| Sydney, 28 March 2025
The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA Australia) presents Warraba Weatherall: Shadow and Substance. This timely exhibition reflects on the acquisition and display of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural materials and property from the 19th century to the present day.
Shadow and Substance is the first solo museum exhibition by Kamilaroi artist Warraba Weatherall (b. 1987, Toowoomba, Queensland). Curated by MCA Australia Curator Megan Robson in the Level 1 South Gallery, Shadow and Substance brings together new and recent works, alongside loans from public and private collections.
The exhibition features dynamic installation, sculpture and video works which critique narratives found within archival and museum collections. In this presentation, Weatherall illustrates how the objects, materials and documentation held within museums ‘hold power’ and as such have great influence. The selected works draw attention to the ethics of how Indigenous property, cultural information and materials have been acquired and displayed.
By foregrounding individual and community histories, including his own family’s experience, the artist highlights the gaps and biases of the colonial record, as well as its ongoing influence. Through his artworks, Weatherall presents alternative ways of seeing and understanding our colonial past and offers future models for cross-cultural dialogues.
Artist Warraba Weatherall said, ‘People need to understand that contemporary perspectives of Indigenous peoples have been shaped by the exploitation of cultural property, which are generationally naturalised and reinforced through social and political systems. In this way, cultural property and documentation are not benign materials, but signifiers of contemporary violence.’
Keith Munro, MCA Australia Director First Nations Art and Cultures said, ‘Warraba Weatherall’s contemporary art practice is inspired in part by the archive of cultural and ancestral material that has been shaped, defined and classified by western knowledge structures. These considered artworks open up space for dialogue and new ways of engaging these important issues.’ |
