Memories blur and blend in Archie Moore’s immersive ‘Dwelling’
For his first exhibition after winning the prestigious Venice Biennale Golden Lion earlier this year, Bigambul/Kamilaroi artist Archie Moore is inviting Adelaide into his childhood home.
Standing in a 1:1 replica of artist Archie Moore’s childhood bedroom, peering at his teenage sketches – many inspired by the visceral style of MAD magazine – pinned to the wall, a strange sense of vertigo begins to take hold.
What starts out as an almost overwhelmingly intimate experience (because whose childhood homes do we visit as adults? Really, only those of people very close to us) spirals to a bigger and bigger scale.
On the bed, a folded T-shirt emblazoned with artwork for The Adventures of Tintin in the Congo raises the spectre of romanticised narratives of violent colonisation. Back up on the wall, one of Moore’s sketched characters scrabbles at their eye sockets with claw-like hands.
The installation goes beyond the bedroom. Moore has re-created his entire childhood home, bringing the footprint of a weatherboard house from semi-rural Queensland into the Samstag Museum of Art’s gallery.
Moving through the rooms, the zoom of the experience continues to adjust, swinging wildly from discovering personal details connected to Moore, to signifiers of larger systemic and cultural norms, and then – perhaps most disorienting of all – pushing the viewer into their own childhood reminisces.
“I’m trying to put people in my shoes as well; I do that with other exhibitions, too,” says Moore. “I had perfumes made of smells that triggered a memory for me, or a feeling. I know that won’t happen [for others] – there’s no way of me knowing how to share an experience with someone else.
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“So, that’s more about that knowing and understanding each other as a bit of a metaphor for reconciliation. Will Indigenous and non-Indigenous people ever know and understand each other?”
Artist Archie Moore with his installation at Samstag Museum of Art. Photo: Erica Green, courtesy Samstag Museum
Alongside the smells Moore has infused into the house – including a Dettol aroma that conjures the legacy of the Stolen Generations, which caused many Aboriginal parents to go to extreme lengths in the hope their children would not be reported as “unclean” – he has created a range of other sensory layers, many of which hinge around moving image projections.
This is the fifth iteration of this work that now exhibits under the banner of Dwelling. Each prior version has morphed in how much of the home it represents and what additions are layered onto its bones. The Adelaide incarnation is a commission by the Adelaide Film Festival in partnership with Samstag, which prompted Moore to expand on his previous use of projections in the home.
Created in collaboration with filmmaker Molly Reynolds (who directed the documentary My Name is Gulpilil), the new projection elements are highly varied. One of the most prominent depicts a boy locked in the fridge – a representation of a childhood experience Moore had and was told about by his mother, but of which he has no memory.
Archie Moore, Dwelling (Adelaide Issue), 2024 – Installation view at Samstag Museum of Art. Photo: Sia Duff
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“I’ve always been interested in memory,” says Moore. “It’s the nature of memory, how it’s reconstructed. How you add things to it and the things that get removed. And each time you remember something, it changes a bit.
“Some things are exactly what was, you know, part of my memory. But other things might be slightly different, like the fridge is not the exact same fridge, of course. It’s indicative of what we had with the locking handle.”
Other moving image elements underline how insidiously systemic racism and the long fingers of colonisation reached into Moore’s childhood consciousness. On a big, boxy TV in the lounge room, old snippets of shows loop in a stream of what might feel, to some privileged viewers, like an innocuous exercise in nostalgia. But amid the cheesy jingles are brutal reminders.
“[There are] things I would have missed when I was a kid that would reinforce negative stereotypes about Aboriginal people,” Moore explains.
On one show, he says, a character comments that he doesn’t want to visit Australia “because it’s full of dingoes and [a racial slur]”.
“And I remember feeling embarrassed when I saw an Aboriginal person or if I had a friend with me or another Aboriginal person was nearby, and I didn’t want to be Aboriginal.”
Archie Moore, Dwelling (Adelaide Issue), 2024 – Installation view at Samstag Museum of Art. Photo: Sia Duff
In an indication of how multi-dimensional the installation is, Moore has also used the moving image elements as an opportunity to track the history of the form, with everything from a camera obscura, to 8mm film, and an iPad presentation included.
Despite being so expansive in its thinking and themes, Dwelling remains grounded in an atmospheric and feeling world. Among deliberate detail like perfectly calibrated and varying lighting states, there is also an organic sense of transformation. It feels as if, like in a real home, a book on the shelf might not be there tomorrow – something that likely reflects Moore’s hands-on artistic process.
“I have a minimum of what it should be, so there’s going to be a house with this many rooms,” he says. “How many objects are in those rooms? That’s determined in the install.”
Moore feels what the installation should become by walking among it, adjusting objects, adding and removing them in a process that brings together his great wealth of research, his memories, and something less immediately tangible. It’s this last element that make the spaces especially compelling once he’s finished; the something beyond articulation that sits between the walls, waiting for audiences to discover it.
Archie Moore’s Dwelling (Adelaide Issue) is at the Samstag Museum of Art until November 29.