This landmark exhibition celebrates 10 years of critical and creative work by the nationally acclaimed Unbound Collective, a group of First Nations women based on Kaurna Yarta whose shared praxis represents a rupturing and reimagining of colonial institutions, and radical endeavour to shape the world anew.
Featuring moving images, installations, song, poetry and performance, Sovereign Acts | Love Praxis traces Unbound Collective’s journey from its inaugural exhibition in 2014 at Fontanelle Gallery in Adelaide’s inner west, to its most recent commission for the 2023 TarraWarra Biennial. This video-work PERMEATE | mapping skin and tides of saturated resistance, was also presented in ‘unsettling Queenstown’ at the Australia Pavilion for the 18th Venice Architectural Biennale.
Unbound Collective is a group of activist-led creative arts practitioners and scholars based at Flinders University including Dr Ali Gumillya Baker (Mirning), Dr Faye Rosas Blanch (Mbararam, Yidinyji), Dr Natalie Harkin (Narungga), and Dr Simone Ulalka Tur (Yankunytjatjara). Their individual and collective work centres on ethical practice and responsibility, using memory and storytelling to critically engage with colonial sites of power and knowledge production, such as universities, galleries, libraries, archives and museums.
The Collective’s work is grounded in First Nations methodologies of creative resistance, refusal, activism and sisterhood. It explores complex ideas around sovereign identity and representation, offering profound new ways of interrogating, resisting and speaking back to the enduring hold of colonialism in Australia. In reflecting on their collective shared praxis, they ask “What are the ideas that we can collectively bind ourselves to and what are the ideas that can set us free?”
A new performance piece being developed to extend the Sovereign Acts | Love Praxis survey project, includes a Yankunytjatjara translation of the anti-nuclear song ‘Purple Flowers’, co-written in 2018 with Dr Lou Bennett (formally of Tiddas).
An edited book of essays reflecting on the work of Unbound Collective, including a catalogue of works over ten years, is being published by Wakefield Press, for release in 2025. Contributors to the book include Romaine Moreton, Léuli Eshrangi, Clo Bullen, Nici Cumpston, Karina Lester and Julie Gough.
