Next to this, the sculptural treatment of a set of legal papers in Inert State (2022)—made for Embodied Knowledge: Queensland Contemporary Art, 2022 - 2023 at Queensland Art Gallery—is extended and physically simplified with a representation of all official inquiries into Indigenous deaths in custody in Australia since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (1987-91), a complement of more than five hundred reports. In this iteration, reams of standard A4 copy paper tile a large table-height platform, laser printed from partially redacted scans or left blank as stand-ins for those not publicly accessible.

Both precisely researched, humbly but meticulously rendered components carry an unmistakable charge. The fact that the chalk marks in one appear unfixed and the paper stacks in the other unbound heightens the tension inherent in their presentation. The darkened space they sit in invokes a sense of quiet contemplation (in a way not unrelated to the experience of entering any of Venice’s numerous churches for their artistic treasures). The elemental, cave-like character of the setting is accentuated by Moore detailing his drawing medium as ‘clay crayon’. Each half of the work, however, demands a different response. How they sit together is where I find myself most challenged by the work.

The room requires a pause as my eyes adjust. A floor-level window to the left admits sunlight reflecting up from the small canal that passes the building, between the two sections of the Giardini. Moore keeps where we are in view. The movement in the light mingles with the glow of the white paper and white drawing that loom from the darkness. The play between chalk and ink, paper and blackboard, light and shade offers no simplistic symbolic contrast, of course. Yet there is a polarity between the document table, weighed down by a snowdrift of white colonial law’s impersonal (and dubiously effectual) bureaucracy, and the hand-drawn genealogy, lent gravity instead by the sheer timescale of Indigenous lore, 65 000 years plus of culture (as the room sheet counts it).

It is not a comparison to make lightly, but I find it hard to shake the resemblance between the table and a model of The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, designed by Peter Eisenman and Buro Happold (which, as it happens, also pairs its field of slabs and gaps with a roll of names). In any case, Moore’s gesture is unequivocally a memorial to the suffering and loss it marks. The effort in its construction, and the stage given to it through this event, are an insistence that we face up to the ongoing injustice. It demonstrates the scale of a problem. It is a protest action.

On the other hand, while the ‘family tree’ is legibly marked by racism and other effects of colonial devastation (the room sheet warns that ‘language that is offensive to today’s standards is presented within its historical context’), it is an imaginative synthesis of worldviews. Its opacities—that might be seen in part in the blackholes, or black suns perhaps, in the upper reaches—could relate to mass deaths or ‘lapses’ in the historical record. Yet they are as much or more consistent with implications of a respect for the taboo of the names of the deceased, the privilege of ‘inside names’ only be used by appropriate people —with Indigenous epistemology.¹ It pictures survival, resilience, and a personal journey of reclamation; a clear orientation in conceptions of kinship and Country.

A shallow tray of ink-tinted water that underlies the platform physically separates the two parts of the work. While at points in the room its reflections mingle the walls with the floor, it accentuates the relative illegibility, the apartness of the legal piles. A moat of sorts between the visitor and their texts, it also resembles something like a font, a repository for symbolically or spiritually cleansing water, one of the precautions taken to keep us safe from the pain of others we are confronted with by this half of the work.

Moore’s modest ‘me’—inscribed in the centre of the far wall from the entry point to the room—is implicated in carceral histories, in that as the catalogue lays out, documents pertaining to charges against his kin are sources of knowledge for his own ancestry, although none involves a death such as those represented by the paper. The risks he takes is that while the work speaks up for the specific people—if not named, unambiguously implied—their suffering powers a work that, however selflessly intended, is also unavoidably credited individually.

The political crux of the work is nothing less than different understandings of the relationship between personal and collective, past and present, and their implications for responsibility. Moore’s personal writing in the catalogue—printed in silver on black paper, so another beautifully conceived black container—demonstrates the depth to which he is prepared to draw on his own experience of this nexus. The last line on the inside of the back cover addresses ‘reposing mother’: ‘i want you to know it’s okay. i understand the reasons why, now more than ever.’

As someone from Aotearoa New Zealand, the Māori concept whakapapa describes for me well the relational understanding of self figured in Moore’s wall drawing. Whakapapa is precisely an identity made out through connections to wider family, to the natural world, and to an ultimate origin story. It is a kupu or word that conjoins the ideas of ‘making’ and ‘ground’ or ‘place’ (and that might also be literally translated as ‘to place in layers’). Whakapapa is grounding, materially and spiritually.²

Perhaps we might best understand the relation between the two elements of Moore’s work as one holding the other: A strength found in an orientation to the past that makes bearable—for the artist himself, at least—the horror in the present with which he calmly, stonily confronts us.

kith and kin, Archie Moore, Venice Biennale 2024 (20 April – 24 November, 2024), Commissioned by Creative Australia. Curated by Ellie Buttrose.