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 MEG, mars 2012 |
From 17 September 2010 to 27 February 2010
MEG | Conches
… there was a big island, discovered in the eighteenth century and proclaimed Terra nullius by the newcomers. Yet, for 60,000 years, groups of people had been living in this immense land, which ancestral beings had shaped in the Dreamtime.
The clash between these two worldviews was sudden and relentless. The Australian Aborigines, oppressed and overrun by colonisation, have struggled ceaselessly ever since to make their voices heard and their value system recognised.
Peintures sur écorce, Australie, Territoire du Nord, Terre d'Arnhem
Inv ETHOC 025207, ETHOC 039751, ETHOC 033604
To achieve this, the Aborigines use their art, especially the eucalyptus barks on which the artists represent their everyday and mythical reality. These paintings, exhibited not only in ethnographic museums but in art museums and galleries all over the world, have become mouthpieces for their demands and tangible proof of the vitality and flexibility of their culture.
The "Dream Traces" exhibition brings together the MEG's fascinating collection of bark paintings – 43 paintings gathered between 1955 and 2010 – and 30 artworks borrowed from other Swiss institutions in Basel, Neuchâtel and Môtiers. These works, which were collected on site in northern Australia, are presented through seven themes covering secular and sacred life, animals, spirits and myths as a better way of questioning the relationship between art, identity, politics and the market.
Why do the Wandjina spirits have no mouths, why must we beware of symbols that look like little flowers, why can some barks not be shown to the public and how did a woman set fire to her husband, the crocodile Bäru, and the whole region around them ? Answers to these mysteries can be found in the exhibition and the handsome catalogue that accompanies it.
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© 2011 Musée d'ethnographie, Genève |
 
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