Art and Memorialisation: Truth-Telling Through Creative Practice in Settler Colonial Australia

Genevieve Grieves is a Worimi woman from Southeast Australia currently based in Garramilla (Darwin). She is an award-winning artist, curator and content creator committed to sharing First Peoples histories and cultures and interrogating colonising frameworks and practices. Her recent projects include The Violence of Denial exhibition (2017) as part of the Yirramboi Festival; Barangaroo Ngangamay (2016), a place-based Augmented Reality app that shares and celebrates the living cultures of Sydney Aboriginal women; and, she was the Lead Curator of the internationally celebrated permanent exhibition, First Peoples (2013), at the Melbourne Museum. She is a passionate advocator of decolonising and community-engaged practice and teaches these methodologies in university, institutional and community contexts. Her current role is co-founder and creative director of GARUWA, a First Nations storytelling agency.

Amy Spiers is an artist and researcher of settler descent, and currently a Vice Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at RMIT School of Art based in Naarm (Melbourne). She has presented art projects across Australia and internationally, including at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), Monash University Museum of Art (Melbourne) and the 2015 Vienna Biennale. Amy has also published widely, including co-editing Let’s Go Outside: Art in Public with Charlotte Day and Callum Morton for Monash University Museum of Art (Monash University Publishing 2022) and co-authoring the book, Art/Work: Social Enterprise, Young Creatives & the Forces of Marginalisation, with Grace McQuilten, Kim Humphery and Peter Kelly (Palgrave Pivot, 2022). Most recently, she was awarded a 2024 Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) to investigate non-Indigenous artists’ that engage in truth-telling about Australia’s colonial past through creative practice.