©LINDA YABLONSKY/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND ROSLYN OXLEY9 GALLERY, SYDNEY/VIA ART GALLERY NSW
The Australia Council for the Arts has announced that Tracey Moffatt will be representing Australia at the 2017 Venice Biennale. Melbourne-based curator Natalie King will be curating her work, which will be shown at the Australian Pavilion in the Giardini.
In a statement, Venice Biennale 2017 commissioner Naomi Milgrom AO said:
“With a career spanning over 25 years, Tracey is one of Australia’s celebrated and differentiated contemporary artists, invigorating the art scene both locally and internationally. Tracey is the first Australian Indigenous artist to present a solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale marking this appointment as significant, bold and inspirational. A moment to be celebrated by all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists, as it will be by all Australians.”
Moffatt works primarily in film, photography, and video, often combining elements of film history, art, and photography alongside those of pop culture and her own childhood memories in her art. She has had solo exhibitions in Europe, the United States, and Australia, and has shown films at the Cannes Film Festival. In 1997, she participated in the Venice Biennale’s Aperto section, and will present her film Laudanum, in addition to other works, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2016.
Moffatt commented in the same release:
“Naomi Milgrom and the wonderful curator Natalie King and I will indeed enjoy our Venice 2017 journey together and we three will make sure that we keep up the humour. But we three are dead serious about art. Naomi with her collecting and commissioning, Natalie who has worked as a curator for more than half her life and as for me, I haven’t really had a life; I’ve only had art.”