Archie Moore: kith and kin

Archie Moore's kith and kin has made its Australian premiere at Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA), the first time the artwork by the esteemed Kamilaroi/Bigambul artist has been displayed since it secured the prestigious Golden Lion Award for Best National Participation at La Biennale de Venezia in 2024. 

Commissioned by Creative Australia and curated by Ellie Buttrose, Curator of Contemporary Australian Art, QAGOMA for the Australian Pavilion at Venice, the work was subsequently gifted to the collections of both QAGOMA and Tate in the UK by Creative Australia on behalf of the Australian Government.

The artwork comprises a vast genealogical chart capturing Archie Moore’s First Nations Australian and convict British and Scottish connections spanning more than 2400 generations over 65,000 years. 

Over several weeks, Archie and a team of installers worked to meticulously hand-draw the ancestral map in chalk across a large expanse of four walls in a stand-alone room specially built to replicate the internal dimensions of the Australia Pavilion in Venice. 

The work also confronts the ongoing legacies of Australia’s colonial history and the overincarceration of First Nations people, with a collection of coronial reports on deaths in custody suspended above a memorial pool in the centre of the room.

QAGOMA Director Chris Saines said, ‘It’s an unimaginable endeavour to map a personal genealogy through more than two thousand generations, and kith and kin powerfully summons an extraordinary image of human connection through deep time,’

Archie Moore: kith and kin’ will be shown alongside ‘Inscribing a Life’, an exhibition of works from QAGOMA’s Collection celebrating the intensity and wonder of existence, histories, and time through the act of mark making. It includes work by Hossein Valamanesh, Shirley Macnamara, Georg Baselitz, Simryn Gill, Gulumbu Yunupingu and others.

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Images:  Archie Moore / kith and kin (installation view, Australia Pavilion, Venice Biennale) 2024 / Presented to QAGOMA and Tate by Creative Australia on behalf of the Australian Government 2024 / Collection: QAGOMA / © Archie Moore / Photograph: Andrea Rossetti / Image courtesy: The artist and The Commercial, Sydney