Yiwarra Kuju : Turning Space into Place at the National Museum of Australia
Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route was the most successful exhibition ever shown at the National Museum of Australia (NMA). Anchored around a display of contemporary Aboriginal desert paintings, the show encompassed the NMA’s most important attempt to honour Aboriginal concepts, values and voices in an exhibition. As a colonial history told from Aboriginal perspectives, and complex cultural experience wrapped in a fine art show, the exhibition inhabited unsettled curatorial ground. Indeed, the very idea of an « exhibition » was questioned and transformed through the cross-cultural and collaborative curatorial process. The ultimate collaborative act underpinning Yiwarra Kuju..., however, was in taking the Aboriginal artists and the conceptual challenge of their work seriously; giving Aboriginal art the institutional space to question conventions and assumptions underpinning curatorial approaches to Indigenous material culture and intangible heritage. Yiwarra Kuju... tested several frontiers in the curatorial approach to both Aboriginal art and Australian history. In this paper I explore the unique conceptual, political and methodological issues that defined the curatorial process.