Stepping out from the glaring Venetian sunlight and into the Australian Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, the sensory shift is total, immediate, and profoundly visceral. The air cools; the light recedes. Inside this darkened, hermetic space, Kamilaroi and Bigambul artist Archie Moore has orchestrated an intervention that fundamentally recalibrates how a national pavilion can function on the world’s most contested stage for contemporary art. The installation, titled kith and kin, is at once an expansive celebration of continuous Indigenous survival and a devastating indictment of the Australian carceral state. In April 2024, the Biennale jury recognised the immense gravity of Moore’s achievement, awarding the exhibition the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. It is a historic milestone—the first time an Australian artist has ever received the prestigious accolade.
Curated by Ellie Buttrose, kith and kin responds to the 2024 Biennale’s overarching theme, Stranieri Ovunque (Foreigners Everywhere), as determined by artistic director Adriano Pedrosa. Yet, rather than looking outward at geographic borders and modern migration, Moore turns his gaze inward and backward, delving deep into ancestral time and the traumatic ruptures of colonial violence. The result is an environment that functions as both a cosmic ledger of existence and a solemn site of mourning, successfully demanding that the international art world halt its frantic pace to bear witness to Australian history.
The Chalk Ledger: 65,000 Years of Ancestry
The immediate visual impact of kith and kin is staggering. Moore has transformed the interior walls and the ceiling of the modernist pavilion by painting them entirely in black. Across this vast, dark expanse, he has painstakingly hand-drawn a sprawling genealogical chart in fragile white chalk. The mural maps 65,000 years of ancestry, documenting over 3,400 generations. It is a staggering physical and intellectual feat; Moore spent more than two months entirely immersed in the pavilion, drawing the intricate web of lineage by hand.
The chart traces Moore’s own complex heritage—weaving together his Kamilaroi, Bigambul, British, and Scottish bloodlines. However, this is not a sanitized or romanticised family tree. Woven into the chalk matrix are the derogatory terms, racist slurs, and bureaucratic classifications historically used by colonial authorities to categorize and control Indigenous Australians. By rendering these violent archival words in the same fragile chalk as the names of his ancestors, Moore visualises the inescapable intersection of Indigenous identity and colonial administration.
The title of the exhibition operates on multiple linguistic and historical registers. “The phrase ‘kith and kin’ simply means friends and family but an earlier Old English definition for Kith dates from the 1300s and originally meant ‘countrymen’… and Kin: ‘family members’,” Moore detailed in the exhibition’s official materials. “I was interested in the phrase as it aptly describes the artwork in the Pavilion, but I was also interested in the Old English meaning of the words as it feels more like a First Nations understanding of attachment to place, people and time.”
This profound attachment to “place, people and time” evokes the First Nations ontological concept often translated into English as the “everywhen”—a non-linear understanding of existence where the past, present, and future are intimately coexisting and continuously interacting. The chalk lines on the ceiling do not simply represent dead ancestors; they represent a continuous, living fabric of kinship that envelopes the viewer.
The Reflection Pool: A Monument to Systemic Failure
If the walls and ceiling of the pavilion represent the infinite expanse of Indigenous survival, the floor anchors the viewer in a brutal, contemporary reality. In the centre of the darkened room lies a large, square reflection pool, filled with black water. The dark surface acts as a mirror, reflecting the white chalk lines from the ceiling and creating a disorienting illusion of infinite, spherical space.
Yet, suspended directly above this dark water is the installation’s most harrowing element: neat, meticulously arranged stacks of white paper. These are redacted coronial reports documenting the deaths of First Nations people in state custody. Specifically, the documents represent the 557 Indigenous individuals who have died in police and prison custody between 1991—the year the landmark Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody delivered its final report—and 2023.
The visual contrast is a masterclass in spatial rhetoric. Above, the chalk lines demonstrate a vast, interconnected history of life and endurance spanning millennia. Below, the bureaucratic reports represent the abrupt, violent, and highly administered truncation of Indigenous lives by the modern state. The heavy redactions on the documents—blocks of black ink obscuring details—serve a dual purpose. Practically, they protect the privacy and cultural protocols surrounding the deceased. Conceptually, they symbolise the state’s persistent obfuscation, the silencing of victims, and the bureaucratic erasure of institutional accountability. The reports hover over the water like ghosts, suspended in a perpetual state of unresolved grief.
Slowing Down Time: The Curatorial Vision
The efficacy of kith and kin is deeply tied to its curatorial execution. Ellie Buttrose, a curator of contemporary Australian art at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), worked closely with Moore to ensure the spatial dynamics of the pavilion served the emotional weight of the subject matter. In the context of the Venice Biennale—a notoriously overwhelming event characterized by rapid consumption of art, crowded pavilions, and sensory overload—Buttrose and Moore engineered a space that demands deceleration.
The darkness, the stillness of the water, and the sheer scale of the chalk drawings strip away the noise of the Giardini. “It was vital for the exhibition to slow people down, encourage them to linger and to signal that art is not separate to life,” Buttrose explained in an interview with Art Almanac.
By forcing the viewer to slow down and adjust their eyes to the gloom, the exhibition transforms the act of viewing into an act of physical and emotional reckoning. Visitors cannot simply glance at the work and move on; they are enveloped by it. They must walk the perimeter of the pool, feeling the weight of the 557 redacted lives, while standing beneath the weight of 65,000 years of history. This approach bridges the often-distant worlds of contemporary art and urgent political memorialisation, proving that aesthetic beauty and rigorous socio-political critique are not mutually exclusive.
Global Resonance and the ‘Everywhen’
While kith and kin is profoundly rooted in the specific political and historical context of Australia, its resonance at the Biennale has proven to be fiercely universal. The Venice jury’s decision to award the Golden Lion to Moore indicates that the installation’s themes of colonial violence, state surveillance, and the endurance of indigenous epistemologies strike a global chord. In an era marked by rising nationalism, border conflicts, and a renewed scrutiny of imperial histories, Moore’s pavilion serves as a mirror for other nations grappling with their own legacies of dispossession.
Moore’s vision of connectivity stretches far beyond the borders of the Australian continent. Speaking about the philosophical underpinnings of the space, Moore described kith and kin as “a holographic map of relations which connects life and death, people and places, circular and linear time, everywhere and everywhen to a site for quiet reflection and remembrance.”
By invoking this “holographic map,” Moore effectively subverts the foundational premise of the Venice Biennale itself. The Biennale is structured around national pavilions—built representations of the modern nation-state. By painting over the architecture of the Australian Pavilion with a genealogy that predates the very concept of the nation-state by tens of thousands of years, Moore dwarfs the modern geopolitical order. He reminds the international audience that the “nation” is a recent and often violent invention, superimposed over ancient, enduring networks of kinship.
Institutional Custodianship and Legacy
The impact of kith and kin will not end when the Biennale closes its doors in November 2024. In a significant move that underscores the work’s monumental importance, the installation has been jointly acquired by QAGOMA in Brisbane and the Tate in London, facilitated by Creative Australia.
This joint custodianship is fraught with powerful historical irony and profound reparative potential. The Tate, a premier British institution whose historical foundations are inextricably linked to the wealth of the British Empire, will now be a custodian of a work that explicitly chronicles the devastating impact of British imperialism on Australia’s First Nations people. The acquisition signals a major shift in international collecting practices and exhibition design, reflecting a growing institutional willingness to internalise the critiques of the communities they historically marginalized.
For Australian art, the Golden Lion represents a paradigm shift. It validates the central, undeniable importance of First Nations narratives in defining what Australian art is on the global stage. Archie Moore and Ellie Buttrose have not merely exhibited an artwork; they have constructed a sanctuary, an archive, and a tribunal. As the chalk inevitably dusts and the water remains still, kith and kin stands as a permanent testament to the fact that while the bureaucratic machinery of the state may attempt to erase, the bloodlines of the everywhen endure.