- Installation, Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum, Cologne, 2024
- Installation, Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum, Cologne, 2024
- Installation, Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum, Cologne, 2024
- Installation, Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum, Cologne, 2024
- Installation, Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum, Cologne, 2024
- Installation, Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum, Cologne, 2024
- Installation, Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum, Cologne, 2024
- Installation, Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum, Cologne, 2024
- The Missing Pieces, in progress.
- The Missing Pieces, in progress.
- The Missing Pieces, in progress.
- The Missing Pieces, in progress.
- Installation, Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum, Cologne, 2024
- Installation, Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum, Cologne, 2024
THE MISSING PIECES
These images of Aboriginal artefacts from Central Australia are from the RJM archive. When the RJM opened this archive to The Revisions Project
in 2022 the images were brought back to the communities in Yuendumu and Nyirripi.
Many of these images of artefacts had specific purpose and significance in their original context – some ceremonial, some practical. Typically, this knowledge is absent from the museum’s cataloguing, along with knowledge of their exact origin.
Mirroring this decontextualization, the objects were extracted from
the images in an act of revision, subsequently they appear as absences.
These absences became windows which when held over photographs which Waterhouse had taken in the community over the course of the project, revealed fragments of Warlpiri land and life.
This kicked off an exploratory process in the community. The space
where the objects once were become apertures to place on top of
various images of Warlpiri country. Playing with the apertures revealed various fragments of the context where these objects originated.
Eventually the apertures were placed decidedly on images by various members of the community – the placing was sometimes meaningfully considered, sometimes serendipitous. The fragments you see in this combination of images will only ever give a partial view and therefore
a limited understanding.
But unlike the original images which appear fixed and divorced of
context, these reclaimed images were made through a dynamic process wherein our understanding of history and context is being continually
re-discovered, particularly through insights from those whose voices
were for so long missing.