Archie Moore's immersive installation for the Australian pavilion, Kith and kin (Kinds and Friends), has won the Golden Lion for best national participation at the 60th Venice Art Biennale, which opens its doors to the public this Saturday ( until November 24). In an edition in which indigenous people have taken the stage, Moore's work appears as a celebration of the resistance of the Australian aborigines, the oldest continuous culture of humanity, which throughout history has suffered numerous attempts to annihilation, physical and cultural. The artist, of Kamilaroi and Bigambul origin on his mother's side and British and Scottish on his father's side, has drawn with white chalk a dense family tree that dates back 65,000 years and occupies the four walls and ceiling of the pavilion. In the center, and as if floating on a puddle of water, there is a huge table on which rest thousands of partially redacted documents related to the deaths of indigenous Australians in police custody in recent decades.
"In this quietly powerful pavilion, Moore worked for months to hand-draw in chalk a monumental First Nations family tree. Thus, 65,000 years of history, both recorded and lost, are inscribed on the dark walls and ceiling, asking "to viewers to fill in the blanks and assimilate the inherent fragility of this sad archive," argues the award jury in a statement. For its part, the artist has pointed out that "aboriginal kinship systems include all living beings in the world. environment in a broader network of relationships; The earth itself can be a mentor or a father to a child. "We are all one and share the responsibility of caring for all living things now and into the future."
The jury has also awarded a special mention to the Kosovo pavilion for the installation The Echoing Silences of Metal and Skin, in which Doruntina Kastrati examines the precariousness of working conditions, especially for women, after the Kosovo war of 1999. The The project consists of four sculptures with metallic resonances that allude to the oral histories of the employees of a Turkish delight factory in Prizren. These women produce approximately ten thousand boxes of the titular sweets daily. Their work in the factory is repetitive and they do it standing, which is why almost half of them have to undergo knee replacement surgery.
For its part, the Mataaho collective from New Zealand has taken the Golden Lion for the best participant in the central exhibition, Foreigners Everywhere, with Takapau (2022), the large installation that opens the exhibition at the Arsenale. Jerusalem-born artist Samia Halaby, 87, and Argentine artist La Chola Poblete also received special mentions.
