For over three decades Tracey Moffatt has created videos, films and photographic series that prompt all kinds of emotive, political, surreal, and aesthetic reflections. She was the first solo Indigenous artist to represent Australia at the 2017 Venice Biennale; has shown at galleries like Tate Modern and the Museum of Modern Art; has her art in a staggering number of esteemed collections; and has screened her films at Cannes Film Festival. Not to mention how admired she is for her fearless attitude, which is never without humour.
For the Biennale of Sydney, Moffatt is exhibiting DOOMED, 2007—a short film created with Gary Hillberg. It’s part of a cinematic montage series that cuts up iconic, repetitive tropes of film, spanning themes of revolution, love and matriarchy—for Ten Thousand Suns, it is scenes of blockbuster disaster.
In conversation with editor-in-chief Tiarney Miekus, Moffatt talks about her penchant for the staged and surreal, growing up in Brisbane and moving to New York in her thirties (she currently works from Sydney), and the importance of imagination.
TIARNEY MIEKUS
I understand there’s a reluctance to go into personal background, but like yourself I’m from Brisbane and artists who come from Queensland often have this special process of thinking and experimentalism—something playful yet serious, and often anti-authoritative. Can location be linked to an artist’s work?
TRACEY MOFFATT
I agree about radical people being produced from the oppressive state of Queensland, with its violent history—extreme environments produce extreme people. In my
