Aboriginal art is considered as the oldest living art form of humanity.
Traditional aboriginal art was essentially secret and ritual.
In 1970’s at the earth of the central desert of Australia, a fundamental change of this ancestral art form has occurred.
On the impulsion of a newly arrived Art teacher, elders of this community executed a mural painting of the “Honey haunt dreaming” on the village’s school external walls.
For the first time Aboriginal people were revealing their sacred stories outside the spiritual custom.
Their paintings are conceptualising on an aerial perspective a network of meaningful places that function together as an all, they map out the boundaries of a cultural geography that are shaping social network.
Executed in a powerful visual language, those works establish a link between specific places and moments of the mythological era. They celebrate an ancestral past and the actions of the ancestral beings that created the universe and put in place the laws that govern it.
The paintings can be read as maps of country that bears the scars and marks of history.
The abstract iconographic system is used to encode these places of memory and maps out enormous tracts of land in a narrative way.
In a sense, the concept of place here becomes an abstract intellectual product which is the essence of a myth before becoming a tangible element of nature.
Emerging from an ancient culture, Aboriginal art today is complex in its renewal; it is difficult to perceive all its aspects. It invites us to question fundamental values about identity, belonging and memory which appear to be in harmony with our current exploration of identity and our environmental sensitive time.
The choice to represent this art form intent to introduce a rupture in the way we look at this ancient art form. It aims to show it as a form of contemporary art movement and not simply an extension of unfamiliar tribal art. It is the transition from a purely ceremonial art to a new art form that is meeting this characteristic of contemporary art to convey ideas through visual communication.
Traditional aboriginal art was essentially secret and ritual.
In 1970’s at the earth of the central desert of Australia, a fundamental change of this ancestral art form has occurred.
On the impulsion of a newly arrived Art teacher, elders of this community executed a mural painting of the “Honey haunt dreaming” on the village’s school external walls.
For the first time Aboriginal people were revealing their sacred stories outside the spiritual custom.
Their paintings are conceptualising on an aerial perspective a network of meaningful places that function together as an all, they map out the boundaries of a cultural geography that are shaping social network.
Executed in a powerful visual language, those works establish a link between specific places and moments of the mythological era. They celebrate an ancestral past and the actions of the ancestral beings that created the universe and put in place the laws that govern it.
The paintings can be read as maps of country that bears the scars and marks of history.
The abstract iconographic system is used to encode these places of memory and maps out enormous tracts of land in a narrative way.
In a sense, the concept of place here becomes an abstract intellectual product which is the essence of a myth before becoming a tangible element of nature.
Emerging from an ancient culture, Aboriginal art today is complex in its renewal; it is difficult to perceive all its aspects. It invites us to question fundamental values about identity, belonging and memory which appear to be in harmony with our current exploration of identity and our environmental sensitive time.
The choice to represent this art form intent to introduce a rupture in the way we look at this ancient art form. It aims to show it as a form of contemporary art movement and not simply an extension of unfamiliar tribal art. It is the transition from a purely ceremonial art to a new art form that is meeting this characteristic of contemporary art to convey ideas through visual communication.