Disciplines:

Indigenous Studies and Creative Arts

Investigators:

The investigators include Lead CI Associate Professor Ali Gumillya Baker (Mirning), Professor Simone Ulalka Tur (Yankunytjatjara), Associate Professor Natalie Harkin (Narungga), Dr Faye Rosas Blanch (Yidinyji, MBarbaram) from Flinders, and Professor Katerina Teaiwa (Banaba, Tabiteuea, Rabi Island), Australian National University, Dr Lou Bennett AM (Yorta Yorta Dja Dja Wurrung), University of Melbourne, and PI Dr Romaine Moreton (Goenpul Yagerabul Minjungbal Bundjulung), Director of First Nations and Outreach, Australian Film Television and Radio School.

Summary:

A National Indigenous Creative Arts Framework to transform humanities disciplines at Australian universities is the aim of a project awarded funding under the ARC Discovery Indigenous Scheme and led by researchers at Flinders University.

The three-year project will bring together a dynamic team of investigators, all Indigenous women and creative art practitioners, to examine the generational impacts of colonial institutions on Indigenous culture in the first type research of this scale in Australia.

Lead Chief Investigator, Dr Ali Gumillya Baker in the College of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences, says the project will examine the inter-generational impacts of colonial institutions and archives on Indigenous communities and how academic discourse, through Indigenous language, poetry, song, visual arts, and performance, can transform research and teaching at Australian universities.

The project will also incorporate a survey of current and emerging Indigenous literature, a series of creative workshops, annual symposiums at Australian universities, specialist publications in reputable journals and support for Indigenous PhD scholars.

Grant:

• ARC Indigenous Discovery $468,026

Category:

Creative Arts

Disciplines:

Indigenous Studies and Creative Arts

Visual Arts, Performance, Creative Writing, Video/Film

Investigators:

Associate Professor Ali Gumillya Baker (Mirning), Professor Simone Ulalka Tur (Yankunytjatjara), Associate Professor Natalie Harkin (Narungga), Dr Faye Rosas Blanch (Yidinyji/MBarbaram)

Summary:

TarraWarra Biennial 2023: ua usiusi faʻavaʻasavili, focuses attention on contemporary artists tied by ancestry or by materiality to the many lands and waters constituting Australia and its immediate neighbourhood of the soil and watery expanses termed Asia and the Great Ocean.

PERMEATE: This is a slow agitation, permeating tributaries from wetland to rock-hole to spring and mighty flows that silt and stir at mouths of sand, salt and clay. This is our body, awash and afloat, water-bearing and bearing-witness to poison and ignorance and greed. We are river and sediment, storied and seeping an exchange of love and dangerous ideas. This is a slow mapping of decolonial flows that soak vital inlets and outlets, guiding currents to vast oceans of kinship deep. This is our body as mangrove as skin and lung; a fragile filtering of lateral roots marked beyond thousands of years to reach toward skies and breathe free through tides of saturated resistance.

Grant:

• TarraWarra Museum of Art grant: $15,000

Category:

Kaurna Country and heritage

St Kilda mangroves

Indigenous storytelling

Environment

Protection of Country (lands, waters, skies)

Activism

Fish traps and net-making

Disciplines:

Indigenous Studies and Creative Arts

Visual Arts, Performance, Creative Writing, Video/Film

Investigators:

Associate Professor Ali Gumillya Baker (Mirning), Professor Simone Ulalka Tur (Yankunytjatjara), Associate Professor Natalie Harkin (Narungga), Dr Faye Rosas Blanch (Yidinyji/MBarbaram)

Summary:

This work included an exhibition outcome on the theme of INVISIBILITY and the location of MOD. near Karrawirra Parri, and presented at MOD. in 2022. It produced a series of digital works woven into gallery and building spaces to form a layer that connects visitors to stories of place.

REFLECT is a series of slow, small-flow contemplations; a digital deep-listening of place that honours Karrawirra Parri toward new visibilities. This work considers what it means to be present in shadows of absence, silence, and invisibility. This work reflects the shimmering light and shade of a long story, attending to traces of beauty and love in deep lessons from Country. We present a unique mixed-media series of quiet storied-moments with a soundscape of river reflection poetry between Karawirra Parri's West End and Pilta Wodli.

We acknowledge: Senior Kaurna Elder Uncle Lewis Yarluburka O'Brien, Senior Kaurna Man Mickey Kumatpi O'Brien, and Kaurna poets Dominic Guerrera, Taylor Power-Smith, Dearna Newchurch, and Carly Tarkari Dodd.

Grant:

• MOD. University of South Australia: $20,000

Category:

Heritage and Country

The River Karrawirra Parri

Kaurna storytelling

Environment

Protection of Country (lands, waters, skies)

Disciplines:

Indigenous Studies and Creative Arts

Visual Arts, Performance, Creative Writing, Video/Film

Investigators:

Associate Professor Ali Gumillya Baker (Mirning), Professor Simone Ulalka Tur (Yankunytjatjara), Associate Professor Natalie Harkin (Narungga), Dr Faye Rosas Blanch (Yidinyji/MBarbaram)

Summary:

Since we formed in 2014, we have engaged in a series of intertextual, performative Sovereign Acts, that reveal and challenge the suppression and exclusion of Aboriginal people by institutions of knowledge, culture and power.

In these Sovereign Acts, we explore the things that we were once bound to historically, and what we choose to (un)bind ourselves from now and into the future. For 52 ACTIONS, we are presenting highlights from the Sovereign Acts series as an archive of our work.

Grant:

• ArtSpace: $1500

Category:

Creative arts praxis research showcase

Disciplines:

Indigenous Studies and Creative Arts

Visual Arts, Performance, Creative Writing, Video/Film

Investigators:

Associate Professor Ali Gumillya Baker (Mirning), Professor Simone Ulalka Tur (Yankunytjatjara), Associate Professor Natalie Harkin (Narungga), Dr Faye Rosas Blanch (Yidinyji/MBarbaram)

Summary:

This multi-stage-multi-site project is presented through a poetics of performance, song, poetry and video-projection. The installation activist pieces enact inter-generational transformations of old and new stories to explore the bound and the free. What ideas we are bound to historically, and what we choose to (un)bind ourselves to and from now and into the future.

We acknowledge Dr Julie Gough as creative collaborator in conceptualising and presenting Act I. We acknowledge Nancy Bates for assistance with the adaptation to a song of the Dedication poem by Mona Ngitji Ngitji Tur. We acknowledge Katie Inawantji Morrison for violin.

Grant:

• Australia Council for the Arts: $19,000

Category:

Creative development research and performance

Disciplines:

Indigenous Studies and Creative Arts

Visual Arts, Performance, Creative Writing, Video/Film

Investigators:

Associate Professor Ali Gumillya Baker (Mirning), Professor Simone Ulalka Tur (Yankunytjatjara), Associate Professor Natalie Harkin (Narungga), Dr Faye Rosas Blanch (Yidinyji/MBarbaram)

Summary:

Bound and Unbound: Act 2 built on the successful experimental Act 1 exhibition at Fontanelle Gallery 24 August- 21 September 2014 extending the ideas and their expression. The performative aspects of Act 1 contributed to engaging Aboriginal community members who have historically been excluded from non-Indigenous run cultural spaces. When Aboriginal people’s voices are heard and listened to, this compels an engagement with the broader Aboriginal community. In Adelaide spaces of representation are often bound, and through performative acts such as song, we can be unbound.

Act 2 was a project in three stages. Two performances and accompanying images and installation narrative on 10 bus shelters in shelters in the city and Adelaide suburbs to coincide with TARNANTHI Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Visual Art Festival in October 2015, performed in the outdoor space between the Flinders City Gallery and State Library Institute Building on North Terrace. 

Act 2 speaks back to colonial institutions of power as dominant repositories of culture/knowledge. These institutions on North Terrace contain many founding documents and historic journals, letters, images and diaries of non-Indigenous explorers and colonists, as well as their depictions of Aboriginal people. Within these collections are representations of the artist’s families and communities. Unbound Act 2 performed, projected and responded to these imposed colonial spaces. We retold the rarely told histories of these spaces from Indigenous embodied perspectives.

Grant:

• Australia Council for the Arts: $28,965

Category:

Creative development research and performance

Disciplines:

Indigenous Studies and Creative Arts

Visual Arts, Performance, Creative Writing, Video/Film

Investigators:

Associate Professor Ali Gumillya Baker (Mirning), Professor Simone Ulalka Tur (Yankunytjatjara), Associate Professor Natalie Harkin (Narungga), Dr Faye Rosas Blanch (Yidinyji/MBarbaram)

Summary:

Sovereign Acts III – REFUSE is the third work in a trilogy of research, video and performance works that explore the capacity of ideas to both bind and set free, alongside cultural continuance and institutional containment. This work continues the investigation through the lens of community continuity, environmental campaigning, climate justice, and the Port River.

Through their ongoing research and collaborative practices Unbound are exploring critical-creative resistance and refusal to acts of environmental degradation on Aboriginal land, the role of Aboriginal women in caring for Country, intergeneration transmission of knowledge and sovereignty through protest.

Commissioned by Vitalstatistix for Climate Century: a festival of climate change art for the 21st Centure, November 8-25, 2018.

Grant:

• Vitalstatistix $20,000

Category:

Creative development research and performance

Disciplines:

Indigenous Studies and Creative Arts

Visual Arts, Performance, Creative Writing, Video/Film

Investigators:

Associate Professor Ali Gumillya Baker (Mirning), Professor Simone Ulalka Tur (Yankunytjatjara), Associate Professor Natalie Harkin (Narungga), Dr Faye Rosas Blanch (Yidinyji/MBarbaram)

Summary:

Sovereign Act IV | OBJECT is the fourth Act, commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art for The National: New Australian Art, 2019.

The Unbound Collective’s Sovereign Acts IV: OBJECT (2019) is an interrogation of the passive condition of the object, and an active protest of objectification. The performers physically and conceptually move within this binary, their identities bound and unbound. The Unbound Collective move together as an embodied single, complex thought, where the living flesh and the archive are caught in a dance. The Unbound Collective conducts a dialogue with the cold, hard fixity of colonial structures and patriarchal order, their unquiet tranquillity instantaneously destabilising the rigid structures of institutionalism. Small projectors in their hands marking their way, The Unbound Collective interrupt the scientific gaze, disturb colonial authority, and repatriate the named and un-named Aboriginal people held in institutional collections, augmenting a repatriation process that is simultaneously an act of love. The women walk carefully, their light-bearing forms moving through moribund spaces, weaving kinetic maps that reinscribe ancestral presence back into place.

Grant:

• Art Gallery of NSW and Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney: $8000

Category:

Creative arts praxis research exhibition retrospective

Disciplines:

Indigenous Studies and Creative Arts

Visual Arts, Performance, Creative Writing, Video/Film

Investigators:

Associate Professor Ali Gumillya Baker (Mirning), Professor Simone Ulalka Tur (Yankunytjatjara), Associate Professor Natalie Harkin (Narungga), Dr Faye Rosas Blanch (Yidinyji/MBarbaram)

Summary:

Sovereign Act V | CALLING is the fifth Act as an installation and performance commissioned by Samstag Museum of Art, 25 Apr to 19 Jul 2019.

Sovereign Act V: CALLING presents a critical reflection though poetry, story, song, performance, video-installation and archival letters, responding to two major Australian War Memorial exhibitions launch on ANZAC Day, 2019: For Country For Nation, and Reality in Flames: modern Australian art and the Second world war.

This work is concerned with making visible what has been concealed by colonial institutions of power, and beckons the viewer to pay attention, to look carefully for absences in our collective knowledge and to not be passive in our investigations, with particular consideration to Australia's First People's representation in war.

We acknowledge Kaurna Elder and scholar, Uncle Lewis Yarluburka O’Brien and Senior Kaurna knowledge holder Michael O'Brien, as collaborators in this work.

Grant:

• Samstag

Category:

Creative arts praxis research showcase

Disciplines:

Indigenous Studies and Creative Arts

Visual Arts, Performance, Creative Writing, Video/Film

Investigators:

Associate Professor Ali Gumillya Baker (Mirning), Professor Simone Ulalka Tur (Yankunytjatjara), Associate Professor Natalie Harkin (Narungga), Dr Faye Rosas Blanch (Yidinyji/MBarbaram)

Summary:

The Unbound Collective returns to Tarnanthi with a retrospective showcasing their long-running Sovereign Acts series, which reveals and challenges the containment and exclusion of Aboriginal people by institutions of knowledge, culture and power.

Sovereign Acts | In the Wake is presented as part of Tarnanthi: Festival Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art. Tarnanthi is presented by the Art Gallery of South Australia.

This retrospective of our five Sovereign Acts considers the ideas of what it means to be bound, and what it means to be free. Placed on the skirts between the records, are new imaginings. Sovereign loves poems, songs of calling for long-held philosophies, for times of grief, for protection of country and activism. Our love of trees, our bodies and love letters to our families. We are our future archive. We are compelled to perform in the wake. As ours skirts slowly twirl, the archives change and blend into new awakenings. To rise-up, stay afloat and keep watch in the wake of the last light.

We honour our families and communities and all those who continue to stand in solidarity. We would like to thank everyone, the individuals and organizations, who have supported, mentored, collaborated and encouraged this work over six years. Living in the wake is living black existence. Bound and Unbound.

Grant:

• Migration Museum: $7000

Category:

Creative arts praxis research exhibition retrospective

Disciplines:

Indigenous Studies and Creative Arts

Visual Arts, Performance, Creative Writing, Video/Film

Investigators:

Associate Professor Ali Gumillya Baker (Mirning), Professor Simone Ulalka Tur (Yankunytjatjara), Associate Professor Natalie Harkin (Narungga), Dr Faye Rosas Blanch (Yidinyji/MBarbaram)

Summary:

Purple Flowers and Dust was commissioned for a multi-site exhibition curated by Lisa Radford and Yhonnie Scarce, The Image is Not Nothing (Concrete Archives). The exhibition premiered at ACE Open as part of the 2021 Adelaide Festival before touring to the Margaret Lawrence Gallery, The University of Melbourne.

This work Purple Flowers and Dust honours legacies of un-ending relationality through histories of activism, resilience and protest, and the active reconnection and repatriation of old stories lost, found and re-imagined. These stories shape and rupture our skin as Country, through colonial archives and beating hearts. Our bodies layered with landscape, records and memory – we wear it all to shine a light on anti-nuclear activism in South Australia and the ongoing relevance of the Irati Wanti, Leave the Poiso campaign led by the Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta (senior Aboriginal women from Coober Pedy, South Australia) from the late 1990s to the early 2000s.

This is an old love story about radio-active dust and ideas that refuses to settle, the refusal to accept desecration through uranium mining, the transport of waste and uranium oxide concentrate through lands/rivers/seas, and the ongoing struggle against a waste dump on Aboriginal lands. We honour all First Nations and Pacific communities who fight to protect country and black lives.

This is our call and response responsibility to protect Country and refuse the old fixed-imaginings of State. We are indebted to the wisdom, strength and love of our ancestors and activists such as the Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta. We sing, write and project our fallout-stories against this larger epic backdrop to our collective-collected lives, and we continue to talk straight out.

We acknowledge Dr Lou Bennett in co-writing the song Purple Flowers, with the Unbound Collective, which was debuted at the exhibition opening, performed by Simone Ululka Tur.

Grant:

• ACE Open as part of the 2021 Adelaide Festival $2000

Category:

Creative arts praxis research showcase

Disciplines:

Indigenous Studies and Creative Arts

Investigators:

Associate Professor Natalie Harkin

Summary:

This project aims to investigate a history of Aboriginal domestic service in South Australia which is currently not documented or widely acknowledged. It will use ‘archival-poetics’ as a critical-creative methodology to generate new knowledge responding to historical assimilation-based policies, particularly those targeting girls for removal from their families, and enabling indentured domestic labour.

The Project will support Aboriginal people creatively engage with and respond to State records to counter and transform hegemonic narratives of colonial history. This work will contribute to studies in global trans-indigenous literature and archival research from Indigenous Australian standpoints, and contribute to well-being and healing.

Grant:

• ARC DECRA DE18100559: $410,022

Category:

Indigenous women's Memory Stories

Domestic Labour

Indigenous history

Creative and visual arts

Disciplines:

Indigenous Studies and Creative Arts

Investigators:

Associate Professor Natalie Harkin, Narungga

Summary:

This project aims to investigate Indigenous community and colonial archives as powerful sites of social and cultural memory, and creative intervention. These sites can locate, repatriate, and transform fundamental narratives of history and collective memory to reassert and determine Indigenous voice and agency.

This work partners with peak Indigenous arts and archive networks to demonstrate the value of Indigenous living-legacy archive innovations and initiatives for cultural preservation and renewal, through unique community-led modes of storytelling.

It benefits community wellbeing and healing through self-determined knowledge production and memory stories of local and global impact, and truth-telling legacy work for future generations.

Grant:

• ARC Future Fellowship (ARC FT220100078): $908,906.00

Category:

Indigenous archives, creative and visual arts