Gordon Hookey: A Murriality
Ahead of an upcoming exhibition surveying three decades of Gordon Hookey’s practice, VAULT explores the Waanyi artist’s bitingly funny brand of agitprop art.
Image credit: Gordon Hookey, Austika / Austrailya (B), 2020, canvas synthetic polymer paint, metal eyelets, on wood dowels, traffic cones, castors, 300 x 265 x 50 cm. Photo: Rhett Hammerton. Courtesy The University of Queensland, Brisbane
Earlier this year, Gordon Hookey covered the walls and rafters of his warehouse studio in Brisbane’s inner south with hundreds of posters and printed graphics, part of a collection amassed by the artist over his three-decade career. Encompassing the Aboriginal land rights movement, arts and cultural events, as well as broader community and social justice campaigns, the archive serves as a visual record of the major currents that have shaped Australia public discourse over the past 30 years, mirroring his own trajectory as both an artist and activist. Hookey retrieved the prints and posters from storage while preparing for his first survey exhibition, A MURRIALITY, co-presented by UNSW Galleries, Sydney and the Institute of Modern Art (IMA), Brisbane. Seeing them anew prompted the artist to devise a way to bring their (still) potent messages into the studio space and process. “I wanted to immerse myself in this history of collective struggle while making a new body of work for the exhibition.”
Born at Cloncurry in 1961, Hookey belongs to the Waanyi People whose Country extends southward from the Gulf of Carpentaria in northwest Queensland, and across the Northern Territory border. He moved to Brisbane in the early 1980s to study anthropology at the University of Queensland, and engaged with the city’s Aboriginal rights movement based at Musgrave Park. It was during this time that the artist began collecting protest ephemera, an essential communication tool for actions in the pre-digital era. After moving to Sydney in 1989, he became involved in the influential Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative and completed...Subscribe to read this article in full
