Archie Moore’s kith and kin is an immersive, dark installation created within a black-painted building – a replica of the Australian pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale – that itself sits inside a voluminous wing of Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA). The ‘pavilion’ becomes its own discrete space. An adjacent high window allows natural sunlight and views of the sky. In Venice, the doors opened to the canal; within GOMA, this sky view is as close as the installation gets to nature. Not far from the installation, however, you can overlook Maiwar/the Brisbane River; water flowing around the globe connects these two places. Once inside the exhibition space, your eyes gradually adjust to the darkness. From the darkness appears black chalkboard walls on a scale that dwarfs viewers, a celestial diagrammatic, linked structure hand-drawn in white, and dark concrete floors. Its psychological impact is more slowly felt. The meditative qualities of the room drive a shift in perceptions.

Moore has said, ‘It’s chalk on a wall. 550 documents in a reflection pool. Three parts to it, with the pool a shrine-like place. I like that quiet way of speaking.’

kith and kin was Australia’s contribution to the 2024 Venice Biennale and achieved the highest international accolade possible for a visual artist: the Golden Lion for National Participation. The scale of this achievement is significant. Australia has participated in the Biennale since 1954, but never won the Golden Lion; indeed this marks the first time the prize has been awarded to a country outside the northern hemisphere. The installation was gifted to the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) and London’s Tate UK by Creative Australia and is being exhibited for the first time since the Biennale

Moore was born in Queensland’s Toowoomba in 1970 and lives outside of Brisbane. He has Kamilaroi and Bigambul heritage, and is known for art which explores language, archival research, identity, and racism. kith and kin curator Ellie Buttrose is Curator of Contemporary Australian Art at QAGOMA and first worked with Moore on the 2022 exhibition Embodied Knowledge.

Inside the space, Moore’s chalk lines name a timeline of people, ancestors, and kin stretching back 65,000 years. By articulating these connections, the work declares a universal thread between all living things, while also bearing witness to Moore’s sovereignty, his losses (of language and culture), and his grief (including the silence surrounding familial connections in his childhood). Moore’s own lineage runs around the room at eye level, his maternal Kamilaroi and Bigambul connections drawn with Gamilaraay and Bigambul words to re-etch them into the present. His paternal ties to convicts and his British and Scottish heritage are also drawn.

kith and kin (courtesy of Gallery of Modern Art)

The common ancestors from 3,000 years ago that connect all humans are delineated, as are the words, names, and slurs applied to First Nations peoples in the archive after 1788. This extensive research is expressed as a holographic map of relations, with ‘holographic’ used in the sense of a document that is completed in the author’s hand. The use of chalk on blackboard also evokes Moore’s schooling in a system in which Indigenous understandings of nature and culture were excluded and alien. Three bare patches on the high black walls mark interruptions to lineage due to disease, massacre, and deliberate destruction of Country, as well as records and evidence of First Nations occupation.

In marked contrast to the dark walls and floor, a stark white table dominates the middle of the room. Stacked in tight rectangular piles of paper on the central table are some documents: 557 coroners reports that detail First Nations deaths in custody, with 339 recommendations that lie dormant. There are gaps in this daunting array; where reports exist but cannot be found, they are represented by blank white paper, also tightly stacked. Then there are Moore’s own family records from the archive: details of the ways in which his ancestors were surveilled, monitored, and documented under Queensland’s Aboriginal Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897. The regimented sharp edges and straight lines on the table are at odds with the handwritten walls; this systemic clash has tragic (and ongoing) consequences.

A glossy black reflection pool surrounds the table. It prevents viewers from getting close to the documents; leaning forward to peer at the details (names redacted), you find yourself bowing before the many dead. The depths of black in the water reflect the names from the four walls, its liquid movement encompassing all: life past and present, gleaming light from the ceiling, and an aesthetic that stretches back 65,000 years and continues today.

Every element of this installation has been carefully researched, considered, and choreographed. It is expressive of a First Nations worldview that opens to embrace an audience global and local. Moore writes: ‘We are all brothers and sisters in a larger global family. All people are connected to the planet and the environment … We’re all kith and kin.’ 

This artwork compelled audiences in the world’s most competitive contemporary art exhibition. It changes the way we understand our place in the world, and it expresses the resilience of people and place. It is in Brisbane for a year, but memorable for a lifetime. A beautiful book, Archie Moore: kith and kin (2024), accompanies the exhibition, adding anecdotal and documentary detail and language.

kith and kin is exhibited at the Gallery of Modern Art, in Brisbane, from 27 September 2025 to 18 October 2026.