Dusk of Nations features selected works by leading Australian-based artists drawn primarily from the UQ Collection. Spanning painting, photography, sculptural objects and moving image, artists explore ideas of national identity and nationhood, and how these concepts are defended and maintained, resisted and subverted. Critical hinges of ‘Australian’ national mythology, including the outback, the national flag, a day at the beach, and a mass-produced snack food are invoked in ways that problematise the authority of their ‘sunny’ connotations. Exhibited artworks bring this symbolism into conversation with the messy complexity and physical reality of ongoing colonialism, and the nation’s imbrication within global histories of migration, exploitation and extractive capitalism.
The exhibition exposes the fears regarding a supposed diminishment of national identities and traditional institutions in the face of intellectual, social and demographic shifts. Dusk of Nations suggests that imperial forms of nationhood have some responsibility for our dying world and looks towards the closure of this traditional world order. The exhibited works emphasise that national identity is an always-contested space, and that hopeful futures emerge from dismantling dominant nationalisms. To this end, many of the artists included in the exhibition appropriate existing symbolism and national icons in subversive reconfigurations that undermine their authority. Dusk of Nations complicates understandings of nationhood and its vestiges, in favour of recognising the nation as a site of heterogeneity and multitudes.
Artists: Cigdem Aydemir, Brook Andrew, Fiona Foley, Jack Green, Kathleen France Inkamala, Vanessa Inkamala, Rosemary Laing, Archie Moore, Sally M. Nangala Mulda, Raquel Ormella, Gloria Napurrurla Pannka, Kenny Pittock, Luke Roberts, Arthur Streeton, Keemon Williams.
Image: Sally M Nangala Mulda, Policeman Taking Man to Big Jail 2019, acrylic on linen. Courtesy of the artist and Edwina Corlette Gallery, Turrbal Country/Brisbane. Collection of The University of Queensland, purchased 2019. Photo: Carl Warner.
