Indigenous communities around the world are faced with the challenge of preserving and transferring ancestral knowledge. A new exhibition at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris is an example of how indigenous Australian elders are finding innovative ways to protect the bridge between ancient and modern worlds.

Dalisa Pigram, a dancer and co-artistic director of the contemporary Australian dance company Marrugeku, has been invited to present a series of recitals as part of the “Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters” exhibition.

Her piece “Gudirr Gudirr” takes its name from the warning cry of the guwayi shorebird from Western Australia.

“Watch out,” it cries. “The tide is coming in, you might drown!” It could be interpreted as a universal alarm bell for society in general, but in particular for young indigenous people.

Pigram, who belongs to the Yawuru/Bardi people of Western Australia, created “Gudirr Gudirr” with the Belgian choreographer Koen Augustijnen ten years ago. It was a way to address the past and the present with all their contradictions, pain, anger, frustration and joy.

Using dance, video, music and text, Pigram explores the fallout of colonialism and the trauma of younger generations, lost between cultures. She broaches the topic of young people fighting each other for kicks, and the record high child suicides in the Kimberley region of Western Australia.

Even after several world tours, the urgency of the message has not changed.

The movements are robotic, hypnotic, blending martial arts with aerial acrobatics. The music is modern, punchy rock, sometimes with lyrics in Pigram’s native tongue.

She whirls around the stage using a fishing net suspended from the ceiling. It is an important symbol, representing both friend and foe. While it is a tool for survival to find food, it is also a trap.

“Dalisa told me a lot of stories,” Augustijnen told RFI, referring to their chance encounter many years ago. “Then she asked me to give her some ‘tasks’ or themes to prepare for the dance. This was new way of working for me.”

The cross-cultural partnership has enriched both their experiences on and off the stage, with Augustijnen hailing the recital’s ability to recount important historical events from a physical perspective.

“Our truth-telling hasn’t begun yet, telling both sides of the historical story,” Pigram told RFI after her performance on Thursday, adding she was thrilled to be part of the “Songlines” exhibition.

“The youth are still struggling with their place in the world and their connection to culture, their connection to who they are. Also the country is at risk every single day with the different policies, mining and loss of language, loss of elders and all of that. In the last ten years, nothing has changed,” she laments.

Decolonising minds

Born in the pearl industry town of Broome, Pigram recognises the wealth of her own mixed Asian and indigenous cultural heritage, and her attachment to the stories and traditions passed down from her elders.

“I can see people [in the audience] processing it. They ask me, ‘how did you manage to say all those hard things in a dance?’ They are surprised that dance and theatre has the ability to address complex issues.”

She says her piece poses questions: “How can we decolonise indigenous minds? Can the past hold keys to the future? And who will pass on that knowledge?”

This question of transfer is raised in the rest of the “Songlines” exhibition.

Passed down through the generations for thousands of years, these oral guidelines continue to provide a spiritual and practical map for the people of today.

They explain moral principles, rules of society, how to care for nature, and essential knowledge for survival in the desert.

The Quai Branly exhibition introduces one of the major pillars of the First Australians’ creation legends, known as the Seven Sisters songline.

An evil sorcerer is threatening the lives of seven sisters, who flee into the desert. Pursued relentlessly through what may seem an inhospitable environment, the women learn to survive thanks to their knowledge of the terrain and of nature, guided by the songlines. 

Their story, presented visually, takes place across three of the continent’s vast central and western deserts and provides the backbone of the exhibition.

Fragmented knowledge

The museum has gone to great lengths to present a fully immersive experience with nearly 200 works, including 20 multimedia pieces, on display in partnership with the National Museum of Australia.

Curator Margo Neale says that the process of gathering material began in 2010, with the close collaboration with a group of elders from the Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara lands in central Australia and the Ngaanyatjarra and Martu in the West.

They expressed concern that many of their descendants no longer have a meaningful connection to their ancestral lands, nor do they have access to the language. The project provided a vehicle to preserve this fragmented knowledge before it was too late.

Recognising the fact that the digital age has changed the way people consume culture and knowledge, there has been a push to make the presentation as interactive as possible.

By following the lines on the ground of the gallery, visitors can listen to the songs and testimonies of the Aboriginal artists and elders as if they were standing there in person. The videos are part of what Neale calls “a living library”, assuring that the elders’ knowledge does not die out with them.

“They said to themselves that they too had to record their knowledge in digital form if they wanted to maintain a link with the younger generations,” she writes in the exhibition notes.

‘Everything is alive’

The landscape is described in extraordinary colourful dots, lines, shapes and patterns, all holding their own significance. Each artist has the responsibility to recount the legend, leaning on the ancestral knowledge passed down to them.

“For Aboriginal peoples,” Neale explains, “country is a multidimensional concept that includes everything. There is no distinction between animate and inanimate worlds.

“Everything is alive, everything has its place: people, animals, plants, earth, water and air.”

“Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters” is at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris until 2 July

Since its founding in 1982, performing arts company Artists Repertory Theatre has played a big part in highlighting theatrical productions by artists from underrepresented communities, such as Larissa FastHorse and her current Broadway hit “The Thanksgiving Play” and Hansol Jung’s “Wolf Play.”

But over the last few years, due to construction delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, ART hasn’t had a home base to showcase the company’s work.

That’s all about to change.

Officials at ART announced in April that the company moved into the second phase of a $30 million building project that will house all of its future productions.

Through a rigorous funding campaign, ART Executive Director J.S. May said they raised $24.5 million as of April.

Construction crews broke ground for the project in 2019 at 1515 SW Morrison Street, just a few blocks from Providence Park.

As part of the first phase, crews tore down the Alder Street side of the old building to make way for the 21-story Alta ART Tower. They also reinforced the Morrison Street side of the building, stripped the interior and added seismic safety-upgrades.

Phase two currently consists of constructing a new lobby, which will initially serve as the performance space, and two additional theaters including a 178-seat main stage and 99-seat studio theater.

Since 1997, ART has operated out of the same building on SW Morrison Street and bought the entire block from 15th to 16th avenues in 2004. But years of wear and tear finally caught up to the building, including leaky roofs and walls that were not up to seismic standards.

In 2018, ART received an anonymous donation of $7.5 million to do what they wished.

ART used the money to pay off the company’s debts and started planning for the new building.

ART at the time was real estate rich, but cash poor, May said. So in 2019, they sold the north half of the block to development firm Wood Partners, who built Alta ART Tower.

“And that became the lead investment for redoing our half of the building,” May said.

May said he’s excited about finally having a building that meets the high standards of the productions ART has been known to have.

“ART has both a local and a national reputation of doing really high quality work that impacts the theater, and our building hasn’t supported that kind of process,” May said. “So this gives us the opportunity to have a facility that at least aspires to be as good as the work.”

Jeanette Harrison joined ART in 2022 as its first Indigenous Artistic Director and echoes May’s enthusiasm for a new building.

“I think our artists are just really feeling the hurt of isolation for so long. It’s been hard and it’s been exhausting and arts leaders are exhausted. Portland is really a first class art city, and this building is going to help us knit our community back together again,” she said.

While the new building is being constructed, ART is still putting on productions for the upcoming season.

Harrison said that ART will continue to put on productions through partnerships with other theater companies like Portland Center Stage and the University of Portland.

“One of the great things for Artists Rep from this partnership is not just the intergenerational theatre making, but also the fact that University of Portland is opening up some of their resources to us,” she said.

The 2023-24 season opens with the play “Pueblo Revolt” by Indigenous playwright Dillon Chitto. The comedy play follows two Indigenous brothers who live in 1860 New Mexico and plan a revolt against their Spanish colonizers. The play runs from Sept. 18 to Oct. 15.

“It is going to be performed and produced in partnership with the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. So that play will be performing in what used to be the Yale Union Building,” Harrison said.

Harrison admits that navigating both the construction of the new building and the new season has been a challenge, but she relishes the opportunity to showcase new productions in interesting ways.

“We’re gonna go out into the community and we’re gonna be producing work all over Portland in the hopes that we’ll be building our audience back, and then we’ll be able to invite people to come back into our building and into our neighborhood when we’re ready,” she said.

May hopes the new building will inspire people to come back to ART and enjoy their new offerings of productions that challenge how we view the world.

“Creativity is a fundamental human impulse that helps define who we are,” he said. “What we want is for people to come to this building and get insight into what’s going on in the planet and how they can personally understand it better.”

For one week every June, art galleries and institutions around the world commit to showing only female artists, with many offering special talks and events. Women Artists’ Art Week (WAAW) was co-founded in 2022 in London by artist Annya Sand and art patron Catherine Hunt as a not for profit initiative to encourage the art industry to be more inclusive towards female artists and to address the imbalance of representation of female artists. From London, the annual event has gathered momentum, showing there is clearly a need for an annual event to highlight female artists.

This year’s event runs until 15 June, with 44 galleries in the U.K involved. WAAW has expanded quickly since launching and this year, seven overseas galleries are participating including the Rangi Gallery in Tanzania, the Leila Heller Gallery in the USA, three galleries in China, one in Uzbekistan and one in Singapore. A map on the WAAW website shows artlovers all of this year’s participating galleries and their exhibitions and events. It’s also useful for women artists to see which galleries are perhaps more encouraging of women artists.

Among the highlights of the female art shows this week in London is a tour on 14 June at 5pm of the Victoria & Albert Museum’s new Parasol Foundation for Women in Photography. The new gallery emphasises the museum’s commitment to supporting female practitioners and championing contemporary photography, through a dynamic series of events and exhibitions.

Bowman Sculpture and Guerin Projects is presenting The Power of She – A Tribute to Women in the Arts (until 24 June), a group exhibition featuring 15 of the most important 18th and 19th century, Modern and Contemporary women artists. including: Camille Claudel, Elizabeth Frink and Barbara Hepworth, juxtaposed with leading contemporary artists Emily Young, Lily Lewis and Pauline Amos. A highlight is works by 19th-century artist Camille Claudel, who, while until recently was perhaps best known for her tragic love affair with Rodin, now has her own museum, the Camille Claudel Museum in Nogent-sur- Seine. Claudel is shown alongside one of the most striking pieces in the show, a beautiful sculpture by Emily Young, The Skies Daughter, carved from a piece of Lapis Lazuli mined in a high mountainous region of North Eastern Afghanistan. As a special event during the exhibition, at 4 pm on Monday 12 June, Prima Ballerina of the English National Ballet, Natascha Mair will perform The Dying Swan, accompanied by Austrian violinist and composer Yuri Revich, as well as a talk by New York gallerist, Hong Gyu Shin, on Carla Prina and Else-Fischer-Hansen, two 20th-century female artists, whose works feature in the exhibition.

Another fantastic exhibition during WAAW is Tangle Teaser by Sarabande Foundation, established by Lee Alexander McQueen. The exhibition at the north London gallery, explores how artists use hair to examine themes of lineage, conditions, tradition, gender, sexuality, politics and liberation. Artists in the exhibition work in a variety of media including photography, sculpture, textiles, painting and performance.

JD Malat Gallery have an Artist Q&A 10 June, at 3pm by French-Vietnamese artist Sophie-Yen Bretez and the Gallery Director about Sophie’s painting show Powerful, despite it all (until 8 July 2023). The artist’s vibrant surrealist paintings elicit questions on self-expression and the social conformities imposed on women.

Further afield, Leila Heller gallery in Dubai is showing Beirut based multimedia artist Katya A.Traboulsi’s solo show Perpetual Identities until 1 September. Katya’s show is based on the empty sleeve of a mortar shell that she received for her birthday in 1975. The object, which had blindly sown death where it fell, ended up in her room, raised to the status of a trophy celebrating the courage of fighters or the defeat of enemies. Her later reflections on the mortar shell inspired an installation project Perpetual Identities which sought to divert the weapon from its morbid destiny and make it serve Life. Forty six shells are on display from different countries, each one handmade, using different materials, including ceramics, porcelain, resin, wood, and iron. Each is titled with a country’s name; most are produced by their native artisans. The shell becomes like a ‘book’, an inventory of myths and traditions. The many cultures and societies involved in the project enrich the object with seemingly infinite meanings.

WAAW World has set its sights on helping the public to see and appreciate the art created by female artists that we have been missing for centuries. They’re also keen to show commercial galleries the talent of female artists and their commercial potential.