‘I don’t feel any younger,’ says Richard Bell, standing in his exhibition that charts over 30-years of making art. You can go now opens at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) this weekend, and has been curated by Clothilde Bullen, MCA Senior Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Collections and Exhibitions.
The title comes from a painting of the map of Australia with these words emblazoned across it, painted in 2017, and which Bell says is ‘a very polite saying’ to tell someone to bugger off. It is not lost on some, that this exhibition officially opens on Mabo Day – the anniversary of the 3 June 1992 High Court decision to overturn the legal concept of ‘terra nullius’, and acknowledge the traditional rights of Indigenous people to their land and waters, which paved the way for native title in Australia.
