Abstract
Indigenous Australian artist Judy Watson's Museum Piece 2008, etched into the glass walls of the Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, represents a visual reclamation of Aboriginal cultural objects which were acquired for colonial museum collections. Watson is one of a number of prominent Indigenous Australian artists including Vernon Ah Kee, Fiona Foley, Brooke Andrew and others, whose practice includes an engagement with museum objects as a means of reconnecting with cultural heritage, and way of critiquing colonial appropriations, classifications and power relations in the treatment of Indigenous people, knowledge and culture. The enforced removal of many Indigenous Australians from traditional lands in the 19th and 20th centuries, and their subsequent relocation into government reserves resulted in substantial disruptions to long held cultural practices. At the same time, Indigenous culture was being fragmented, reified and represented by objects in disparate museum collections. Consequently artists such as Watson have been interrogating colonial practices by mining museum archives and drawing on oral histories in order to reconnect with cultural knowledge through their work. This paper examines ways in which Watson and others have addressed cultural loss through forms of artistic repatriation. It considers the journey of Aboriginal cultural objects from their originating context into museums, and the subsequent decolonisation and transformation of such objects through creative interventions by Indigenous Australian artists.