Courting Blakness lights up the Great Court

Curated by UQ Adjunct Professor, Fiona Foley and officially launched on 5 September by The Hon. Linda Jean Burney, MP, Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the NSW Parliament, the University of Queensland launched one of the year’s most important arts and education projects, Courting Blakness: Recalibrating Knowledge in the Sandstone University.

This ground-breaking exhibition, which ran from 5 – 28 September 2014, brought together works by Michael Cook, Christian Thompson, Karla Dickens, Megan Cope, Natalie Harkin, r e a, Ryan Presley and Archie Moore. Three visually surprising and conceptually challenging public art installations were positioned within key locations in the Great Court, some prompting a minor frenzy of ‘selfie’ happenings as students on campus and others interacted with the works. The other major component of the exhibition included five highly engaging multimedia works which screened directly onto the Forgan Smith sandstone walls in the early evening on both 5 and 6 September.

CREATIVEMOVE was contracted by the University of Queensland (School of Political Science and International Studies and School of English, Media Studies and Art History) to assist the Schools to deliver the exhibition component of the project. Courting Blakness also included a national symposium with essays and research publications and substantial outreach programs for primary and secondary school students collectively overseen and project managed by Dr Fiona Nicoll.

As the Curator Fiona Foley contended:

“The ambition that currently drives many Aboriginal artists is to challenge notions of who we are as Australians. Through bringing eight Aboriginal artists into the University of Queensland’s Great Court we are reinterpreting this space. The artists are reshaping the way we think about Australian identity. Their artworks will reconfigure how non-Indigenous students interact with the space and think about contemporary society and Aboriginal politics. What happens when you subvert constructs of power? I think that the Great Court is a construct of power and by subverting that space you actually create a more interesting space”.

The aim of incorporating the installation was also to create an integrated arts led transformative education and research platform, where dialogue can occur across social, political and cultural boundaries around a range of critical issues.

Adjunct Professor Foley is currently working closely with colleague, Dr Fiona Nicoll and writer Louise Martin-Chew to edit an illustrated collection of twenty essays from the conference to be published by UQP in 2015.

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