The 30-year career of this soft-spoken but fiercely intellectual artist is one of reclaiming Indigenous identities and rewriting history
Fiona Foley stands defiant and bare-breasted in her 1994 self-portrait series, Badtjala Woman. The photographs are a reclamation of a kind: Foley had come across an archival picture of an Indigenous woman, dated 1899 and simply titled “Young Woman from Fraser Island”. There was no mention of the woman’s name, where she was born, her role within her community or the circumstances of her death. Foley took the image and recreated it using her own likeness, giving identity and personality to those colonial images of Indigenous people that often remain nameless and unidentified in the historical archive.
Foley’s art practice – photography, public art, installation and, recently, film – is often focused on decolonising images of Aboriginal people and of reasserting Indigenous cultural identity and sovereignty. It’s just one of the through-lines for Who are these strangers and where are they going?, a photographic retrospective on her 30-year career to date that opens in Sydney in January.
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