In an abandoned, dusky ballroom where couples once danced three storeys above Naarm/Melbourne’s Flinders Street railway station, hundreds of agile meat ants appear to have taken up residence in a three-metre-high mound.
Part of an elaborate animation of blossoming flowers and swaying branches by the Yolŋu collective Mulka Project, these digitally drawn ants pour out of the fibreglass mound and across the floorboards in search of spirits. The cry of the late Yolŋu artist Mulkun Wirrpanda bounces across the peeling walls and exposed wooden ceilings: “Rarrirarri, Rarrirarri.” The artist, who died in 2021, was famed for her knowledge of edible plants as well as her bark painting, weaving, carving and printmaking; here, her recorded voice calls out to the spirits as her animated footprints walk the room.
Rarrirarri is one of 14 immersive artworks in the new exhibition Shadow Spirit, a showcase of works by 30 Indigenous artists from across Australia, assisted by about 100 additional specialist fabricators. Part of the city’s Rising festival, which opens on Wednesday, the exhibition explores how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders’ spirit worlds vary from mob to mob, as well as metaphysics and memory. It is both a contemporary art exhibition and a conduit for conveying ancient and ongoing understandings of caring for country and people.
“Our mobs have these stories that some people might consider myth or folklore, but really, to us they’re systems of knowledge,” says curator Kimberley Moulton. The Yorta Yorta woman found her theme after a conversation with her mentor, Boon Wurrung elder Aunty Carolyn Briggs, who told her: “What lies in the heavens is reflected on the Earth; we just have to understand the in-between.”
While Flinders Street station is Australia’s oldest – known as Melbourne Terminus when it opened in 1854 – the heritage-listed ballroom and 11 additional rooms used in the exhibition date back to 1909 and have also recently featured exhibitions by sculptor Patricia Piccinini and street artist Rone.
Yet, as Moulton points out, the Birrarung (Yarra) river upon which the station is situated was a gathering place for the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation from time immemorial. Just recently, excavations for the new metro tunnel opposite the railway station unearthed about 300 Aboriginal artefacts, mainly parts of stone tools.
Moulton’s show has five sub-themes: weaving time, spirit ecologies, the guides, absent presence and the “in-between”, which she describes as the space “between what we feel and what we know. That’s not just a First Peoples thing; that’s an everyone thing.”
Down the corridor, an eerie video work by Wemba Wemba/Gunditjmara artist Paola Balla tells the story of Mok Mok, a female spirit known across Indigenous clans for stealing children and avenging violence against women by chopping up men. Mok Mok is played here by Balla’s mother, Aunty Margie Tang: “Mok Mok says shhhh,” she whispers as a tram clangs its bell, travelling past the Aboriginal artefact site outside. “Mok Mok says, ‘I was always here, and I always will be’.”
Balla herself first began dressing as Mok Mok eight years ago. “Eight years on from the first series, violence against Aboriginal women has escalated even further,” she says.
“We’ve lost more Aboriginal women in deaths in custody, and more Aboriginal kids are taken away. Mok Mok may be an entity from all times but she’s witnessing these atrocities taking place, so she’s still angry, and rightly so.”
Moulton points to strong correlations of “matrilineal power” and “ecofeminism” between the works of Balla and Wiradjuri artist Karla Dickens and Keerray Wooroong/Gunditjmara artist Vicki Couzens, all housed together in the exhibition’s eastern wing.
Dickens’s four new sculptures, collectively titled Deeply Rooted, present sections of trees cut down on farmland across the northern rivers to make way for new highways, to which she has added ornamentation such as a female Aboriginal figurine with a petrol pump for an arm. Couzens’s installation is a giant sculpture of a bandicoot, the companion of Peert Koorook, a female devil spirit “tall as a gum tree” who guards women’s Country on her mob’s lands.
Nearby, Waanyi artist Judy Watson’s water shadow includes works suspended from the ceiling that, inspired by the Guardian’s deaths inside series, record the names of Indigenous people who died in custody, written in braille. Watson’s work also includes a soundscape recorded underneath Flinders St station, capturing the sound of the natural waterway that runs underneath nearby Elizabeth Street.
The exhibition balances lightness and humour with darker shadows and deep knowledge. Maluyligal/Wuthathi artist Brian Robinson’s Zugubal: The Winds and Tide Set the Pace immerses the audience in an intricately detailed 360-degree animation about celestial beings known as Zugubal, who start their lives as constellations and influence life back on Earth.
Robinson encountered many wonders growing up on Waiben (Thursday Island) in the Torres Strait. The era of island sorcerers dancing in masks has passed, but their laws still govern tides, rains and crops. Then there was his grandfather’s stash of Phantom comics, the migration of birds, and the four seasonal winds of kuki, sager, zey and naigai (north-west, south-east, south and north respectively), all informing his intricately cut linoleum prints that are the basis of these animations.
Those who look hard might also spot Pac-Man and Stormtroopers, Wall-E and R2D2: little sci-fi references hidden among the stars. “I was very influenced by popular culture,” says Robinson, “and that element of escapism out of your usual life into that realm where dreams do become real.”
While assembling this exhibition over two-and-a-half years, Moulton says she was more interested in spirituality, to connect with the broader public, rather than centring colonialism as a theme.
“Whether you believe it or not is not really the point,” she says. “It’s just coming to experience and to understand there are systems of knowledge to be shared within these very creative spaces.”
Shadow Spirit opens at Flinders Street station, Melbourne on Wednesday and runs until 30 July. Steve Dow travelled to Melbourne as a guest of Rising festival.