Visual Art
Blak In-Justice at Heide Museum of Modern Art is at once a devastating indictment of our legal system and a way to connect emotionally to its impact on Indigenous people. By Claire G. Coleman.
The passion and power of Blak In-Justice at Heide
Not long after I first moved to Naarm, I lived, for a time, about 100 metres from Heide Museum of Modern Art. It’s a beautiful piece of Wurundjeri country, near the floodplains of the Birrarung in what was then a semi-rural suburb named Bulleen, a gently hilly neighbourhood of tree-lined streets, parkland and some of the last farmland in the city. John and Sunday Reed lived here, in a house they named Heide – after the Heidelberg School art movement – that became famous as a gathering place for Melbourne’s artists and later the gallery where Blak In-Justice: Incarceration and Resilience is currently on display.
Aboriginal people are the most incarcerated on the planet, making up only 4 per cent of the nation’s population but 36 per cent of Australia’s prison population. We are imprisoned by the colonial legal system at a rate that would be embarrassing if the colony were capable of shame. “We are not an inherently criminal people”, as we are reminded by the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Those same words are printed on the wall of the gallery.
Rather, as royal commission after royal commission has discovered – each time as if it were a new fact – the extreme over-representation of Indigenous people in custody is caused by overpolicing and an entire legal system that is definitely not colourblind. This is the theme of Blak In-Justice, Heide’s current show: injustice, incarceration and resilience.
It’s curated by Barkindji artist and curator Kent Morris, who has worked at The Torch – an Indigenous-run art program for Indigenous people in prison, for 14 years – from the very beginning. There are works in this exhibition from artists who got their start in art from these Torch workshops, some learning art in prison and becoming professional artists upon release. As Morris says, “this exhibition [is] really about a call to action, we need to do much better in this nation around Indigenous incarceration and deaths in custody”.
Works by incarcerated artists tell the story far more effectively than I can. They are all over the walls of the gallery, telling us stories of culture, of prison, of the Stolen Generations, of genocide. They hang in judgement of the colony, judging you, reminding you that Australia can do better. In one room at the end of the large gallery space, faces of Aboriginal people take that literally. They all face the centre of the squarish room, watching you as you watch them.
This continent was turned into a carceral state upon the birth of the colony. The first people sent here by Britain were prisoners and jailers: the colony only existed initially as a side effect of a prison system. The carceral state has continued for generations, for as long as the colony has existed, which is an eye-blink of time compared with Aboriginal culture. The carceral state is so deep within Australia that it seems nobody can come up with a solution to Aboriginal over-incarceration and deaths in custody that does not assume the imprisonment rates will continue.
Connection to culture through art can be life-changing for Indigenous people in custody. Acknowledging the failings – or, perhaps, the genocidal successes – of the legal system is important, and the humanity of Indigenous people is important. The systems of the colony have failed Indigenous people repeatedly and the people who run the system – government, judges and police – know that and continue with their failures. The pivotal question, perhaps, is whether the system is still intentionally genocidal against Indigenous people, whether the genocidal effect is a bug or a feature.
Yet we are resilient and we resist; always have and always will. Resistance and resilience is how Aboriginal people support each other and how culture keeps us going. It is how we can find hope in even the depths of colonial displacement and over-incarceration. “There’s also hope because within our community we have to have hope,” says Morris. “And that’s why we build programs that make significant impacts, because we can’t give up on this.”
Accompanying works from artists with a life history of incarceration is art that’s about incarceration or about the conditions that lead to incarceration, by artists with no personal history with the legal system. “I’ve tried to pull together so many unique and diverse voices that have been commenting either on incarceration of First Nations people and the ongoing crisis of deaths in custody and also those who have had a lived experience of being incarcerated,” Morris says. There are more than 40 artists represented across the exhibition. Some you might know – they are among the most important artists in the country: Karla Dickens, Reko Rennie, Judy Watson, Tony Albert, Vernon Ah Kee and Richard Bell, to name just a few – but others you will almost certainly not have heard of.
Arguably the biggest surprise is two exquisite watercolour landscapes by Aranda artist Albert Namatjira, on loan from the National Gallery of Australia. It is not their power that is surprising, although they are particularly fine works from an incredibly important artist: rather it is their presence in this context. Namatjira is himself a perfect example of the need for this exhibition. He was jailed in 1959, when he was in his 50s and a successful artist, for a crime that would not have led to a prison sentence if committed by a white person and, it is argued, his time in prison led to his early death less than a year later.
The treatment of Namatjira is horrific enough to demand action, yet since it happened 66 years ago, nothing has really changed. Aboriginal people are still disproportionately imprisoned, often for infractions that would get white people nothing but warnings. There have been multiple royal commissions into Black deaths in custody, all of which have found the problems to be systemic and racist and have led to countless promises from government. Yet the problems persist and nobody seems interested in finding solutions that actually work.
You can read in many places about the disproportionate representation of Aboriginal people in prisons in Australia. That will give you the right words to begin the path to knowledge. However, Blak In-Justice will give you more than that: a visceral understanding of the issues, an emotional understanding and a powerful explanation of the extreme depth of the injustice. It’s hard to find an Indigenous person in Australia who doesn’t have a firsthand experience of incarceration or of losing family to incarceration, and that is something to fight against.
As Morris said, “Where we can bring the community together and get bipartisan support and encourage people to become part of the solution … then we can create change.” You can learn what you need to know – why you should stand against over-incarceration of Aboriginal people, why you should fight against the genocidal policies of government – by visiting this exhibition and learning from the testimonies represented by the art.
That is not the only reason to visit the exhibition. It holds within it powerful works of art, works that have never hung together, works by artists in prison and works by some of our most accomplished contemporary artists, works you might have never had the chance to see. If you desire to divorce the exhibition from the politics embedded within it, the art is good enough to stand on its own.
I know it gets said a lot – “just go have the experience” – but this is a case where such a statement is not hyperbole. It’s a powerful show of the scope you might consider appropriate for the National Gallery of Australia or the National Gallery of Victoria. But it’s not in one of those urban galleries: it’s in Heide in Bulleen, at the part of the Birrarung beloved by the Heidelberg school of artists, a part of the Yarra Valley that felt rural before a tunnel project turned up almost next door.
I’m going to say it again: just go see it.
Blak In-Justice: Incarceration and Resilience is showing at Heide Museum of Modern Art, Bulleen, until July 20.
ARTS DIARY
CINEMA Gold Coast Film Festival
Home of the Arts, Yugambeh Country/Gold Coast, April 30–May 11
INSTALLATION Izabela Pluta: Lumina
Heide Museum of Modern Art, Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country/Bulleen, until October 5
EXHIBITION Joy
Immigration Museum, Naarm/Melbourne, until August 29
CULTURE Sunrise Australia
Carriageworks, Gadigal Country/Sydney, April 30–May 1
VISUAL ART Tender
Ngununggula, Southern Highlands, NSW until June 15
LAST CHANCE
VISUAL ART Joan Ross: Those Trees Came Back to Me in My Dreams
National Portrait Gallery, Ngambri/Canberra, until April 27
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on April 26, 2025 as "Opening the prison".
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