Archie Moore and Ellie Buttrose are the artist and curator commissioned by Creative Australia to exhibit at the Australia Pavilion for the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia.
Creative Australia is the commissioner for Australia’s National Participation at the Venice Biennale 2024 and the producer of the Australia at the Venice Biennale project.
Image courtesy of Creative Australia. Photo: Rhett Hammerton.
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Kamilaroi/Bigambul artist Archie Moore (b. 1970, Toowoomba) works across media in conceptual, research-based portrayals of self and national histories. His ongoing interests include key signifiers of identity (skin, language, smell, home, genealogy, flags), the borders of intercultural understanding and misunderstanding and the wider concerns of racism.
Recent solo exhibitions by Archie include: Pillors of Democracy, 2023, Cairns Art Gallery; Dwelling (Victorian Issue), 2022, Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne; The Colour Line: Archie Moore & W.E.B. Du Bois, 2021, University of New South Wales Galleries, Sydney; and Archie Moore 1970–2018, 2018, Griffith University Art Museum, Brisbane. Significant recent group exhibitions comprise: Ever Present: First Peoples Art of Australia, 2022, National Gallery of Singapore; Embodied Knowledge: Queensland Contemporary Art, 2022, Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; UN/LEARNING AUSTRALIA, 2021, Seoul Museum of Art; Indigenous Art Triennial, 2017, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; The National: New Australian Art, 2017, Carriageworks, Sydney; and Biennale of Sydney, 2016, Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney. In 2018, Archie’s United Neytions was permanently installed at Sydney Airport’s International Terminal.
Archie’s artworks are held in major public collections across Australia including: Artbank; Griffith University Art Museum, Brisbane; Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne; Murray Art Museum Albury; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; National Portrait Gallery, Canberra; Newcastle Art Gallery; Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; Queensland University of Technology Art Museum, Brisbane; University of Queensland Art Museum, Brisbane; and University of Sydney; and University of Technology Sydney. His art is also held in the collection of Fondation Opale, Lens, Switzerland.
Archie Moore is represented by The Commercial, Sydney.
How aesthetic debates inform the political imaginary is the subject of Ellie Buttrose’s curatorial projects and critical writing.
Ellie is a Curator at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane. With Katina Davidson, Curator, Indigenous Australian Art, she co-curated Embodied Knowledge, 2022, that featured the centrepiece commission Inert State, 2022, by Archie Moore. Ellie recently curated: Living Patterns, 2023, focused on artists who deploy abstraction as a political as well as formal device; Work, Work, Work, 2019, about the entwinement of civic and artistic labour; and Limitless Horizon: Vertical Perspective, 2017, which rethought the impact of drone vision on contemporary art via the bird’s-eye view paintings of First Nations Australian songlines and the floating perspective in Chinese and Japanese landscape painting traditions. Ellie is a member of the curatorial team for The Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, 2024, 2021 and 2018.
In 2020, 2019 and 2018, Ellie was a guest curator for the Brisbane International Film Festival; she curated Material Place: Reconsidering Australian Landscapes, 2019, at University of New South Wales Galleries, Sydney, which considered how experiments with artistic media reflect changing attitudes towards the environment; and served on the curatorium for Cosmopolis: Collective Intelligence, 2017, at Centre Pompidou, Paris, that showcased artistic practices centred on knowledge sharing and the development of social fabric.
“kith and kin is a memorial dedicated to every living thing that has ever lived, it is a space for quiet reflection on the past, the present and the future”
– Archie Moore
First Nations peoples of Australia are among the oldest continuous living cultures on earth; Archie Moore’s kith and kin affirms this by tracing the artist’s Kamilaroi and Bigambul relations over 65,000+ years. His choice of materials for this celestial map of names — fragile chalk on blackboard — addresses the insufficient dissemination of Indigenous histories.
The complexity of First Nations kinship systems exceeds the standard genealogical chart. Archie’s extensive drawing captures the common ancestors of all humans, emphasising our kinship responsibilities to each other. In a Kamilaroi understanding of time, past, present and future are co-present. By placing tens of thousands of years of kin on a single continuum, Archie enfolds audiences within the everywhen.
While many of the stories in kith and kin are specific to the artist’s family, they mirror narratives throughout the world. Through this lens Moore highlights our shared ancestry and humanity: through the interconnectedness of people, place and time.
Archie Moore / kith and kin 2024 / Australia Pavilion at Venice Biennale 2024 / Photographer Andrea Rossetti / © the artist / Images courtesy of the artist and The Commercial
Archie Moore / kith and kin 2024 / Australia Pavilion at Venice Biennale 2024 / Photographer Andrea Rossetti / © the artist / Images courtesy of the artist and The Commercial
Archie Moore / kith and kin 2024 / Australia Pavilion at Venice Biennale 2024 / Photographer Andrea Rossetti / © the artist / Images courtesy of the artist and The Commercial
