The Power of Paper: 50 years of printmaking from Australia, Canada and South Africa (14 February – 6 December 2015)

ARCHIVED EXHIBITION

Lithograph titled 'Imposed Migration' by Pudlo Pudlat, edition 43/50. Print shows a walrus, a polar bear, and a musk ox suspended from an orange chinook helicopter. 1986. MAA 2012.76. Photography by Josh Murfitt.

Li Ka Shing Gallery

The art of printmaking has always put images into circulation: from Dürer to Hogarth and since, artists have made prints, in order to reach and shape public imaginations.

From the mid-twentieth century onwards, colonized peoples and indigenous communities began to represent themselves through art in modern media. In Australia, Canada and South Africa, they depicted culture, history and struggle through prints made in remote community workshops and in city studios.

This exhibition is a revelation of eloquent art made by black and indigenous artists since the 1960s. Inspired by environments from the Arctic to the Australian desert, from the country and the city, it foregrounds visions of place, custom and history, in settings that are at once profoundly different, yet linked by empire and the politics of decolonization.