Gordon Hookey: Summoning Time. Painting & Politikill Transition in the MURRILAND!
Griffith University, Frontier Imaginaries, documenta 14 and Van Abbemuseum
Gordon Hookey’s MURRILAND! (2015-ongoing), is a monumental series of 10-metre long canvases that capture the history of Queensland and the country’s still-prevalent narrative of dispossession from an Indigenous view point. This book demonstrates the range of sources and reference material used by Hookey, while his trajectory – personal experience as an artist in Australia, the country’s colonial psyche, the politicisation of art, and the need to look at that genre of history painting anew, are discussed in interviews, re-interviews and in-depth conversations with curators Vivian Ziherl and Hendrik Folkerts and anthropologist Johannes Fabian; augmented by Aboriginal historian Michael Aird’s essay and a foldout, panoramic view of the work at its centre.
