In my last blog post, I talked a little about the Mulka Project which is an archive in an Indigenous community in the Northern Territory of Australia. Mulka has two parts: the digital archive, which consists of historical and contemporary material, and the digital production house, which uses the archival material to produce installations and works of art. Mulka began as a digital repatriation project that aimed to give Yolngu people access to their own family documents. Before Mulka, Yolngu people had to travel to institutions across Australia and internationally in order to see photos, videos, and recordings of their family members that had been collected by anthropologists and linguists. Now, Yolngu people can just pop into Mulka and download these documents whenever they want.

I visited Yirrkala, the home of Mulka, last summer and got to see the archive in action. They have a computer room where people can access the archive and put anything they want on USB drives. They also have an auditorium where visitors can queue up videos to watch on the big screen. It was incredible to watch people download hours and hours of family videos, and then come back the next day to download even more. Photos and videos of elders are cherished by many people in the community.

Perhaps most relevant to my work, however, is the space where the “new stuff” gets made (that’s how people at Mulka refer to it). Shortly after Mulka started in 2007, artists became interested in incorporating the archival documents into their artistic practice. Yolngu artists have produced films, songs, sculptural works, and projection installations using the digital materials of their ancestors.

One artist who works at Mulka, Dhukumul Wanambi, was recently a finalist for the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Award in Multimedia. Her work was titled Gurka’wuy, the name of her father’s ancestral homeland, and featured the projected image of drone footage he recorded at Gurka’wuy surrounded by animated rings of his clan designs.

I had the privilege of moderating a panel with Dhukumul and another artist from Yirrkala, Milminyina Dhamarrandji, at the Asia Society in New York on Saturday, September 21st as part of the exhibition opening of Madayin: Eight Decades of Bark Painting from Yirrkala. It seemed so timely because I had just finished drafting my previous blog post about video art and the way that Indigenous artists are engaging with and building their own archives. I was not originally supposed to be the moderator for that event, but circumstance made it so that I had about 12 hours notice before I was supposed to get up on stage, in front of an auditorium of people at a major New York City museum, and facilitate a discussion about Mulka and Yolngu filmmaking. It was the first panel I ever moderated and it was going to be at such an immense scale!

After my initial freak out over being on stage and having to do public speaking, I reminded myself that my role was just to give Dhukumul and Milminyina the space to talk about what they wanted to talk about. It helped that I had been to Yirrkala recently and was such a huge fan of their work. Dhukumul talked so beautifully about how she wanted to use video to show the inextricable connection between land and Yolngu culture, like with Gurka’wuy’s footage of her father’s Country surrounded by his clan designs. The medium of video makes that connection so explicit while simultaneously acting as an archival document. Milminyina spoke about how important Mulka was for preserving culture for future generations.

Archives and their relationship with Indigenous people is very complex. Archives were used as a tool of colonization, stealing cultural objects in the name of “preservation.” There are many scholars who explain this ongoing history much more eloquently than I ever could. But it is really interesting to watch how Indigenous people conceive of and build their own archive, and how culturally generative Mulka has become.

Because I am only just starting my second year of my PhD, I am still in the process of trying to figure out what my dissertation project will be about. Coupled with my pursuit of Digital Humanities through Praxis, it feels like something keeps pulling me in the direction of video, performance, and the archive. And I’m lucky to know Dhukumul, Milminyina, and other artists who will continue to teach me about their art.

Emmy Monaghan with Dhukumul Wanambi and Milminyina Dhamarrandji at the Asia Society

“With the younger generation, video is more acceptable. Kids have phones, iPads, everything you know? So if you’re using this media that’s accessible to kids, you’re at least feeding culture and language into the digital space. The digital space right now, a lot of people are scared that it’s taking our young people away. Moving away from culture. So we need to put culture into that space, because that’s already where they are.”

- Colin Heenan-Puruntatameri, Tiwi artist

This quote is from an interview I did with Colin Heenan-Puruntatameri during the Darwin Aboriginal Arts Fair this past August. I study contemporary First Nations art from Australia, so I was lucky enough to visit his community, Milikapiti on the Tiwi Islands, back in June as part of my research for graduate school. I was introduced to art from the Tiwi Islands when I had the opportunity to curate an exhibition titled Performing Country at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection (March 2023-Februrary 2024). One of the galleries of the exhibition was entirely dedicated to Tiwi art and, through the research and consultation process of that project, I interviewed Tiwi artists about their work.

Performing Country was centered around the concept of performance and its relationship to art production. Much of Tiwi artistic practice is related to song, dance, and the performance of ceremony. The designs seen in prints and paintings in museum galleries are derived from the practice of painting the body for ceremony. When I started to speak with the Tiwi artists about their ideas of performance in artmaking, they introduced me to their recent work with video.

Video art is relatively new on the Tiwi Islands, with the first piece produced by their art center, Jilamara, in 2020. The piece was called YOYI (dance) and it involved 30 artists dancing their totems on their Country. When talking with the artists who worked on it, they said that the piece not only functioned to share their culture with outsiders, but it also was a way of documenting their cultural practices for their own community.

Heenan-Puruntatameri very adeptly articulates this tension in his quote: technology is moving the younger generation away from Tiwi practices, but video and digital projects seem to be the way forward in preserving and generating culture. A lot of Indigenous Australian communities are grappling with the same issues, and a common solution seems to be digital learning centers and cultural archives.

The Mulka Project in Yirrkala is perhaps the prime example of this type of institution in practice. Mulka is attached to the community’s art center and provides a space for photographs, videos, and documents to be digitally stored and continuously accessed. The founders of Mulka, like many Aboriginal communities, realized that a lot of media about their ancestors were dispersed in national and international collections. Mulka provided an on-site keeping place for all of this material. Originally envisioned as an archive, now artists have used old voice recordings, films, and photographs of their ancestors in artistic projects, like Ishmael Marika’s piece Rarrirarri (2023). In this large installation piece, Ishmael digitally recreated and then projected the footsteps of his grandmother onto the floor of the gallery. The installation is accompanied by an audio recording of his grandmother singing.

Jilamara is trying to construct a similar digital media center in Milikapiti. Artists like Heenan-Puruntatameri lead the way in thinking about how to engage with digital media in a way that will respect Tiwi tradition by moving the culture forward.

As a fellow in the Scholars’ Lab this year, I am very lucky that I get the tools to think about Tiwi video/archival work not only art historically but also through a digital humanities lens. In addition to being a graduate student, I am also the Assistant Registrar at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection which means that I am often the person who chooses how to store and format the museum’s data. With video and performance art possibly becoming a part of the museum’s collection in the future, I am left with a lot of questions about these media that I hope to explore in future blog posts:

• What does it mean to own a piece of video art, especially when it involves the performance of ceremony?

• How can museums conserve video work?

• What does video allow Tiwi artists to do that other media doesn’t?

• How does the medium of video change the audience of the artworks?