Thousands upon thousands of names, hand-drawn in white blackboard paint, cover the five-metre-high and 60-metre-long black walls and ceiling of the Australia Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale. On the ground, at the centre of the pavilion’s hard-edged rectangular space, a black pool of water engulfs a black steel structure. On the structure, hundreds of stacks of white documents contain information on 2,400 generations of ancestors, dating back 65,000 years. Archie Moore, a First Nations artist of Kamilaroi and Bigambul descent, is representing Australia with an installation titled kith and kin, which traces his family tree as far back in time as First Nations peoples are known to have lived on the continent. The names on the walls represent the more recent generations, but as the chart goes back in time—and up towards the ceiling—not only does it become more densely patterned and less legible, but also more speculative, as more gaps become apparent: gaps in historical and cultural knowledge, broken by colonial violence, natural disasters, and plagues. “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,” said Moore, whose installation won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation, Australia’s first-ever Venice accolade.

...despite First Nations Australians representing less than four per cent of Australia's population, they account for a staggering 33 per cent of its prison population, among the most incarcerated people globally.

Moore’s staggering work plays with minimalistic aesthetics, but its scope is colossal; in her public address at the pavilion’s opening, curator Ellie Buttrose noted that the installation‘s centrepiece, the vast hand-drawn genealogical chart, dates so far back, in fact, “that it includes the common ancestors of every human and all living entities—a timely reminder that we all have kinship responsibilities to one another.”

The pavilion’s solemnity, Moore’s earnest research, and the enormity of his months-long labour onsite lend the installation a monumentality that visitors—or at least this one—would recognise from the experience of entering war memorials or purpose-built sites dedicated to the victims of violent conflict. Moore dialogues with these connotations, of course. The reams of redacted documents, inaccessible due to the pool which functions like a moat around the structure that holds them, contain—according to the press release—thousands of official courtroom inquests to gather coroners' information on the suspected deaths of Indigenous Australians in police custody that have taken place over the past several decades. Moore also calls attention to the fact that despite First Nations Australians representing less than four per cent of Australia's population, they account for a staggering 33 per cent of its prison population, among the most incarcerated people globally. But these are not simply numbers in a mournful archive, as Moore reminds us. They are family and community members—children, parents, and siblings of the thousands of names inscribed on the pavilion’s stark architecture.

These documents contain narratives of oppression that are repeated in many places around the world.

“This installation stands out for its strong aesthetic, its lyricism, and its invocation of shared loss for occluded pasts,” the jury’s statement reads. For Moore, those losses are not only political, reflecting the injustices still faced by his community today, but also personal: amid the contemporary coroners’ reports are historic documents with specific references to the artist’s family. The cold bureaucratic language of state institutions denied his grandparents freedom of movement by the so-called Protector of Aboriginals, a 19th-century colonial role that was often misused to incur injustices rather than protect the aboriginal population. These documents contain narratives of oppression that are repeated in many places around the world.

Despite the work’s weighty subject and sombre formalism, it succeeds in transporting the viewer into a cosmos of connections running across universal communities and fates, a network of responsibilities to kith and kin through space and time. It is an artwork much bigger than this tumultuous and, frankly, very frightening political moment. It speaks of 65,000 years of resilience, grounded in the personal human experience. It is the monumental project of an anti-monumental artist, who throughout his three-decade career has, as Aboriginal writer and journalist Daniel Browning writes, “built a reputation for creating subversive work that sometimes flies under the radar of the mainstream art world. But that's what he does best—he lets the work speak for itself.”

'kith and kin' is on view at the 60th Venice Biennale from April 20 – November 24, 2024. 

The mandate of the 60th Venice Biennale, which aims to highlight under-represented artists and art histories, aligns with the STIR philosophy of challenging the status quo and presenting powerful perspectives. Explore our series on the Biennale, STIRring 'Everywhere' in Venice, which brings you a curated selection of the burgeoning creative activity in the historic city of Venice, in a range of textual and audiovisual formats.