Echoes Unveiled: Art by First Nations Women from Australia
Artizon Museum, Tokyo

“Echoes Unveiled: Art by First Nations Women from Australia,” an exhibition at the Artizon Museum in Tokyo, was the first in Japan to exclusively showcase First Nations artists from Australia. The exhibition’s women-only focus aimed to correct a historical ethnographic bias that deemed the work of female artists inferior, often due to their expression through crafts. While many of the featured artists made their Japan debut through the show, its broad brush nature offered an all-too-cursory introduction to the rich and diverse visual languages of First Nations makers over the last three decades.

For an exhibition purportedly celebrating craft-based practices, it was surprising to see mostly painting. Fiber weaving, a strong skill among many First Nations women, was represented only digitally in the stop-motion animation films by the Tjanpi Desert Weavers, a social enterprise from the Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara region. The multilingual videos highlighted the joys and idiosyncrasies of desert community life; a story about hunting and eating a feral cat in Kukaputju – The Hunter (2021) must have shocked some feline-loving Tokyoites. While the films showcased the technical innovation of tjanpi (desert grass) weaving, the absence of real-life examples of the weavers’ work felt like a missed opportunity.