NIRIN Virtual Tour: Artspace

NIRIN at Artspace presents collectives and deep connections to collaboration. All artists have worked with their respective communities and histories to engage with issues relating to misogyny, colonial indoctrination of particular religions and hetero-normative values, and remote communities dealing with the fall out of loss of land and complex histories of cultural genocide.

Historic materials and cultural artefacts - from disused pokie machines, to world war medical stretchers, to a re-created television set and re-worked colonial imagery - are brought to the present, not merely as representations of a discernible past, but are realities still present today reflecting inter-generational trauma or sites of reference still being neglected. 

A central theme of NIRIN is MURIGUWAL GILAND (meaning 'different stories'). The works presented here are testament to the dynamic ways that artists can complicate historical narratives and challenge dominant positions, telling stories through the touch of diverse materials, the blurring of history and fiction, and through departure from linear teleological time. Moreover, these works are often a presentation of multiple shifting views rather than a singular position, presenting modes that are inquisitive, responsive as well as critical.

A common thread of re-visiting colonial pasts asks not only how they resonate in or effect the present, but how have forms morphed to decade recognition, what links have been buried or obscured? Intertwined with this re-visitation, is also a carrying forward of cultural practices, stories and identities that have been subject to erasure, and a celebration of new forms that have emerged out of survival, disruption, collective healing, and the passing on of knowledge.

Navigate through Artspace and explore the artists of NIRIN.