PA/10/15 22 May 2015
An exhibition of Aboriginal Art from Australia’s Western Desert
A groundbreaking exhibition from Australia, which reveals the Aboriginal history of the world’s longest stock route through the deserts of Western Australia, has gone on display in Delhi.
‘Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route’ provides a window on the artistic, cultural and natural worlds of the Aboriginal people of Australia’s Western Desert. The artists draw on both traditional art conventions and new figurative styles to recount their sacred and secular life experiences through their art.
Nearly 70 artists travelled along the 1850-kilometre stock route on a six-week intensive engagement with their country in July and August 2007. Over 100 artworks were produced during the expedition, and a selection of these are now on display at DLF Place Saket until 22 June, 2015.
The art of the Canning Stock Route has its origins in the traditional sacred art of Aboriginal people of the Western Desert. Prior to Western contact, most art was produced in ceremonial contexts as body decoration, sand sculptures, ceremonial objects and rock art. Paints, made from ochres and charcoal, were augmented by the use of bird feathers and down.
The iconography of desert art is complex. Artists combine symbols, such as concentric circles, bars, footprints, horseshoe shapes and lines, to convey sacred stories. The tradition of ceremonial art, and the rules associated with its creation, continued in the Western Desert until well into the 1970s, when a new art movement developed out of a growing Western market for Aboriginal desert art.
Today’s artists use traditional methods to express a personal style, telling more individualistic, often secular histories that continue to be informed by traditional practices, and often with an undercurrent of the sacred world.
The works created for The Canning Stock Route are exuberant, vividly coloured, and highly energetic, conceived by the artists to express the joy of telling their stories.
The exhibition was developed by the National Museum of Australia in partnership with the arts group FORM, which initiated the four-year Canning Stock Route Project that involved artists, traditional custodians and emerging Aboriginal curators and filmmakers from across Western Australia.
Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route will be on display at the will be on display at DLF Place Saket from 20 May to 22 June 2015 (Timings 11:00 am – 9:00pm)
Background to the exhibition
Yiwarra Kuju is a vision of the Country that was intersected by Canning’s stock route. The Canning Stock Route was a cattle route used throughout the first half of the 20th Century for droving cattle through 1850 km of desert from the Kimberley to the southern goldfields of Western Australia. The stock route crossed lands that had been occupied for millennia by Aboriginal people, and regularly spaced wells were built over traditional soaks and springs that were vital to the survival of those communities.
The meeting of Aboriginal people and European surveyors and pastoralists that took place as a result of the opening up of the Canning Stock Route was initially violent. Eventually, however, the land and its resources came to be shared, to the extent that many Aboriginal people began to work on remote cattle stations and along the stock route. Today a number of Aboriginal communities lie on, or near, the old stock route, and a vigorous art movement flourishes in these communities.