Direct positive: Affirming First Nations presence in Australian museums

‘Direct positive: Affirming First Nations presence in Australian museums’ will be a panel discussion on July 10th, facilitated by Matt Poll (Chau Chak Wing Museum, USYD) and featuring artist James Tylor and Coby Edgar (AGNSW) at Cement Fondu. The talk will be hosted in the gallery space during our exhibition ‘Oh, Museum’, which presents the work of Australian and International artists who are initiating inclusive and timely conversations about art and institutional regeneration. The talk will take James Tylor’s newly commissioned portrait series ‘CIPX’ 2021, as its starting point. Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange (CIPX) is an international project that encourages Indigenous photographers from around the world to take portraits of their local Indigenous communities using the 19th century tintype process. Tylor’s contribution to the CIPX project re-contextualises the early photo-documentation of Aboriginal people by European anthropologists in the 19th and early-20th century in Australia by photographing contemporary arts workers and artists in ways that give them agency and respect. Facilitated by Matt Poll, this discussion will ask questions of whether Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island community expectations have been met in regards to unequal representation, embedding cultural protocols in museum policy, and where to now for First Nations autonomy in museums. Aboriginal curators and artists have called for just recognition of their right to participate on an equal basis in economic and social terms for generations. The panellists will draw upon their personal experiences of the ways in which existing Indigenous practices, strategies and support networks are working to counter this inequity and affirm a deeper First Nations presence in Australian museums.