And so, it’s the artists we turn to, to give expression to what we know about who we are as a people, not as a past people, or a lost culture, or as less than human, but as a people, fully human, here and now.

But this is why I have been interested in the intellectual and political work of our artists who have the freedom to theorise about our world, how we came to be and know, without being bound by the disciplinary parameters so many of us have been trained in. …It would take me some time to come to understand the dispossessing function of identity in the colony, of never being enough, as either Black or Indigenous. I have always been interested in identity, and the disjuncture between what my body felt in its being, and how it has supposedly become known within the health sciences and humanities in which I labour. To support the exhibition the Gallery has commissioned two highly respected research/writers to contribute essays that offer alternative readings for the work of the artists included in the exhibition.ĭr Chelsea Watego (formerly Bond), a professor of Indigenous health at Queensland University of Technology Bond, has written an essay entitled More than the masks we wear, which offers multiple interpretations of issues that inform works by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists included in the exhibition. For each artist, the physicality of the face, as a marker of identity, is explored and redefined within particular social, cultural, and political frameworks and contexts, to offer new meanings and interpretations.įor the artists in the exhibition the face is an important signifier of identity and by manipulating it or changing it in some way, they present more complex readings shaped by historical, political, and social contexts. Working closely with fifteen North Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists and ten African and African Diaspora artists, Cairns Art Gallery has curated this ground-breaking exhibition which brings together newly commissioned and loaned works across a range of art forms and media. FACELESS Transforming Identity: Blak/Black Artists from North Australia, Africa and the African Diaspora is an exhibition that challenges established notions of identity and explores ways in which interpretations of identity can be manipulated or redefined by blak/black artists through a revisioning of the face using devices such as embellishment, erasure, and disguise.

Faceless painting