EXCHANGE: Blak Dot Gallery

Yhonnie Scarce

5 Apr - 11 May 2025

Part of this years Yirramboi Festival, Blak Dot is proud to present:
EXCHANGE
ngunggilanha . yunggama . taonga tauhokohoko 

MAREE CLARKE | LISA COUZENS | VICKI COUZENS | KIRSTEN GARNER LYTTLE | BRIAN MARTIN | YHONNIE SCARCE | FRANCES TAPUELUELU | WANI TOAISHARA

OPENING: SAT 5 APRIL 2 – 5pm

EXCHANGE is a group exhibition featuring a dynamic new body of work by eight First Nations artists based in Naarm (Melbourne), Victoria: Maree Clarke, Lisa Couzens, Vicki Couzens, Kirsten Garner Lyttle, Brian Martin, Yhonnie Scarce, Frances Tapueluelu, and Wani Toaishara. Each artist has navigated industry and policy on their own terms, forging practices deeply rooted in culture, history, and mutuality.

EXCHANGE brings together photography, drawing, installation, glass, multimedia, sculpture, and weaving — offering an expansive survey of the ebb and flow of artistic endeavour.
The exhibition explores the exchange between peoples and the transfer of knowledge, materials, and practice. Though exchange may seem routine, for First Nations artists, it carries a significance that can be eroded by economic forces, lack of understanding, and insincerity. Ideas gain substance and validity through seeking knowledge and permission to access living traditions.
To explore the physicality of these ideas, artists traverse oceans and Country, interpreting and reinterpreting knowledge and materials at their source. Through collaboration — with those who came before, those practicing now, and those pushing the boundaries of contemporary forms — EXCHANGE reveals both mutual understandings and distorted relationships.
Each exchange carries a myriad of obligations — to return home, to culture, to Country, to archives, to resistance, to language, to practice, and to family…

From there we can range beyond the tenth horizon, secure in the knowledge of the home base to which we will always return for replenishment and revision of the purposes and directions of our journeys. We shall visit our people who have gone to the lands of diaspora and tell them that we have built something: a new home for all of us.
– Our place within, Epeli Hau’ofa