Djon Mundine

At the 2015 Cementa Festival I worked with over 80 desendants of survivors of the 1820s Dabee massacre; Jimmy and Peggy Lambert, painting a memorial mural on the external wall of the Kandos Museum that will be added to every festival. For the Dingo Project (2022) Ngunungula Art Gallery, (Bowral) and Hervey Bay Art Gallery I performed an In Conversation With My Grandmother (a Tanami Desert cross-bred Dingo) and left a permanent red ochre body self-print; Always Was, Always Will Be. In 2023, I performed a short poetry performance in homage to Caribbean poet Eduard Glissant, as part of Daniel Boyd’s Rainbow Serpent exhibition at the Gropius Bahr, Berlin.

A red ochre life size body print on the inside striped wall of Kandos Aboriginal Centre Traditional Indigenous people have left hand prints and/or stencils in red ochre to record their presence all over the Australian continent including cave walls in the Sydney Basin itself. This full body is a statement of prior un-ceded ownership and to remember those large numbers of innocent men women and children murdered in the killings of the colonial wars.