Daniel Boyd: RAINBOW SERPENT (VERSION)

About

RAINBOW SERPENT (VERSION) is the most comprehensive exhibition of Daniel Boyd’s artistic practice in Europe to date. It provides an overview of Boyd’s image-making that counters the colonial narrative of Australia’s history, engages transnational networks of resistance, Indigenous knowledge production and personal family histories, which he reflects in relation to the context and architecture of the Gropius Bau.

Boyd will engulf the Gropius Bau in a second skin layered over the atrium floor and first floor windows. This staging reveals and reflects the fragmented architecture of the Gropius Bau and relinquishes control of perception to the fall of natural light, through which his paintings are seen in constant movement.

The non-linear display of RAINBOW SERPENT (VERSION) underscores Boyd’s interest in how narratives continuously travel through time and space. Closely linked to Édouard Glissant’s thinking, the artist resists fixed categorisations that characterise the colonial violence of cultural homogenisation.

Non-First Nation people use the blanket term “Rainbow Serpent” for a number of creation stories of diverse First Nation communities in Australia, which refuses to acknowledge the specificity of their respective cosmologies.

An integral part of the exhibition is a public programme that, much like a theatre, plays out on the floor installation in the atrium.

Curated by Stephanie Rosenthal and Carolin Köchling
Developed in partnership with the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane