Before the Spectacle, 2026. Kirsten Garner Lyttle.
GALLERY 1
Opening: Saturday 1 August, 2pm
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DR KIRSTEn garner lyttle
august 1–23
Photography has often been understood as a technology for recording the world. After Spectacle: Photography, Authority and the Archive begins from a different proposition: that photographs do not simply document history, they participate in making it. Through installation, photography and archival research, Kirsten Garner Lyttle examines how nineteenth-century visual technologies, museum practices and exhibition culture shaped colonial ways of seeing, believing and knowing.
The exhibition is informed by the Māori concept of whakaahua, a term that encompasses the making, transformation and photographic rendering of images. Rather than understanding photography as a neutral record, whakaahua recognises images as active participants in relationships between people, objects, place and history. It offers a way of thinking about photography as a process that not only represents the world but also helps to shape it.
Centred on the colonial staging of Indigenous and First Nations peoples for European audiences, the exhibition considers how photographs, museum displays and ethnographic spectacles produced particular ideas of authenticity while obscuring the complexity of lived cultural knowledge. Rather than simply documenting Indigenous cultures, these images informed how they were interpreted, classified and, at times, materially transformed. Misclassification, omission and institutional authority are approached not simply as historical errors, but as ongoing structures that continue to shape relationships between photographs, objects and the people they represent.
Drawing on both contemporary practice and nineteenth-century image-making techniques, the exhibition explores the relationship between spectacle, illusion and historical authority. Images emerge, recede and shift between presence and absence, inviting viewers to question how archives produce meaning, how authority is established, and whose knowledge is privileged. Rather than offering resolution, the exhibition creates space for Indigenous ways of knowing to unsettle inherited narratives and imagine more relational approaches to photographs, museums and history.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Dr Kirsten Garner Lyttle is a Māori Australian artist and practice-led researcher (Waikato Tainui, Ngāti Tahinga) whose expanded photographic practice spans weaving, installation, print-based practice and writing. Her research repositions photography as a site for Indigenous making through her methodology whakaahua, transforming photographs into forms that challenge colonial histories of representation, classification and the archive.
Grounded in collaboration, cultural exchange and material experimentation, Kirsten's practice explores photography as both a material process and a way of being in relationship with people, place and history. She is a member of the RF Collective, an interdisciplinary group of artists and researchers exploring Indigenous-led approaches to photography with Country through principles of reciprocity and relational accountability. In 2025, the collective undertook a research residency at Bundanon to develop collaborative methodologies for photography with Country.
Kirsten's work has been commissioned and exhibited nationally, including by the National Gallery of Victoria for Melbourne Now (2023), the 9th TarraWarra Biennial (2023), and Art of the Pacific (2025–26). She received an Honourable Mention in the Bowness Photography Prize (2024) and was a finalist in the Ravenswood Australian Women's Art Prize and the Blake Prize (2026). She has taught at Monash University, RMIT University, the Victorian College of the Arts, Deakin University and Photography Studies College.
After Spectacle: Photography, Authority and the Archive has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia with the support of Blak Dot Gallery.
