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ABSTRACT
This article is about recent art of Tjanpi Desert Weavers, the not-for-profit, social enterprise of the Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara (NPY) Women’s Council, as practices of eco-somatic feminist Indigenous ‘survivance’. Kuka Irititja (animals from another time) and Tjituru-tjituru (Tragedy, Grief and Sadness), produced in creative collaboration with non-Indigenous artist Fiona Hall, focus on death, extinction, annihilation. Whose lives, whose deaths mattered in the past; whose lives, whose deaths matter today. These works reference the British testing of nuclear bombs at Maralinga in the desert homelands of the artists in the 1950s and explore living-on in the aftermath of relentless settler colonial devastation, as Rene Wanuny Kulitja says of her work for Tjituru-tjituru: ‘these are for the ones who were born but never lived’. Developing a close analysis of the works, situated in a broader framework of remote avantgarde or Aboriginal art under occupation, this article explores how these works address a past that is not past for Anangu/Yarnangu women today and the vital importance of the work of Tjanpi Desert Weavers art production in the present.
Acknowledgements
My first and foremost thanks to Tjanpi Desert Weavers artists Nyurpaya Kaika-Burton, Mary Katatjuku Pan, Ilawanti Ungkutjuru Ken, Judith Yinkiya Chambers and Eunice Yunurupa Porter, who shared knowledge with me about Tjanpi practices. Michelle Young, Manager of Tjanpi Desert Weavers, provided invaluable input into this article and its development. My thanks to Tjanpi Desert Weavers and to Linda Rive for transcriptions and translations. This article was first developed as a Keynote for Women, Art and Feminism in Australia since 1970, Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, with thanks to Anne Marsh. Thank you to Lindsay Kelley for her invitation to the 2018 4S Transnational STS Composting Feminisms and Environmental Humanities; and to Astrida Neimanis and Jennifer Hamilton for their invitation to join the Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Centre (SSSHARC) supported 2018 Feminist, Queer and Anticolonial Propositions for Hacking the Anthropocene III: what do we WANT? The Australian Research Council (ARC) funded initial research for this paper, under UNSW HREA11080.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Data available statement
For further information on Tjanpi Desert Weavers art and artists, please see their website: https://tjanpi.com.au
Notes on contributor
Jennifer L. Biddle is Senior Research Fellow at the National Institute for Experimental Arts (NIEA), UNSW Art & Design and founding Director of Visual Anthropology & Visual Culture, a leading national program specialising in practice-led Indigenous and Asia-Pacific research.
She is an anthropologist of Aboriginal art, language, emotion and culture. She has conducted fieldwork with Warlpiri (and other Central and Western Desert communities) in Central Australia for over twenty years, with a distinguished track record in ethnographic and collaborative research. Her publications include Breasts, Bodies Canvas: Central Desert Art as Experience (UNSW Press) and Remote Avant-Garde: Aboriginal Art under Occupation (Duke University Press).
Notes
1 The term Anangu refers to people of the APY (Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara) lands, whereas Yarnangu refers to people of the Ngaanyatjarra lands.
2 The Northern Territory Emergency Intervention (NTER Intervention) or Stop the Gap policies as they were (and are still) called, refers to a series of national government ‘emergency’ interventions into (select) remote Aboriginal communities in 2007, following the release of a commissioned report from the Board of Inquiry in the Protection of Aboriginal Children from Sexual Abuse, The Little Children are Sacred, which reported crisis levels of abuse in ‘remote’ Aboriginal communities and led to a series of Aboriginal and townships being seized by compulsory Commonwealth Government acquisition, with military deployment to ‘stabilise and normalise’ what was then considered a humanitarian emergency intervention. While military deployment ceased in 2008, government legislation has seen a series of new laws and institutional frameworks developed to redress purported ‘remote’ Aboriginal community dysfunction, targeting sexual abuse, alcoholism, domestic violence, criminal behaviour, unemployment, infant mortality and other health and education measures, including literacy and numeracy. The NTER Intervention and Stronger Futures policies, which were passed with bilateral support in 2012, have been criticised by the United Nations (see Anaya Citation2010) and Amnesty International (Citation2013) for being in violation of Human Rights charters.
3 Originally, two bodies of work—Kuka Irititja and Alkawari—were produced for the TarraWarra Biennial, under one title Tjukurrpa Kumpilitja (Hidden Stories 2015). Only the works of Kuka Irititja went into the Fiona Hall Wrong Way Time (2015) exhibition for the Venice Biennale.
4 My argument here draws upon the critical anthropology of Ginsburg and Rapp (Citation2013) who model ‘disability’ in terms of entrenched historical and cultural practices which systematically ‘dis-able’ non-normative bodies and experiences.
5 I draw here on Veronica Tello (Citation2016) ‘counter-memorial aesthetics’ and Jill Bennett’s (Citation2012) ‘practical aesthetics’ who both develop formal criteria for distinguishing refugee, diasporic and minoritarian aesthetics tied to real world events.
6 See ‘The Tjanpi Sisters’, National Museum of Australia Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters https://songlines.nma.gov.au/tjanpi accessed 30 February, 2019.
7 My argument here is indebted to First Nations scholar, curator and artist Julie Nagam (Citation2011) who notes a similar attention in relation to First Nations artists of Turtle Island.