Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
Festival puts the colourful and the uncomfortable of contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art on show
Gail Mabo was around eight years old when her father, the late Eddie Koiki Mabo, first traced out for her the story of Tagai the hunter in the night sky above the Torres Strait Islands. “As Tagai moves through the sky, he dictates when it’s time for planting, when it’s time for harvesting, and when it’s time to hunt the turtles,” she says. It was the first time she had been to the islands. “Because there are no other big lights, you could see the full array of stars.”
From this week, Mabo’s large-scale tribute to Tagai, an eponymous scaffold of bamboo stems festooned with a constellation of black stars, is featured in Tarnanthi festival 2021, the Art Gallery of South Australia’s annual celebration of contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists. Appearing alongside work by over 1,400 artists from across the continent and its waters, Mabo’s art speaks to a thread of memory and place that recurs throughout this vast exhibition.
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