Located in Galleries 8-11

Turrangka…in the shadows surveys over a decade of James Tylor’s practice and brings together the most comprehensive selection of his unique daguerreotypes, expansive digital photographic series and hand-made Kaurna cultural objects.

The exhibition title is drawn from a Kaurna word, highlighting a significant ongoing aspect of Tylor’s practice: the learning and sharing of his Indigenous language. As well as shadow, turra also translates to reflection, image and mirror.

At the core of Tylor’s practice is a continuously innovative program of photographic intervention, disrupting the image to redact or highlight visual information. He systematically alters the reading of Country by excising information from the photographic print or inscribing language and place-names onto the surface of his daguerreotypes.

These photographs provide a glimpse into Tylor’s broader practice of recreating Kaurna cultural artefacts, architecture and ephemera. Antiquated analogue photographic processes including Becquerel daguerreotypes and hand-tinting are also used to generate a new archive of pseudo-historical images. Tylor’s recreations point to the absence of these images from the hegemonic depiction of colonial Australia’s visual history.

A UNSW Galleries, Sydney exhibition, presented in partnership with Art Gallery of South Australia. Presented during SALA Festival.

Located in Gallery 7 of Art Gallery of South Australia

This tintype photographic series, CIPX Kaurna Miyurna, celebrates important members of the Kaurna community in Tarntanya (Adelaide), on Kaurna Yarta.

These works form part of the Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange (CIPX), an international Indigenous portraiture project first conceived by Will Wilson, a Diné (Navajo) artist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA. The CIPX project invites Indigenous photographers from around the world to create portraits of members of their local communities using the nineteenth-century tintype process. Kaurna artists Damien Shen and James Tylor have contributed to this contemporary project, which seeks to recontextualise early photographic documentation of Kaurna people produced by European colonists and anthropologists in South Australia during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

These CIPX portraits differ significantly from earlier images of Aboriginal people taken by Europeans. The project is designed to prioritise agency and respect for contemporary Indigenous sitters. Historically, European colonial photographers controlled the visual representation of Aboriginal subjects and retained ownership of the original images.

The CIPX process centres the Indigenous sitter’s autonomy. Participants have control over how they are represented, and the original tintype photographs are returned to the sitter. With the permission of each sitter, Shen and Tylor exhibit reproductions of the works, presented in large scale on aluminium.