YOU ARE HERE
An exhibition by Therese Ritchie
10 June – 17 July 2021
YOU ARE HERE is an exhibition with truth-telling at its core. Artivist, Therese Ritchie, factually examines Australia’s frontier wars and the massacre of Indigenous peoples alongside the nation’s history of coal extraction and infrastructure development implemented by European settlers, mining companies and successive Australian governments. YOU ARE HERE is an unflinching examination of how we got to where we are now.
Created in 2020, Ritchie’s most recent tour de force - YOU ARE HERE - unrelentingly makes apparent her intense discomfort with the processes of land appropriation that resulted in the formation of the Australian nation. Her evocative use of visual digital imagery – much of which is appropriated from familiar historical Australian paintings of landscapes and events commemorating the arrival of European’s in Australia – is overlaid with text and timelines that account for a litany of events, misdemeanours, atrocities, discoveries, manoeuvres and ploys that lead us to this culminating moment in Australia’s history. YOU ARE HERE prompts the need for wider conversations about truth-telling, care for country, the future of mining and issues of sovereignty in 2021 and is accompanied by a series of engaging public programs.
Ritchie is Alumni of CDU and an accomplished and committed Darwin-based artist whose art is socially engaged. CDU Art Collection holds the largest collection of Ritchie’s artwork in Australia, some of which was featured in the exhibition Not Dead Yet: a retrospective exhibition of Therese Ritchie and Chips Mackinolty, presented at CDU Art Gallery, 2010. A survey exhibition and eponymous catalogue, Therese Ritchie: Burning Hearts was presented at Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, 2019-20. The exhibition is curated by Dr Joanna Barrkman, Curator, CDU Art Collection and Art Gallery.YOU ARE HERE is supported by a COVID-19 Response Grant, Arts NT, Northern Territory Government.
Warning: Please be advised that the content of this exhibition may cause distress to viewers - especially Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
IMAGE: Therese Ritchie (b.1961) They all look the same to me, 2021, digital inkjet print, 50h x 80w cm [image]; 60h x 90w cm [paper]; on loan from the artist.
PUBLIC PROGRAM
Impacts of mining on Indigenous communities and the environment
Panel discussion
Truth-telling and Australian history
Lecture: Looking at Australian history from the north down by Professor Henry Reynolds
Truth-telling and the limits of legal systems
Lecture: Truth-telling in relation to the youth detention by Professor Thalia Antony (in person)
followed by Artist's talk: I see red by Lee Harrop
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