The Conference Committee are pleased to announce that Maree Clarke and Dr Frances Edmond will present the 2023 Loris Williams Memorial Lecture at our 2023 conference, Rising to our challenges: archives at the ‘G.
What is a Living Archive? A conversation
In this presentation, Maree and Fran will hold a conversation about the evolving living archive project – which has travelled between the USA, Newcastle (NSW) and Ngukurr in southeast Arnhem Land – where linking up stories, artworks, Ancestral collections and more, aims to reclaim the traditional/Western archive by centring Indigenous knowledges in the process.
Maree Clarke, a Yorta Yorta/Wemba Wemba/Mutti Mutti/Boonwurrung woman from northwest Victoria is a pivotal figure in the reclamation of southeast Australian Aboriginal art practices, reviving elements of Aboriginal culture that were disrupted since colonisation. She is renowned for nurturing/promoting the diversity of contemporary southeast Aboriginal artists and is known for her collaborative approach to her multidisciplinary cultural practice – working intergenerationally and interculturally to revive Ancestral knowledge from the ‘archive’.
Maree has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally including: her major survey exhibition Maree Clarke – Ancestral Memories at the National Gallery of Victoria (2021-22); Tarnanthi, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide (2021); The National, Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney (2021); Reversible Destiny, Tokyo Photographic Museum, Tokyo Japan (2021); and Ritual and Ceremony at the Australian Embassy in Paris, France (2022-23). In 2020, she received the King Wood Mallesons Contemporary First Nations Art Prize for the Victorian Artist category; and was awarded the Linewide Commission for the Metro Tunnel project (2020-current). She is the recipient of the 2020 Australia Council Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Fellowship and the 2023 Yalingwa Artist Fellowship awarded by the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art.
Dr Fran Edmonds is an interdisciplinary scholar in the fields of anthropology and ethnohistory. Her work is collaborative, participatory and community-based, aimed at decolonising research methodologies. Her research interests include the intersection between art, culture and wellbeing; the creative use of digital technologies; youth identity; visual studies; oral history/storytelling; ethnography in the GLAM sector; and intercultural knowledge exchange.
For over twenty years, Fran has worked alongside Maree Clarke and other Indigenous matriarchs/artists towards decolonising the archive. She is Senior Research Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne working on the Australian Research Council Indigenous Discovery Project (2001000420) ‘Storytelling and the Living Archive of Aboriginal Knowledge’.
Registrations are open with early bird rates available until 7 July 2023.
Visit our conference website for more information.
Images L-R: Maree Clarke (image credit: Eugene Hyland); Dr Frances Edmonds
Comments