Ngiyaningy Maran Yaliwaunga Ngaara-li (Our Ancestors Are Always Watching)

"As a Gomeroi yinnar photographer, it has always been my responsibility to bring our stories into the public domain, to connect and engage audiences with images through a black lens.
For most of my life, I have documented the diversity of Aboriginal experiences: politics, sport, dance, song, community, family.
Ngiyaningy Maran Yaliwaunga Ngaara-li (Our Ancestors Are Always Watching) shifts my work into a new phase. It is an opportunity to delve into my archive, to curate my lifetime’s work and re-present it as a kaleidoscopic compendium of Aboriginal contemporary history within a gallery setting. It is an immersive, multichannel audio-visual black takeover of the white cube: a ‘Blackout’.
Ngiyaningy Maran Yaliwaunga Ngaara-li provides an insight into what it means to be a First Nations person surviving and thriving in a colonial world."

The dense, interconnected and expansive photographic archive of Barbara McGrady highlights the nature of her images as agentic forces that not only document and witness, but participate across cultural realms, centring Indigenous histories and stories, and becoming tools for activism and shifting perceptions. The texts embedded within this installation are prose and words from McGrady’s social media sites.