The archive is a confronting and unsettling place, akin to a haunted house. In hosting – or, in a sense, keeping captive – sacred and often stolen objects, the archive is a place of profound paradox. It obscures items in a process of homogenisation that seeks to flatten complex, layered histories into singular narratives, erasing the multiplicity of their meanings. The British Museum alone holds around eight million objects, the largest collection of cultural artefacts in the world. Of these, over six thousand are connected to Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Many were looted during early colonial contact, yet these objects continue to hold immense cultural significance for First Nations communities, albeit exiled from Country and residing on the other side of the world.
A multitude of artists have mobilised the archive as a site of aesthetic and political interrogation – especially since the ‘archival turn’ in the 1990s – often destabilising the systematic and structural foundations of the institution. For First Nations artists, the archive embodies a haunting paradox, merging colonial trauma, degradation and ancestral memory. This intricate interplay is explored in The British Museum, 2023, by Matthew Harris, acquired by the National Gallery of Victoria in 2024 through the Victorian Foundation for Living Australian Artists.
Harris grew up in Wangaratta, Yorta Yorta Country in north-east Victoria. An artist of Koori, Scandinavian and Scottish heritage, Harris works across painting, assemblage and installation. In The British Museum, Harris presents a suite of six hessian canvases adorned with white ochre depicting phantom-like silhouettes of First Nations objects from Australia. In developing the work, Harris accessed the British Museum’s collection online and painted, in alphabetical order, a selection of these objects housed in the museum. Rather than providing detailed renderings, Harris gives an intentionally obscured representation, a meta-critique of the archive’s own tendency to abstract and decontextualise the objects within its possession.
The silhouettes lining Harris’s canvases include objects we may recognise, such as shields, boomerangs and spears. Others maintain an elusive, almost invisible presence, bypassing the viewer’s eye and retaining a semblance of ambiguity. Harris assumes the role of an archival mediator, bridging audiences in Australia and the objects held in the British Museum, acknowledging their enduring connection to the communities to which they rightfully belong. This work is a covert but potent call for repatriation, particularly through its material choices. For Harris, the white ochre used in The British Museum is significant, referencing its ceremonial use for mourning. In this way, the piece speaks to the emotional, psychological and cultural trauma that accompanies the displacement of sacred objects from their Country and communities.
Harris’s repetitious reconstruction of the archive’s objects highlights how institutional practices obscure original contexts to build a comprehensive, yet fundamentally flawed, encyclopedia of human knowledge. Each silhouette, rather than capturing the full essence of an object, hints at what is lost in translation – what is stripped away as artefacts are relocated to foreign shelves, catalogued and displayed in ways that disregard their stories, cultural importance and traditional functions.
In The British Museum, Harris’s haunting representations critique the institutional practices of collecting, commodifying and controlling access to sacred objects. By re-creating these objects as indistinct forms, Harris not only honours their significance but also symbolises the fundamental limitations of the archive, challenging its claims to authority and demanding a reconsideration of whose narratives it upholds and whose it erases.
Michael Gentle is Curator, Australian and First Nations Art at the National Gallery of Victoria.