Thursday, 9 May 2024 • 03:00PM - 04:30PM. Schaeffer Library Seminar Room 210, Mills Building (A26) Free. Part of the Art History Seminar Series, convened by Mary Roberts and presented by the discipline of Art History at the University of Sydney, with support from the Power Institute.
This seminar is also accessible via Zoom (click here to join).
Australia's exhibition at the 2024 Venice Biennale is presented by artist Archie Moore and curator Ellie Buttrose, with a work entitled "kith and kin". In this presentation Ellie Buttrose, just returned from Venice, will discuss the work and her curatorial involvement.
Archie Moore / William Clevin in kith and kin 2024 / Digitally altered found photograph / Australia Pavilion, Venice Biennale 2024 / Graphic design work: Žiga Testen and Stuart Geddes / © the artist / Courtesy: the artist and The Commercial.
Archie Moore has explained the title as follows:
“The phrase ‘kith and kin’ simply means friends and family but an earlier Old English definition for Kith dates from the 1300s and originally meant ‘countrymen’ (kith also meant ‘one’s native land’) and Kin: ‘family members’. These words gradually took on the present looser sense: friends and family. Many Indigenous Australians, especially those who grew up on Country, see the land and other living things as part of their kinship system – the land itself can be a mentor, teacher, parent to a child.
“I was interested in the phrase as it aptly describes the artwork in the Pavilion, but I was also interested in the Old English meaning of the words as it feels more like a First Nations understanding of attachment to place, people and time.”
Ellie Buttrose is the Curator of kith and kin by Archie Moore in the Australia Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2024. She is Curator of Contemporary Australian Art at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane. At QAGOMA, Ellie recently curated ‘Living Patterns’ 2023, ‘Work, Work, Work’ 2019, ‘Limitless Horizon: Vertical Perspective’ 2017; with Katina Davidson she co-curated ‘Embodied Knowledge’ 2022; and is a member of the curatorial team for ‘The Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art’ 2024, 2021 and 2018. In 2019, Ellie curated ‘Material Place: Reconsidering Australian Landscapes’ at University of New South Wales Galleries. Photograph credit: Rhett Hammerton, Brisbane 2024.