EXCHANGE

Saturday 5 April 2025 2:00 pm 14:00
Sunday 11 May 2025 4:00 pm 16:00

Blak Dot Gallery 33 Saxon Street Brunswick, VIC, 3056 Australia (map)

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Image Credit: *Flour 1788 (Reign of Terror),* 2025, Frances Tapueluelu

Part of this years Yirramboi Festival, Blak Dot is proud to present:

EXCHANGE

ngunggilanha . yunggama . taonga tauhokohoko

OPENING SAT 5 APRIL 2-5pm

EXCHANGE is a group exhibition featuring a dynamic new body of work by eight First Nations artists based in Naarm (Melbourne), Victoria: Maree Clarke, Lisa Couzens, Vicki Couzens, Kirsten Garner Lyttle, Brian Martin, Yhonnie Scarce, Frances Tapueluelu, and Wani Toaishara. Each artist has navigated industry and policy on their own terms, forging practices deeply rooted in culture, history, and mutuality.

EXCHANGE brings together photography, drawing, installation, glass, multimedia, sculpture, and weaving — offering an expansive survey of the ebb and flow of artistic endeavour.

The exhibition explores the exchange between peoples and the transfer of knowledge, materials, and practice. Though exchange may seem routine, for First Nations artists, it carries a significance that can be eroded by economic forces, lack of understanding, and insincerity. Ideas gain substance and validity through seeking knowledge and permission to access living traditions.

To explore the physicality of these ideas, artists traverse oceans and Country, interpreting and reinterpreting knowledge and materials at their source. Through collaboration — with those who came before, those practicing now, and those pushing the boundaries of contemporary forms — EXCHANGE reveals both mutual understandings and distorted relationships.

Each exchange carries a myriad of obligations — to return home, to culture, to Country, to archives, to resistance, to language, to practice, and to family…

From there we can range beyond the tenth horizon, secure in the knowledge of the home base to which we will always return for replenishment and revision of the purposes and directions of our journeys. We shall visit our people who have gone to the lands of diaspora and tell them that we have built something: a new home for all of us.

- Our place within, Epeli Hau’ofa

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

MAREE CLARKE

Maree Clarke, a Yorta Yorta/Wamba Wamba/Mutti Mutti/Boonwurrung artist, is dedicated to reviving southeast Australian Aboriginal cultural practices. Originally from Mildura and now based in Melbourne, she has spent over 30 years reclaiming traditions disrupted by colonisation. Her work spans possum skin cloaks, kangaroo teeth adornments, echidna quill pieces, and large-scale river reed necklaces, seamlessly integrating traditional and contemporary materials like glass and 3D printing.

Through photography, sculpture, and immersive installations, Clarke explores ceremony, memory, and colonisation’s lasting impact. Her collaborative, intergenerational practice ensures cultural knowledge is preserved and shared. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, with major works for the Metro Tunnel, naarm ngarrgu Library, and Footscray Hospital.

Her accolades include the Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture (2023) and an Australia Council Fellowship (2020), with residencies in Florence, Tacoma, and Pilchuck.

"My art is about regenerating cultural practices and passing this cultural knowledge onto the next generation... we haven’t lost anything; some of these practices have just been laying dormant." — Maree Clarke

Clarke is represented by Vivien Anderson Gallery

insta: @ree_clarke

VICKI COUZENS & LISA COUZENS

Vicki Couzens, a Keerray Wooroong Gunditjmara artist from western Victoria, is renowned for her interdisciplinary practice, which she calls “creative cultural expression.” Her work spans painting, installation, printmaking, language, ceremony, and teaching but is best known for reviving the possum skin cloak tradition, now central to south-eastern Australia. With over 45+years of community work, Couzens has driven cultural and language revival, collaborating as a cultural adviser and creative developer for major institutions like Museums Victoria. Recognized as a Senior Knowledge Holder, her impactful work is held in national and international collections, including the National Gallery of Victoria.

Lisa Couzens is a proud Gunditjmara Keerray Woorrong woman from south west Victoria, currently living and working on Wadawurrung Country, with a passion for education and empowerment of our youth. Lisa is also involved in Possum Skin Cloak making. She acknowledges her sister Vicki as being the knowledge holder/keeper within their family and her Ancestors, Country and Community in guiding her work. Lisa does not call herself an artist, she believes that her work in creative and cultural practice is inherent in the survival of culture and family responsibility.

insta: @vickicouzens

KIRSTEN GARNER LYTTLE

Dr. Kirsten Garner Lyttle is a Māori-Australian artist and researcher, born in Sydney, raised in Pōneke (Wellington), and based in Naarm. She rethinks photography by combining customary Māori weaving techniques with digital photographic prints, ‘Maorifying’ the medium.

With over a decade of teaching experience, she has lectured in photography, art history, and visual art at RMIT University, Victoria College of the Arts, and Deakin University, and is the inaugural Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Monash University’s Wominjeka Djeembana Indigenous Research Lab. Her work has been showcased widely, including commissions for the National Gallery of Victoria’s Melbourne Now 2023 and the TarraWarra Biennial 2023. In 2024, she earned an Honourable Mention in the Bowness Photography Prize and was a finalist in the National Works on Paper at the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery.

She recently published the book chapter “Ancestors, Not Objects” in Alternative Economies of Heritage (Routledge, 2025). In September 2025 she will undertake an artist residency at Bundanong with colleagues. Her work is held in numerous public and private collections.

Read more about Garner Lyttle here

insta: @kirstlyttle

BRIAN MARTIN

Born in Redfern Sydney, Brian Martin is Bundjalung, Kamilaroi and Muruwari. As a leading Indigenous artist and academic, he is represented by William Mora Galleries and has been a practising artist for thirty years, exhibiting both nationally and internationally specifically in the media of painting and drawing. His research and practice focus on refiguring creative practice and culture from an Indigenous ideological perspective based on a reciprocal relationship to “Country”.

Martin was the inaugural Associate Dean Indigenous at Monash University Art, Design and Architecture and is also Honorary Professor of Eminence at Centurion University of Technology and Management in Odisha, India. He is Professor and Director of Wominjeka Djeembana Research Lab at Monash University.

Martin is represented by William Mora Galleries

insta: @brianmartin_artist

YHONNIE SCARCE

Yhonnie Scarce, a Kokatha and Nukunu artist from Woomera, South Australia, is a pioneering contemporary glass artist. Holding a Master of Fine Arts from Monash University, she describes her work as “politically motivated and emotionally driven,” often addressing the ongoing impacts of colonisation, particularly the forced removal and displacement of Aboriginal people from their homelands, and Aboriginal children from their families.

Her works are held in major collections, including the National Gallery of Victoria, Art Gallery of South Australia, and National Gallery of Australia. Scarce has exhibited internationally, including at Harvard Art Museum, Galway Art Centre, and in Hong Kong, Vancouver, Berlin, Japan, and Italy.

She has participated in significant Australian projects such as the Palimpsest Biennale and Tarnanthi Festival. Her work was featured in the 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014) and the 55th Venice Biennale collateral exhibition (2013). Scarce has also undertaken residencies and symposiums in the USA, furthering global engagement with Aboriginal art.

Scarce is represented by THIS IS NO FANTASY

insta: @yhonniescarce

FRANCES TAPUELUELU

Frances Tapueluelu is a New Zealand-born Tongan, of Vava’u and Nuku’alofa descent. Graduating with a degree in fashion design, Frances worked in the fashion and film industries in New Zealand before migrating to Naarm (Melbourne). She has dedicated time to living and working with remote Indigenous communities. Inspired by early cultural influences and her work with Indigenous communities, Tapueluelu extends her creative practice to include wearable art, print media and spoken word. Her works have featured in numerous exhibitions across Australia and New Zealand and have been added to permanent collections internationally.

insta: @frances_tapueluelu

WANI TOAISHARA

wani toaishara is a Congolese practice-led researcher living in Naarm whose works bridge the realms of documentary and conceptual art. His practice explores the effects of colonialism on Africa and its diaspora, dislocation and memory, and the intricate layers of cultural practice, Indigeneity and identity. His works span various mediums, including image-making, performance, installation and film, often interrogating the complexities of Black sociality in urban spaces.