Mawurndjul : Journey through Time in Australia

Thursday, 22 September 2005 14:18

BASEL, SWITZERLAND.-Museum Tinguely presents – John Mawurndjul : Journey through Time in Northern Australia. John Mawurndjul - “John Mawurndjul is an innovator who has revolutionised Kuninjku bark painting”. (Judith Ryan, Senior Curator, Indigenous Art, National Gallery of Victoria). John Mawurndjul was born in 1952 on his clan territory in Western Arnhem Land in Northern Australia, where the absence of a recorded written form led to the development of a particularly rich iconographical tradition. He learned to paint in the traditional manner, by painting designs on the bodies of initiates during ritual ceremonies. Very early on, though, John Mawurndjul started painting also on the prepared barks of the eucalyptus tree. Inspired by the rock paintings of his distant forefathers, John Mawurndjul developed his own manner and mode of treating the traditional images. He gradually outgrew the motifs of Aboriginal iconography – the lightning spirits or the almighty rainbow serpent as life-giving but also as destructive spirits – to treat it today with entirely new concepts and in a totally new form. His works are imposing by their large scale, and though the eucalyptus bark still furnishes the support for his paintings, the natural earth pigments – red and yellow ochre, pieces of natural chalk and charcoal – are now intentionally mixed with modern, soluble binding agents. The artist changes the pictorial content in a continuous process of transformation: using a cross-hatching technique (rarrk in Kuninjku) that dominates the entire picture to the edge of portrayability, he integrates images of figurative reality, heightening effect and encrypting meaning. John Mawurndjul’s artistic development from the beginning of his career in the 1970s until the present day refutes the widespread prejudice in Europe that denies ‘Indigenous’ artists the right to a personified individuality and the capacity to innovate outside the boundaries of the authority of their community. He further demonstrates in his paintings that dealing actively with traditional sources can be a fruitful experience if one is capable of understanding tradition other than as an anonymous and inalterable corset. Our “Journey through Time in Northern Australia” takes us from the rock paintings, some of which hark back 30 000 years and mark the Aborigines’ sacred sites, down to the present day. In the art world, doors are slowly opening to an extended and global understanding of art. Old strategies of exclusion and banishment still rule the academic world and non-European art is relegated to ethnographical museums. This collaboration of both museums intends to launch the project of global contemporary art which will be analysed in depth in concrete dialogues. The exhibition « rarrk » - John Mawurndjul: Journey in Time in Northern Australia may be considered first and foremost as an encounter between a curious public and the works of art.

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