions at the Venice Biennale: Maria Madeira: Kiss and Don’t Tell, the inaugural Timor-Leste Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale 2024; Yuki Kihara: Paradise Camp, Aotearoa New Zealand at the 59th Venice Biennale 2022 and Powerhouse Museum, Sydney 2023, the first transgender artist from Samoa, and Tracey Moffatt: My Horizon, Australian Pavilion, the 57th Venice Art Biennale 2017, the first solo presentation by an Aboriginal artist.
She is a member of the Ecological Art Research Cluster at NICHE: Centre for Environmental Humanities, Ca’Foscari, University of Venice with whom she has delivered symposia including “Swimming Against the Tide” and “Sea, Soil and Solidarity” for the 59th and 60th Venice Biennales. King is President of AICA-Australia (International Association of Art Critics, Paris) and she has contributed to numerous publications including Phaidon books, Flash Art International, LEAP, Ocula and Art + Australia.