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Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection of the University of Virginia
January 22 – May 19, 2013
In We Bury Our Own, leading contemporary Aboriginal Australian artist Christian Thompson (Bidjara) presented a new body of work that explores the spiritual repatriation of archival materials in the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford.
Repatriation is the act of returning something to its country or place of origin. While the physical repatriation of human remains, objects and photographs has been accepted as an important museum practice in recent years, many objects and images remain in the storage facilities of distant museums. Using historic images of Aboriginal people in the Pitt Rivers archive as his initial focus, Thompson invented a way for them to be repatriated spiritually. Christian ponders:
“this is what art is able to do, perform a ‘spiritual repatriation’ rather than a physical one, fragment the historical narrative and traverse time and place to establish a new realm in the cosmos, set something free, allow it to embody the past and be intrinsically connected to the present…”
Christian Thompson is pursuing a Doctorate of Philosophy in Fine Art at the University of Oxford. His work is held in numerous public and private collections in Australia, including the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and the National Gallery of Victoria. His work was recently exhibited at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and the Aboriginal Art Museum in Utrecht, the Netherlands. He is represented by Gallery Gabrielle Pizzi.
To see a video about We Bury Our Own, click here.
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The United States is one of the most diverse countries on earth, jam packed full of amazing sights from St. Patrick's cathedral in New York to Mount Hollywood California.The Northeast region is where it all started. Thirteen British colonies fought the American Revolution from here and won their independence in the first successful colonial rebellion in history. Take a look at these rolling hills carpeted with foliage along the Hudson river here, north of New York City.The American south is known for its polite people and slow pace of life. Probably they move slowly because it's so hot. Southerners tend not to trust people from "up north" because they talk too fast. Here's a cemetery in Georgia where you can find graves of soldiers from the Civil War.The West Coast is sort of like another country that exists to make the east coast jealous. California is full of nothing but grizzly old miners digging for gold, a few gangster rappers, and then actors. That is to say, the West Coast functions as the imagination of the US, like a weird little brother who teases everybody then gets famous for making freaky art.The central part of the country is flat farmland all the way over to the Rocky Mountains. Up in the northwest corner you can find creative people in places like Portland and Seattle, along with awesome snowboarding and good beer. Text by Steve Smith.
