Stairway to Heaven Installation Image

"In Tennant Creek, Aboriginal men have been stereotyped into figures of notoriety and disrepute – made to live on the edge of two worlds – a place they not only inhabit but ride. They are the embodiment of NIRIN, and it is here that they are emboldened to speak their truth.

In ‘Stairway to Heaven’ the Brio take a metaphorical leap from the ‘edge’ toward a revolutionary and transcendent future: an inclusive hieroglyphic and filmic strip tease to redemption."

The Tennant Creek Brio is an artist collective who navigate their individual practices through a collective spirit of energetic, experimental and transformative working, captured by their name brio, an Italian word meaning mettle, fire, or vivacity of style or performance. The restless energy of the work confronts the colonial projects many tendrils and forges a multi-layered visual response from old practices and new collective imaginings. The works traverse pre-colonial times, through to stories of conflict, massacres, mining, and knowledge from country. With a sensitivity to this particular industrial site, and through re-working disused materials such as televisions and pokie machines, the material world becomes part of a layered social critique, overseen by larger than life heroic figures that come from across vast histories and places, from the ancient world to the present-day.