Aboriginal art comes to The Box, Plymouth
PLYMOUTH is preparing to debut the first Aboriginal-led exhibition of its kind inside The Box, the city’s £47 million museum, gallery and archive, writes Erin Black.
The exhibition, titled Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters showcases the work of over 100 aboriginal artists, using 300 paintings, photographs, objects, song, dance and multimedia.
Originally staged at the National Museum of Australia (NMA) in Canberra and touring to Perth’s Western Australian Museum Boola Bardip, the exhibition has attracted over 400,000 visitors to date.
The installation is expected to be world-first in scale and complexity and took seven years to create after being conceived and curated by a team of First Australians.
This is the first time the works of art have left Australia and The Box will be host to the European premiere before it heads on to European cities, including Berlin and Paris.
Songlines tells the story of the Seven Sisters Dreaming stories – ancient creation sagas of the Australian continent that only exist in oral form – for future generations.
Varying slightly from culture to culture, the narrative revolves around an Ancestral Being in the guise of a man who relentlessly pursues seven sisters (Ancestral Women) over land and sky.
Explained by some as ‘an epic tale of lust, love, passion and danger’, visitors to the exhibit are able to immerse themselves in the story of the Seven Sisters through a variety of different artforms which are spread across The Box, as well as in neighbouring St Lukes and in a pop up ‘DomeLab’ on Tavistock Place. Margo Neale, Senior Indigenous Curator at the National Museum of Australia and lead curator of Songlines said: “Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters is not an art exhibition, a history exhibition or a science exhibition. It is all of these.”
Open to the public from Thursday, the exhibition will remain at The Box until February 27 2022.