The National Gallery of Victoria has debuted its new, dedicated, permanent home for First Nations art in the centre of Melbourne's CBD and tourist footpath at Fed Square.
Opening October 12 at NGV's Ian Potter Centre, Wurrdha Marra - meaning 'many mobs' in Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung language, houses works from long-established and emerging artists with focus on presenting at the forefront.
Tony Albert, Treahna Hamm, Rover Thomas, Christian Thompson, Gary Lee, Nicole Monks, Gali Yalkarriwuy, Dhambit Mununggurr and Nonggirrnga Marawili are featured, among others.
NGV Senior Curator, Australian and First Nations Art Myles Russell-Cook told National Indigenous Times it's a rethink to how the industry has often presented art from a culture stretching back 60,000 years.
"First Peoples art has been almost looked at like a chapter within the story of Australian art. If you were to go through Australian art galleries, they would generally start with colonisation. There would be a lot of first peoples art throughout them, but it was always framed kind of like a chapter within the emergence of European art...We wanted to switch that," Mr Russell-Cook said.
He said it's "the first thing you see when you come to this gallery"
First People's art is nothing new to the state gallery, but now moves away from the exhibition model to a home with permanence.
Within the winding rooms, more traditional styles are showcased alongside design, architecture, weaving with more contemporary painting and, in an NGV first, moving image.
Bundjulung and Ngāpuhi artist Amrita Hepi's 'dolphin house' poses questions over who defines intelligence and Western knowledge systems in a retelling of a NASA experiment attempting to see dolphins communicate with humans across 15 minutes.
It compliments and contrasts Barkindji man Kent Morris' displayed work probing into how we see "a representation of that clash" between colonial and Indigenous intersection and co-existence while Wathaurung artist Aunty Marlene Gibson confronts first contact front-on.
"Aboriginal people, we were happy we were all doing our own thing and then all of a sudden these people came along and just claimed our land," Aunty Marlene said on Wednesday.
The breadth and diversity of medium on display is as considered as it is crucial.
"Creating dialogues across media, across place, across age...the key takeaway should be that this is a living and breathing culture...whether it's something that might look like what you would expect First Peoples art to be, or whether it's something completely unexpected," Mr Russell-Cook said.
"The point is about helping to remove the stereotype that people have that First Peoples art looks a certain way."
While Russell-Cook said "we're not a library, we're an art gallery", contextualising each piece hopes to remove misconceptions around the works.
Another conscious move, Wurrdha Marra includes text aside each and every work.
"We want you to stand in front of the work and have an encounter with that work, and feel something," he said.
"We do tend to not overdo it with extended texts…I would say probably 50% of works would have extended labels throughout most of our collection galleries.
"I've just had so many people say I have no idea what I'm looking at. And just thinking that they were looking at abstract art.
"They're not abstract at all, these are encyclopaedias, they're layered with knowledge, and they're depictions of place, but also of spirituality of history of ancestral stories….It's about helping people to understand that what they're looking at is often, when in the case of conceptual maps, is a language and it's a history."
Wurrdha Marra opens to the public on October 12.
