merri-bek public art collection

Jenna Lee dissects and reconstructs colonial 'Indigenous dictionaries' and embeds the works with new cultural meaning. Long obsessed with the duality of the destructive and healing properties that fire can yield, this element has been applied to the paper in the forms of burning and mark-making. In Without Us, Lee uses charcoal to conceal the text on the page, viewing this process as a ritualistic act of reclaiming and honouring Indigenous heritage while challenging the oppressive legacies of colonialism. Lee explains in Art Guide (2022), ‘These books in particular [used to create the proposed works] are Aboriginal language dictionaries—but there’s no such thing as “Aboriginal language”. There are hundreds of languages. The dictionary just presents words, with no reference to where they came from. It was specifically published by collating compendiums from the 1920s, 30s and 40s, with the purpose to give [non-Indigenous] people pleasant sounding Aboriginal words to name children, houses and boats. And yet the first things that were taken from us was our language, children, land and water. And the reason our words were so widely written down was because [white Australians] were trying to eradicate us. They thought we were going extinct. The deeper you get into it, the darker it gets. But the purpose of my work is to take those horrible things and cast them as something beautiful.’Framed artwork

wāni toaishara is a Congolese artist living and working in Melbourne. His practice explores African Futurisms, Statelessness, Indigeneity, climate justice, those on the margins of those movements and dialogues, Indigenous knowledge production and the effects of dislocation in a globalised anti-Black, Afrophobic society. Final Solution enters the Darebin Art Collection as the winning work of the 2021 Darebin Art Prize. A personal and introspective moving image work, Final Solution features the artist’s family and friends as a way of interrogates some of these broader ideas, speaking to urgent issues both in this nation and on an international level. The powerful message is offset by a sense of intimacy, much needed as we move forward amid the paradigm shifts of the last two years.