Abstracts: New Aboriginalities

Michael Riley
19 June 1996 to 20 July 1996
The Spacex Gallery touring exhibition of the Aborigine photographer Michael Riley was about racism as experienced by the artist throughout his childhood. It combined two bodies of work and included two video installations showing works written and directed by Riley.

As part of Abstracts: New Aboriginalities, 198 Gallery presented new and recent work by Michael Riley, one of the most acclaimed Aboriginal photographers and film-makers in Australia today. Together, the two series of black-and-white cibachromes, two films and a multi-screen video work (Eora, commissioned by the Museum of Sydney), formed a dark, powerful chronicle of both an individual’s experience of unofficial and institutional racism, and the recent history and present state of oppression and alienation suffered by the artist’s people in their homeland.