Award-winning author, film-maker and lawyer Larissa Behrendt hosts the 2024 Wurrdha Marra Conversation – an annual event exploring important issues facing First Nations communities and featuring First Nations voices who are leading contemporary discourse and shaping our future.
Leading contemporary artist and activist Vernon Ah Kee will join Behrendt for an evening of thought-provoking conversation at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia.
The 2024 conversation will focus on the pressing issues facing First Nations creative practitioners, including the cultural loading of First Nations artists and writers, the role of history in creative practice, and the relationship and ongoing dialogue between creative practice and politics.
The event will include an opportunity to view the Wurrdha Marra exhibition from 5.15–6.15pm.
The name, Wurrdha Marra – meaning ‘Many Mobs’ in the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung language – comes to the NGV from the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Cultural Heritage Aboriginal Corporation and supports the purpose of this exhibition in sharing the work of First Nations artists from the NGV Collection, from emerging to senior figures, and across time and place.
Speakers
Vernon Ah Kee is Brisbane-based artist and a member of the Kuku Yalandji, Waanji, Yidinji and Gugu Yimithirr peoples. His conceptual text pieces, videos, photographs and drawings form a critique of Australian culture from the perspective of the Aboriginal experience of contemporary life. Ah Kee’s works respond to the history of the romantic and exoticised portraiture of ‘primitives’, and effectively reposition the Aboriginal in Australia from an ‘othered thing’, anchored in museum and scientific records to a contemporary people inhabiting real and current spaces and time.
Larissa Behrendt – a Euahleyai / Gamillaroi woman – is an award-winning author and filmmaker. She is the author of several books and writes and directs for film and television. She is also a lawyer and an academic based at the University of Technology Sydney. She is the host of Speaking Out on ABC Radio. Behrendt is Distinguished Professor and the Laureate Fellow at the Jumbunna Institute at the University of Technology Sydney. She has published numerous textbooks on Indigenous legal issues. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities and a founding member of the Australian Academy of Law. Larissa was awarded the 2009 NAIDOC Person of the Year award and 2011 NSW Australian of the Year. She was awarded an Order of Australia (AO) in 2020 for her work in Indigenous education, the law and the arts. Larissa received the Human Rights Medal in 2021 from the Australian Human Rights Commission.
This program is part of Resonance: Truth-telling at NGV. Generously supported by the Ullmer Family Foundation.