Thinking about aliens – The Blak Infinite envelops Fed Square this RISING

“[The Blak Infinite] really came from Kim and I sitting down and asking ourselves, what are we going to do with this invitation?’, says ten Buuren, Senior Curator, First Nations, at Melbourne Arts Precinct Corporation. “And in one of the early conversations, Kim said, ‘All right, well, I’m just going to say I’ve been thinking about aliens a lot lately.’” 

For RISING last year, Moulton curated Shadow Spirit, an immersive exhibition two years in development, which was held in the derelict-chic ballroom and rooms above Flinders Street Station.  

While Shadow Spirit explored themes of First Peoples connections with the spirit world, The Blak Infinite emerged in a different context. “It also came out of last year and the referendum,” says Moulton, Senior Curator at RISING Festival, “and also loving the work of artists like Tony Albert, and the way he subverts history and politics through humour. 

Since that initial conversation, what has emerged is a program of immersive art, talks, films and a children’s program of creative workshops.

Animated works include newly commissioned large-scale projections by Tarryn Love (Gunditjmara, Keerray Woorroong) featuring slippery glowing eels and floating ancient spirits, which light up Fed Square’s buildings each night. A daytime and nighttime version of speculative fiction poetry by writer Ellen van Neerven (Mununjali Yugambeh and Dutch) is animated on the Big Screen.

Wander through to the Atrium, and you’ll find suspended alien spaceships with silhouetted humans being beamed up by Tony Albert (Girramay, Yidinyji and Kuku Yalanji) and collaborator ENOKi (Dja Dja Wurrung and Yorta Yorta). Large light boxes are scattered throughout the Square, featuring artwork by Michael Cook (Bidjara) of alien creatures invading England.  

At the entry to the Square, more lightboxes sit, featuring digital prints of Kait James’ (Wadawurrung) multimedia works, of reworked 70s kitsch Aboriginalia. Prominently along Swanston Street, a huge lightbox displays the pop-art inspired work of the late Josh Muir (Gunditjmara, Yorta Yorta and Barkindji), a bold ‘Outer Space’ emblazoned across it.  

Walking further into the Square, visitors will find a khaki green tent, the site for Richard Bell’s (Kamilaroi, Kooma, Jiman and Gurang Gurang) EMBASSY – a work that has toured all over the world, including to The Tate Modern in the UK – inspired by the original Aboriginal Tent Embassy set up in Canberra in 1972 by Aboriginal land rights advocates. During RISING, EMBASSY will become a place for films and conversation, inviting First Peoples writers, artists and advocates and other guests.

“We’re describing [the program] as a constellation”, says ten Buuren.

Tony Albert is a Brisbane-based cross-media artist, whose previous work has featured classic aliens and spaceships, reminiscent of 50s-era sci-fi comics or current-day emojis – those big-headed green fellas in flying saucers.  

“For me,” says Albert, “the idea of the alien always represented this idea of otherness, of misrepresentation, of the tangent between the visible and invisible. And my first real encounter was when I was heavily looking at the idea of language, and I kept coming across the word ‘alien’ in reference to Indigenous people within this anthropological context. And it really struck with me how language is so important.

For The Blak Infinite, Albert has worked with local Naarm-based artist ENOKi, to bring to life a full takeover of The Atrium at Fed Square – complete with large-scale suspended spaceships, an installation of his work Crop Circles in Yogya #5 on the exterior of The Atrium, and a program of free creative workshops for kids. One of Albert’s requests, as part of his involvement with The Blak Infinite, was the opportunity to bring on board a younger artist, whom he could mentor as part of the project. In an era of funding challenges for artists, it’s a rare thing to see, but one that was important to Albert.  

“My start in the art world was because of incredible people and mentors that I had.” Says Albert. “Richard Bell was one of them. I feel so privileged to have had people looking out for me and willing to push my creativity further and support me. At this point in my career, I’m on a number of boards and have different roles and responsibilities, and one of those is to look at opportunities I get and use that platform to raise awareness – particularly for younger or more emerging artists.” 

ENOKi is a Melbourne-based artist who, like Albert, works in cross-media. Their art features vibrant colours and details taken from Victorian native flora, fauna and landscapes, as well as pop-culture references. Their work explores ideas of identity, and what it means to be non-binary, black and queer in Australia. In 2022, ENOKi was involved with RISING Festival, creating a large-scale digital artwork to wrap a tram for the Art Trams project, but they say working with Albert was a whole new experience. 

Filling up an enormous public precinct across two weeks of a festival like RISING is no easy task – and at the forefront of Moulton and ten Buuren’s minds when curating the program was what was going to work in the space, and for the audience. 

“Tony [Albert’s] work is pretty much 24 hours for the whole festival, as are the light boxes, of course. Richard [Bell’s] work is activated every Saturday, with multiple speakers on the one day. People can just come and sit down, have a cup of coffee and listen, and come in and out as they please. There’s no prescriptive way to experience the works or how people want to be in the space.” 

One of the themes of The Blak Infinite is exploring First Peoples futures – through conversations on Aboriginal rights that will form part of the program in EMBASSY, and the two newly commissioned speculative poetry works that will appear on the Big Screen, by writer Ellen van Neerven. 

“We can’t ignore the things that are happening in the world. We couldn’t put on a show and not talk about the realities we are living,” says ten Buuren. 

“Last year we had the referendum, which I feel like has only further emboldened racism in this country and people to act on their racism. We’re also living through witnessing a genocide happening in Palestine. As Indigenous people we have a strong resonance with anyone who’s experiencing oppression and colonial violence, because we’ve experienced that.” 

Walking through the Square for The Blak Infinite, it is hard not to be struck by the overt sense of humour in the works. The hyper-real images of kangaroos with laser beams for eyes striking down a terrified public in the streets of England. The ‘TAKE ME TO YOUR WEAVER’ across Kait James’ images of brightly repurposed kitsch Aboriginalia. 

“And I think our communities and our artists are really funny people. There’s a lot of humour and clever subversion of language. ‘Blak’ is something that [the late] Destiny Deacon coined many years ago in wanting to subvert that language and take the ‘C’ out. And that’s been really embraced by the community. It’s a new way of identifying that it’s also self-autonomous, and that’s sort of, I think, an important part of humour as well. So yeah, I think it’s just part of our culture as well as having serious conversations is.”

The opportunity that The Blak Infinite offers to the public, says ten Buuren, is to see and experience contemporary First Peoples art, in a welcoming and accessible space – open every day throughout the festival. 

“It also says to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander audiences that they’re welcome here and that this is a space for us. And to do that in the heart of the city where art and political movements have always been prevalent, is significant.  

“Public space is not always inviting or safe for Aboriginal people or other marginalised people, and I think to have these works in the public to take up that space, it’s essentially like a Blak-out of Fed Square for the whole of RISING Festival. 

“It just says that this is a space for us, and our voices are centred in this space while it’s on.” 

And what is The Blak Infinite?   

“It was really important to Kate and I to have a program and a project that spoke to the excellence of our people.” Says Moulton.