Genevieve Grieves
Genevieve Grieves | Worimi people | Australia b.1976 | Picturing the old people 2006-07 | Five-channel video installation (Mini DV format): 12:55 minutes, colour, sound; ed. 1/3 | The Xstrata Coal Emerging Indigenous Art Award 2007 (winning entry) | Purchased 2007 with funds from Xstrata Coal through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation | Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | © The artist
Across Country: Five Years of Indigenous Australian Art from the Collection | 5 November 2011 — 21 October 2012 | GOMA | Free admission
Genevieve Grieves has often worked with historical imagery and particularly with the State Library of Victoria’s nineteenth-century colonial photographic collection. Picturing the old people is based on some of the images of Aboriginal people found in this and other archives. Here, Grieves investigates the subjects — imagining the intriguing happenings at these staged studio renderings, where Aboriginal participants were often encouraged to engage in performances to make themselves seem ‘more Aboriginal’. This was to make the captured images seem more romantic or authentic and would help the resulting carte de visite, slides and postcards appeal to a wider audience. Importantly, one of these projections shows the matriarch of one family assuming control, staging the representation of her family on her own terms.
