The Most Stolen Race On Earth
Among the galleries scattered throughout Darwin that participate in the city’s annual Arts Festival, the Northern Centre for Contemporary Art (NCCA) has made a deliberate break from the spectacle of the Indigenous art market in order to highlight some harder truths regarding cultural exchange in Australia. Bungaree’s Farm, a set of videos curated by Djon Mundine OAM, and The Most Stolen Race On Earth, a series of mixed-media installation works by Sydney-based artists Blak Douglas and Adam Geczy, lay bare the inherent imbalance of cultural exchange between white imperialists and First Nations peoples. The exhibitions achieve this through a split focus: Mundine examining the internalised conflict of Indigenous peoples in their efforts to remain true to their culture while staying alive in white Australia, and Douglas and Geczy revealing the brutality of the external apparatus which ensures this negotiation remains a continuous life or death situation for Indigenous people. This exhibition is required viewing amid the buzz of the Darwin Festival, an event that does not benefit in the slightest from reminders that Indigenous artists must always forfeit something of themselves that their white counterparts do not. The festival benefits even less from reminders that such compromises made by Indigenous artists form the tip of the iceberg of the underlying issue. This makes Mundine’s, Douglas’s and Geczy’s contribution all the more crucial.
Bungaree’s Farm poetically explores the complexity of the inescapable internalised conundrum facing Indigenous people: to assimilate and sell out or to resist white hegemony until it becomes the death of you. Mundine collaborated with fifteen Indigenous Sydney-based artists (including Blak Douglas) who submitted short video works in response to the historical figure of Bungaree. At the