paper/s/kin gesture (2018)

The South Australian Museum vaunts its highly distressing and culturally incompetent display of Ancestral remains and belongings in wooden curios cabinets in its Pacific Gallery, located in unceded Kaurna Nation territory. Resistant to our communities' calls for the gallery to close and critical care be administered to the Ancestral remains and belongings, the South Australian Museum's curators keep empty assurances flowing. The hurt and anguish over this racist display practice doesn't dissipate for Indigenous peoples from the Great Ocean's archipelagos. I can't write emails or essays about this dehumanisation, I need to grieve and mourn in a shared ceremonial-political structure that is sovereign of the extractive, consumptive gaze of Caucasian institutions, which denies in turn our agency and responsibility to our Ancestral remains and belongings, to our continuing practices and presences. 

Image credits: Léuli Eshraghi, paper/s/kin gesture (2018), un Magazine 12.1 launch, Footscray Community Arts Centre, May 2018. Photos courtesy Daniel Gardeazabal