Video Art and Digital Archives

“With the younger generation, video is more acceptable. Kids have phones, iPads, everything you know? So if you’re using this media that’s accessible to kids, you’re at least feeding culture and language into the digital space. The digital space right now, a lot of people are scared that it’s taking our young people away. Moving away from culture. So we need to put culture into that space, because that’s already where they are.”

- Colin Heenan-Puruntatameri, Tiwi artist

This quote is from an interview I did with Colin Heenan-Puruntatameri during the Darwin Aboriginal Arts Fair this past August. I study contemporary First Nations art from Australia, so I was lucky enough to visit his community, Milikapiti on the Tiwi Islands, back in June as part of my research for graduate school. I was introduced to art from the Tiwi Islands when I had the opportunity to curate an exhibition titled Performing Country at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection (March 2023-Februrary 2024). One of the galleries of the exhibition was entirely dedicated to Tiwi art and, through the research and consultation process of that project, I interviewed Tiwi artists about their work.

Performing Country was centered around the concept of performance and its relationship to art production. Much of Tiwi artistic practice is related to song, dance, and the performance of ceremony. The designs seen in prints and paintings in museum galleries are derived from the practice of painting the body for ceremony. When I started to speak with the Tiwi artists about their ideas of performance in artmaking, they introduced me to their recent work with video.

Video art is relatively new on the Tiwi Islands, with the first piece produced by their art center, Jilamara, in 2020. The piece was called YOYI (dance) and it involved 30 artists dancing their totems on their Country. When talking with the artists who worked on it, they said that the piece not only functioned to share their culture with outsiders, but it also was a way of documenting their cultural practices for their own community.

Heenan-Puruntatameri very adeptly articulates this tension in his quote: technology is moving the younger generation away from Tiwi practices, but video and digital projects seem to be the way forward in preserving and generating culture. A lot of Indigenous Australian communities are grappling with the same issues, and a common solution seems to be digital learning centers and cultural archives.

The Mulka Project in Yirrkala is perhaps the prime example of this type of institution in practice. Mulka is attached to the community’s art center and provides a space for photographs, videos, and documents to be digitally stored and continuously accessed. The founders of Mulka, like many Aboriginal communities, realized that a lot of media about their ancestors were dispersed in national and international collections. Mulka provided an on-site keeping place for all of this material. Originally envisioned as an archive, now artists have used old voice recordings, films, and photographs of their ancestors in artistic projects, like Ishmael Marika’s piece Rarrirarri (2023). In this large installation piece, Ishmael digitally recreated and then projected the footsteps of his grandmother onto the floor of the gallery. The installation is accompanied by an audio recording of his grandmother singing.

Jilamara is trying to construct a similar digital media center in Milikapiti. Artists like Heenan-Puruntatameri lead the way in thinking about how to engage with digital media in a way that will respect Tiwi tradition by moving the culture forward.

As a fellow in the Scholars’ Lab this year, I am very lucky that I get the tools to think about Tiwi video/archival work not only art historically but also through a digital humanities lens. In addition to being a graduate student, I am also the Assistant Registrar at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection which means that I am often the person who chooses how to store and format the museum’s data. With video and performance art possibly becoming a part of the museum’s collection in the future, I am left with a lot of questions about these media that I hope to explore in future blog posts:

• What does it mean to own a piece of video art, especially when it involves the performance of ceremony?

• How can museums conserve video work?

• What does video allow Tiwi artists to do that other media doesn’t?

• How does the medium of video change the audience of the artworks?