An award-winning Australian exhibition is having its European premiere at The Box.
The exhibition, Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters, will be on display until February 27 next year and is part of major programme of cultural exchange between the UK and Australia.
Featuring over 300 paintings and objects by more than 100 artists, it is the first time the exhibition has been seen outside Australia. Originally staged at the National Museum of Australia (NMA) in Canberra, the exhibition has attracted over 400,000 visitors to date.
Entirely conceived and curated by a team of First Australians, led by Margo Neale, senior indigenous curator at the NMA and elders from across the Central and Western Deserts of Australia, it expertly combines state-of-the art exhibition and display technologies with art, song and dance in order to share ancient stories from the world’s oldest continuing culture.
Songlines is a highly immersive exhibition which takes visitors on an epic journey across three Australian States and three deserts covering some 500,000 square kilometres.
It has created a network of stories that ‘map’ the Australian continent by linking narratives to geographical features and serving as vehicles for naming and locating sites critical for survival physically and culturally. It is through Songlines that Aboriginal people can locate and learn from significant sites and pass on laws, ways of living, and moral codes to the next generation.
Margo Neale, lead curator of Songlines said:
“For Aboriginal people, Songlines are our foundational stories about the creation of the Australian continent. This exhibition was initiated and co-curated by Indigenous communities who wanted to both preserve their culture for future generations and to share their stories with all Australians and the world – this is the model for future Museum-Indigenous community collaborations going forward.
“Songlines is not an art exhibition, a history exhibition or a science exhibition. It is all of these. It is both an Australian Aboriginal exhibition and a universal story of humankind. It offers us connectivity to each other and our planet in a fragmenting world. It is of critical importance that the deep truths and lessons in this exhibition are seen worldwide.”
Nigel Hurst, contemporary arts consultant at The Box, said:
“With ceramics, paintings, sculpture, installation and film by Aboriginal people, this award-winning, immersive exhibition from the National Museum of Australia will provide a unique platform for us to celebrate the arts and cultural life of First Australians, with points of connection linked to Australia’s and the UK’s shared successes and challenges over the last 250 years.
“Songlines will provide a wonderful and timely opportunity to bring the rich culture of First Australians to life for UK and Plymouth audiences, and acknowledge both our historic debt and the rich, complex societies that have emerged in the UK and Australia as a result of migration.”
