VENICE – Archie Moore, an indigenous Australian artist who created an installation including a monumental family tree, won the top prize at the Venice Biennale on April 20.
The 54-year-old took the Golden Lion, the prize for the best national participation at the biennale, the world’s oldest and most high-profile international art exhibition. He beat artists representing 85 other countries to become the first Australian winner.
For his installation, kith and kin, Moore drew a family tree in chalk on the walls and ceiling of the Australia Pavilion. The web of names encompasses 3,484 people and Moore says it stretches back 65,000 years, although he has smudged some details so that they are hard to read.
In the centre of the room is a huge table covered with stacks of government documents relating to the deaths of indigenous Australians in police custody.
Professor Julia Bryan-Wilson of contemporary art at Columbia University, who is the chair of 2024’s biennale jury, said during the prize announcement that Moore’s installation was a mournful archive that “stands out for its strong aesthetic, its lyricism and its invocation of shared loss for occluded pasts”.
Before the ceremony, which was streamed online, Moore’s pavilion had been a critical hit. Writing in The New York Times, Julia Halperin said the installation was one no biennale visitor should miss.
Moore’s hand-drawn family tree was so dense at points, it was impossible to make out the names. “The implication is clear: expand the aperture wide enough, and we are all related,” Halperin said. “It’s a concept that could feel trite if it weren’t rendered with such poetry, rigour and specificity.”
In his acceptance speech, Moore said every biennale visitor had a shared “responsibility of care to all living things now and into the future”.
“We are all one,” he added.
The other major award, the Golden Lion for best participant in the biennale’s main exhibition, went to Mataaho Collective, a group of four Maori women from New Zealand, for an installation that evokes a traditional mat used during Maori ceremonies, such as childbirth.
Announcing that prize, Prof Bryan-Wilson said the collective had created a luminous womblike cradle that casts “a dazzling pattern of shadows” across the gallery floor.
The jury awarded the Silver Lion for the most promising young artist in the main exhibition to Karimah Ashadu, a British Nigerian based in Hamburg, Germany, for Machine Boys, which depicts illegal taxi drivers in Lagos, Nigeria.
This is the 60th edition of the biennale, which was founded in 1895 as a global exhibition of contemporary art. It has long featured pavilions for individual countries to present their own shows, with Belgium’s completed first, in 1907.
Today, the biennale sprawls over the city, and countries without a permanent building to showcase their work mount shows in office blocks, decrepit mansions and, in one case in 2024, a women’s prison.
Every biennale also features a huge central exhibition, devised by a single curator. Mr Adriano Pedrosa, director of the Sao Paulo Museum of Art in Brazil, devised a show called Foreigners Everywhere that features work by hundreds of artists, many of them migrants or from indigenous communities.
The biennale, which opened to the public on April 20 after a week of previews, runs through Nov 24. NYTIMES
