In his first exhibition since winning the Golden Lion for Best National Participation at the 60th Venice Biennale for his installation kith and kin, Bigambul/Kamilaroi artist Archie Moore again reflects on family connections and memories at Samstag Museum of Art, in Adelaide.
Titled Dwelling (Adelaide Issue), 2024, Moore’s exhibition is a 1:1 replica of the home in which he grew up as a child, in a town called Tara, 299 kilometres west of Brisbane. It is the fifth iteration of this installation series, Dwelling, which started in 2010. While the kernel of the installation remains consistent, it morphs, expands and adapts responding to the differing sites.
For the Samstag installation, Dwelling (Adelaide Issue) includes new moving image work, which was a co-commission between Samstag and the 2024 Adelaide Film Festival.
Moore has worked with filmmaker Molly Reynolds to help recreate his memories – from digital cockroaches and flies, to cartoons and Queensland newsreels on the living room TV – in a relic of yesteryear, as with the politics it projects.
The installation explores the intersection of public and personal memory and how they shape our views, or, as Moore says, bump up against the memory of Australia. It is perhaps less explicitly provocative than previous editions. For example, his 2018 version featured projections of racial slurs onto the walls of one room.
In this version, it is a softer burn towards deep questioning. For example, as the viewer enters the bathroom they take in the unmistakable smell of Dettol – a harrowing memory for Moore who was persistently ‘disinfected’ by his mother to ensure he wasn’t taken away by the authorities.
They say smell is one of the strongest carriers of memory, and it connects back to an earlier exhibition of Moore’s work at Samstag, where he created bespoke perfumes displayed with the opulence of cosmetic marketing (Les Eaux d’Amoore, 2005). Yet it evokes very personal memories: shaved pencils from school days, dirt, Brut 33 and rum. These olfactory offerings – as with this current exhibition – are triggers to an inhospitable white-dominated society, especially that of the rural Queensland of his childhood.
Visitors start by walking into Moore’s own room. It sets the tone – the walls painted a deep yet vibrant green (a through-line or consistent anchor with his earlier versions), and there are teenage sketches stuck on the walls. One doodle expresses eyeball-popping frustration of youth, and position. A video of a wattle tree moves in the room outside ‘a window’, piles of comics sit on a side table. You can imagine it being suffocatingly hot in a Queensland summer.
It is immediately intimate. He is laying all bare here.
The constellation of objects keeps pulling the viewer through. The viewer moves through other bedrooms, a living room that has an animal trap on the floor, an eat-in kitchen complete with an old Kelvinator fridge with a child bottled up inside and projected on its door. A back bedroom has the musky sense of an aged relative and proudly displays a case with a Mason apron – civil duty and all that – while the room backs onto a dramatically-lit old wring-washer. A slatted plastic fly screen on the rear door carries a further projection.
It’s a collision of loaded images.
An advantage of Samstag’s presentation is that viewers are able to walk to the upper level of the gallery and peer down upon the footprint of Moore’s modest fibro cottage, which fits within the Gallery with room to spare. A nice touch are the tyres thrown up on the tin roof.
It was one of only two homes occupied by First Nations people in Moore’s home town.
Read: Archie Moore’s Golden Lion-winning installation gifted to Tate and QAGOMA
As a viewer, we are overwhelmed by our own sense of voyeurism viewing Dwelling. We teeter between the visceral experience of connecting with our own memories, then shifting from that to understanding another person through theirs. Then, there’s that final layer at play here – the wallop of a recognition of privilege and place… the well lack of. There is pride is this home, and yet it is an emotion that has been systemically erased. It is a mise-en-scène of misrecognition. How is our own perception of ‘home’ built upon the histories of erasure of others?
It is a subtle and incredibly powerful exhibition that keeps up on you with its big questions.
It is great to see Moore back at Samstag – it was here, 24 years ago that he was awarded the Anne and Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship, as a recent art school graduate, and more recently, the inaugural UniSA Jeffrey Smart Commission in 2022.
Archie Moore: Dwelling (Adelaide Issue), 2024
Adelaide Film Festival and Samstag Moving Image Commission 2024
Samstag Museum of Art, Hawke Building
UniSA City West campus, 55 North Terrace, Adelaide.
11 October to 29 November 2024; free.
