Visual Art
Archie Moore’s masterpiece kith and kin – the first Australian work to receive a Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale – is now an unmissable display at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art. By Claire G. Coleman.
Archie Moore’s Golden Lion-winning kith and kin at GOMA
I want to tell you about one of my favourite thought experiments. I have written about it more than once and it has been the basis for some of my orations. If you go right now to the nearest body of running water – a river, a creek, a stream – and touch the water, the water you have touched will flow to a bigger body of running water, then eventually out to the sea. That sea will connect with every other sea and the water you have touched, wherever you are, will connect you to the lands in which your family line arose. In this way we are all connected.
We are all connected. Kith and kin by Archie Moore, now showing at Queensland’s Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) in Brisbane, reminds us of this.
Aboriginal culture is all about these connections: finding the connection between people and the world, between Country and all that lives on it, between people and our relatives and ancestors human and non-human. If there is a single word that can summarise kith and kin, it’s the one I have been overusing for two paragraphs: “connection”.
The space in which kith and kin is currently on display is an almost exact copy of the inside of the Australia Pavilion in Venice where it was first shown. It’s built to the same dimensions and painted with blackboard paint as the artist and the install team did at the biennale. As in Venice, the installation’s current home is near water. “In Venice there was a window which went into the canal. You saw the water in the canal that goes to the Venice lagoon, then goes to the Adriatic Sea, then it goes all around the world to the Brisbane River out here. So it’s a way to connect with the rest of the world,” Moore told me when we spoke on the opening weekend of the exhibition.
Kith and kin won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation at the 2024 Venice Biennale, the first time an artwork from Australia has won this international accolade. Yet it’s not a showy work. “It’s more of a quiet, minimalist way of doing something big,” Moore said. That might be, he speculated, why it won the award. It’s as unassuming as the artist himself, a brilliant man who radiates modesty. “It’s a place for quiet reflection and contemplation about bigger issues like Aboriginal deaths in custody and the larger global family.”
In the centre of the room, perched in the middle of a dark rectangular reflecting pool, is a huge table covered with neat piles of paper. Printed upon them are the coroners’ reports of Indigenous deaths in custody since the first royal commission. It is a sombre room, the lighting low, a place for contemplation, deep memory and respect. The reflecting pool is “a memorial for First Nations people who have died in police custody”, curator Ellie Buttrose told me. “There’s coroners’ reports that date from 1991 when the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody was handed down, all the way until the end of 2023 when Archie was finalising the work.”
In interviews and talks, Moore refers to the mathematical modelling that suggests all living humanity has a common ancestor 3000 years ago. “It’s about kinship, family, cosmological time, a large network of interrelatedness. We are all part of a global family, so if you go back 3000 years, we all have a common ancestor.”
This ignores an important fact about the continent of Australia. Three thousand years ago we had already been isolated for more than 50,000 years. For so-called “pure blood” Aboriginal people, the nearest non-Aboriginal ancestor is as far back in time as the point we arrived on this continent, sometimes considered to be 60,000 years ago. There are still people on this continent who have no genealogical ancestors from the coloniser cohort so, in reality, Aboriginal Australia proves the question “when was the last common ancestor of all humanity?” to be unanswerable by mathematics.
On the other hand, if you go back far enough, all humans are related. We’re all descended from a common ancestor, about 120,000 years ago. It also seems likely that all living things are descended from a singular, unicellular organism. If you take the connection back far enough into deep time, deeply enough into the Everywhen, all life is related. “We are all related … we should take responsibility for each other and care for each other,” said Moore.
What is interesting when you consider the impacts of colonisation is that those of us who, like Moore and me, have white and Aboriginal ancestors, share the 3000-year connection with Europe. Ironically, those of us who had the strongest connection to the world were also often the most affected by colonial practices such as the Stolen Generations and deaths in custody.
The blackboard walls are inscribed with the artist’s family tree, leading back into the time when colonisation on this continent began. At this point the rest of the tree becomes an exploration of deep time, a prediction of what might have been if colonisation had never happened or, more importantly, if this continent had been free of genocide. As for many of us, records of Moore’s pre-colonisation family are lost. Some names on the wall were taken from government records, the type of records that many Indigenous families have, records that were used to control our people.
“The rest are speculative names that I’ve invented,” Moore said. “But I have stuck to the conventions of Aboriginal language, avoiding phonemes that don’t exist in Indigenous languages like the ‘v’ sound and also using sounds that don’t exist in English at the start of words, like the ‘ng’.” There are voids in the name-cloud that represent the loss of people – of their knowledge, connections and memory – from the impacts of colonisation.
Kith and kin is a temple to Aboriginal relationships, to the people who were in this place alone for 60,000 years, and it’s a memorial shrine to people who have died in custody. It reminds us how those connections can be made and how they have been broken.
Even if kith and kin was not Australia’s first winner of the Golden Lion, it would be a historic work. Legendary art writer and activist Djon Mundine, in his presentation at the start of the public program talks, described it as equivalent to Picasso’s Guernica, and I can see his point: it’s monumental, powerful, provocative and has the potential to change the way Australia not only sees art but how the nation sees itself.
At the door to Archie Moore’s artist talk, when the exhibition opened to the public, there was a line of interested people as long as one to get tickets for a rock concert. When the talk was over, another line started to get into the exhibition. The excitement to see the work was palpable.
This is not only the first time this particular masterpiece has been on display in Australia – and you had better believe that when I call it a masterpiece I am not being hyperbolic – but it’s also the first time a Golden Lion winning work has been available to view without leaving the continent. This is one of the most important works of art ever presented here – if not the most important. It is outstanding, in the literal meaning of the word. Not only does it stand alone in the world of Indigenous Australian art, it is also one of the most powerful works of art produced in so-called Australia.
Kith and kin is empirically one of the greatest works of art in the world and it’s right there, in Brisbane for you to visit. So go and visit it.
Be careful of one thing: don’t step in the reflecting pool. Although you wouldn’t be the first to make that mistake.
Claire G. Coleman travelled to Brisbane with the assistance of QAGOMA.
Kith and kin is showing at the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, until October 18, 2026.
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This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 8, 2025 as "Australia reflected".
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