At Art Basel Hong Kong, two celebrated First Nations Australian artists will present complex and contrasting perspectives on Indigenous identities. In their work, the two artists, Naminapu Maymuru-White and Daniel Boyd, carry on a long tradition of creative expression — harnessing and exploring the history of the hundreds of distinct peoples who established homelands across Australia more than 50,000 years ago.
Their art also reflects the effects of colonialism on Aboriginal Australians: the severed families, displaced people and repeated efforts to erase their cultures. Despite this dark past, the pieces shine with a light of hope. Through glimmering dots and stars, the works illuminate the vast array of Indigenous viewpoints around the world, and highlight ways of reimagining our relationships with one another — and with the earth itself.
Naminapu Maymuru-White
When Ms. Maymuru-White paints the galaxy on the canvas of a eucalyptus tree, she imagines her spirit traveling to her homelands on the earth and in the sky. Her installation for the fair will offer viewers the chance to be similarly transported to a remote Australian region and to the river of stars at the heart of her clan’s cosmology.
Ms. Maymuru-White, a member of the Mangalili clan of the Yolngu people, was born in 1952 at the Yirrkala mission on the tropical coast of the Northern Territory. Like many Aboriginal people of her generation, her early life was shaped by a system of governmental policies and missions that funneled her family away from their homeland to an area where living conditions were difficult and their culture was deliberately eroded. Her father and uncle, both internationally known artists, taught her to create her clan’s sacred bark paintings as a way to preserve their worldview and ways of life.
“It is really important for all us Yolngu people to believe in our culture,” she said. “So I’m doing my part teaching young people because of what our fathers told us.” They told her this knowledge sharing was vital, she explained, so the culture “doesn’t have to be forgotten.”
In the 1970s, when a mine was constructed near Yirrkala against the Yolngu people’s protestations, many sought refuge in their ancestral lands. Ms. Maymuru-White’s family re-established a homeland at Djarrakpi, some 120 miles south of Yirrkala, on a peninsula of forests and sand dunes surrounded by turquoise ocean. It is here that she travels when she paints, and the view she depicts is often the Milky Way.
At Djarrakpi, in the absence of an electrical grid, the Milky Way remains undimmed in the night sky and in Mangalili cosmology. To Mangalili people, it is an astral river where souls swim into life, then flow again after they die.
To honor the Milky Way, Ms. Maymuru-White mixes black and white pigments from stones and clay, then paints sinuous streams of stars on tree bark or trunks collected from local forests. By uniting earth, tree and galaxy, she reflects the Mangalili view that there is no separation between stars, land, people, plants, life and death.
“When I do my Milky Way paintings,” Ms. Maymuru-White said, “I always look at myself like I’m going home through the River of Stars.”
Her installation at the fair, “Larrakitj Forest,” evokes that homecoming through 11 memorial poles painted with images of the Milky Way and other imagery important to the Mangalili people. In her clan’s traditional funeral ceremonies, the deceased person was placed in a grave or on a platform. Later, that person’s bones were retrieved and put inside a memorial pole, or larrakitj, made from a eucalyptus trunk hollowed by termites, then painted with sacred symbols. Though this ritual has mostly disappeared because of the influence of Christian missionaries, Ms. Maymuru-White and other Yolngu painters maintain the memory of this practice through fine art.
The larrakitj forest echoes the songs of the artist’s clan, which say the afterlife journey takes people to a place among the stars where they can feel comforted. “That part of the Milky Way story is not only for us,” she said. “It is for Indigenous people and non-Indigenous people.”
Daniel Boyd
At first glance, Mr. Boyd’s dappled installations and pointillist-style paintings might seem inspired by the famous Aboriginal dot art. Actually, there’s no connection. Instead, his points of light and transparent spots represent lenses through which people project their understanding into the world. The experience of engaging with his interplays of darkness and dots is meant to shatter simple narratives about the history and lives of Indigenous people and “the other” into millions of shimmering, individual viewpoints.
“What I try to do with my art is to share this connection to the diverse cultural traditions, knowledge and experiences that exist in the world,” Mr. Boyd said in a video interview. “It challenges the idea of singularity or the definitive and opens it up to a plurality and the possibility of a poetic kind of relation.”
Mr. Boyd, 41, who lives and paints in Sydney, Australia, has a pluralistic heritage himself, tracing his roots to a number of First Nations Australian and South Pacific island peoples: the Kudjala, Ghungalu, Wangerriburra, Wakka Wakka, Gubbi Gubbi, Kuku Yalanji, Yuggera, Bundjalung, and the ni-Vanuatu. His ancestors were part of the Stolen Generations — Aboriginal children who were, under the directive of the Australian government, forcibly removed from their families and placed in institutions, or with non-Indigenous families, in an attempt to blot out their culture and color. Because of this history, Mr. Boyd grew up disconnected from his ancestors’ traditional practices.
This loss works its way into his paintings of First Nations Australian people and landscapes, some of which will be shown at the fair with Station gallery and Kukje Gallery. From a distance, his blend of black space and semitransparent dots form a clear picture. That’s because the human brain fills in gaps based on assumptions, just as it projects presuppositions onto unfamiliar people and places.
“But when you’re up close, things are kind of obliterated, and they become more abstract,” Mr. Boyd explained. When a viewer moves toward these paintings, the black space between the transparent, lenslike dots expands. This obfuscation evokes aspects of the past that have been pushed into the shadows, as well as the incomprehensible void between different people’s experiences of the world. As Mr. Boyd put it, “It’s about dark matter and the unknown, and how we contend with those things that we don’t understand.”
During the fair, Mr. Boyd will also present an interactive installation, about a mile away from the convention center, at Pacific Place, a high-gloss mixed use space. Windows covered with a perforated black film will allow spots of sunlight into the space and onto people walking inside, creating a dynamic illustration of the projections that people place onto others. In a moving image work and on a mirrored stage, constellations of light and reflective spots will dance across darkness, like millions of intermingling perspectives.
Mr. Boyd aims to inspire viewers to reconsider the narrow lenses through which they view the world, and to make space for mystery and difference.
In this complicated shimmering of unique outlooks, Mr. Boyd sees a kind of poetry: “It’s a way to think about human relations and the beauty in the complexity or chaos of human experience,” he said.
