Co-curated by distinguished UNSW alumna Hetti Perkins and Monash University Art Museum director Charlotte Day, the critically acclaimed exhibition Christian Thompson: Ritual Intimacy explores the practice of one of Australia’s leading and most exciting contemporary artists and the first Aboriginal Australian to study at Oxford University where he completed his PhD in 2015.
Thompson works across photography, video, sculpture, performance and sound to explore notions of identity, race and Australia’s colonial history. Best known for his photographic self-portraits which focus on the artist’s cultural background and sexuality, this exhibition will present work from across fifteen years of practice, including his iconic and extensive Australian Graffiti series featuring Thompson dressed up in Australian flora.
The first survey of this important artist’s work, this is an ambitious and multi-layered exhibition of photography, sound, film and voice. It traces the evolution of Thompson’s focus on the fashioning and expression of identity, to his engagement with Indigenous artefacts in Oxford’s Pitt River Museum, growing interest in language and gesture through performance, song and sounds works, through to recent projects including a newly commissioned multichannel musical and video composition that incorporates the artist’s traditional Bidjara language.
Artist: Christian Thompson
Curators: Charlotte Day and Hetti Perkins
Presented in association with Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA)
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