Archie Moore Charts the Infinite Reach of Ancestry

In a dimly lit room at the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, Archie Moore painstakingly drew an immense genealogical tree in white chalk on black walls. Starting simply with the artist, designated as ‘me’, the chart becomes a dense web as it ascends towards the ceiling. The work was shown in 2024 as part of ‘kith and kin’, Moore’s exhibition at the Venice Biennale, which garnered the Golden Lion for best national participation – the first time an Australian artist has received the accolade. Here recreated by Moore – who is of Bigambul, Kamilaroi, British and Scottish descent – the chart is an ambitious reorientation of time and history and an assertion of belonging. Reaching back over 65,000 years, it is a reminder of the past, present and future of First Nations Australians; bringing this installation to Brisbane is a crucial way to ensure these groups can see their histories represented through art.

Despite extensive research into his family – a notion in Indigenous cultures that includes not just people but land, plants and animals – Moore was limited not only by temporal distance but by absences and omissions in written records. Thus, Moore speculated at times, inventing names and even including slurs used against Aboriginal people. Joining these are Kamilaroi and Bigambul kinship terms – an act of preservation in itself and a rebellion against the decline of First Nations languages under colonization. Gaps punctuating the names evoke the violence and loss Indigenous people have faced since the British invaded in 1788, from the introduction of diseases to efforts to obliterate cultures and families.

Moore’s use of chalk – provisional, erasable, the stuff of school instruction – becomes here a tool for self-determination. Spanning some 2,400 generations, Moore’s genealogical tree asserts the endurance of Indigenous Australians as one of the earth’s oldest continuous living culture. The viewer stands not before a chronology but within an ancestral map of collapsed time.

At the room’s centre, a dark, reflective pool and stark white table confer the impression of a memorial or shrine. The table is covered in tidy stacks of paper of differing heights; strained glimpses reveal that they relate to coronial inquests into Indigenous Australians who have died in police or prison custody since 1991. Totalling 557 reports, the number is overwhelming to behold. The viewer’s inability to read these documents due to the distance the pool puts between them and the table, as well as the fact that the names of the deceased are redacted, adds to the work’s weight. Interspersed among the reports are historical documents tied to Moore’s lineage: government files, anthropological notations and bureaucratic paperwork illustrate the persistent imposition of classificatory and legal systems designed to regulate Indigenous existence. Suspended visually between the reflective water and the sky of ancestral names, the table becomes a sombre axis linking history to contemporary state-sanctioned catastrophe. The more the viewer leans in to read the documents, the more their own body becomes mirrored in the water. Without ascribing blame, the work asks visitors to locate themselves in relation to the colonial systems it so powerfully critiques.

Despite its personal specificity, ‘kith and kin’ gestures outwards, situating Moore’s familial narrative within global patterns of displacement, survival and resistance. Though deeply rooted in First Nations Australian histories, the work addresses our broader human connections across place and time and our shared vulnerability to the forces that attempt to define and limit us. Moore offers neither reconciliation nor closure. Instead, he acknowledges the infinite reach of ancestry and the ongoing struggle against the structures that seek to contain it. What emerges is a monumental act of remembrance and continued self-determination.

Archie Moore’s ‘kith and kin’ is on view at the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane until 18 October 2026

^{Main image: Archie Moore, ‘kith and kin’, 2025, exhibition view. Courtesy: © Archie Moore, © QAGOMA, courtesy Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art and Tate by Creative Australia on behalf of the Australian Government 2024; photograph: N Umek}