From stories of creation across mountain ranges and the ambience of the night sky, to the atmospheric effects of mining and the true expanses of the cosmos — interweaving sky stories will be the focus of a unique new exhibition being shown as part of the 2023 Perth Festival.

Produced by the Berndt Museum and led by its curators, Yanyuwa/Jingili filmmaker Michael Bonner and Palyku woman Jessyca Hutchens, the show is also co-curated by Lee Kinsella for the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art and Joseph Williams, who is part of the Tennant Creek Brio.

^{Michael Bonner and Jessyca Hutchens}

Ms Hutchens, an art historian, says Black Sky will fill the entirety of the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery with immersive installations, including a new film by Mr Bonner.

Shot in the Pilbara over a week, the film — which will be shown on multiple projectors in the gallery’s largest room — is a collaboration with a group of Gombawarrah-Yinhawangka Traditional Owners.

“For the Gombawarrah-Yinhawangka people, the horizon line and the mountains are incredibly important, this is a traditional story of two hills and the way that they talk to each other,” Mr Bonner says.

“It’s a woman’s story also as one of the hills is a birthing mountain and interwoven into that are other Traditional stories including one about the emu that is as old as time.

“For viewers it will be like walking into the Pilbara from sun down to sun up, but there will also be narrative on modern themes — the effect of mining, and the political aspects of being Aboriginal in the Pilbara.”

For Ms Hutchens, who in 2019-2020 worked as curatorial assistant to the artistic director at the Biennale of Sydney for the ground-breaking Indigenous-led exhibition NIRIN, Black Sky is promising to generate the same amount of buzz in Perth.

“When we heard that the theme of Perth Festival was Djinda (the Noongar word for stars), we wanted to compliment that,” she says. “Indigenous art is so often seen as being about the land, but other spaces are also an important part of country.

“There’s a song by a band from central Australia called IlKari Maru, which means Black Sky in Pitjantjatjara, which partly inspired the title of the show, as well as thinking about the black in the Aboriginal flag as symbolising solidarities between Aboriginal people across horizons. We were trying to think about the sky as not just a neutral space but also linked to sovereignty and politics.”

The exhibition will include key works from the Berndt Museum and the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art, along with an energetic multimedia installation by The Tennant Creek Brio, an artistic collective who met in a men’s art therapy group.

“They are an incredibly exciting and experimental group that are really taking Australia by storm. Their art crosses everything from colour fields to traditional designs, to repurposed found objects, to activist and street art styles,” Ms Hutchens says. “While the artists each have very much their own style, they also work in a really dynamic way as a collective.”

Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art curator Lee Kinsella says the collaboration has been “fantastic” and she is excited by the strong collections in dialogue across the galleries.

“Tracey Moffatt’s entire Up in the Sky series will be on display — a rare showing of all 25 prints, and the first time that this particular work has been on public display,” Ms Kinsella says.

“We also draw from the strong holdings of Julie Dowling’s remarkable portraits held in the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art and Berndt. Dowling’s paintings shimmer as they detail the personal histories of individuals and reveal connections that run deep into time.

“It’s a really powerful selection of work and it’s not content that people are familiar with — so that’s exciting too.”

In January 2021 the Berndt Museum transitioned to the UWA’s Indigenous Education Portfolio, led by Professor Jill Milroy, Dean Indigenous Studies.

The museum continues to be a diverse and integrated Living Collection, offering a range of services to ensure that it is accessible to Indigenous communities and researchers within Australia and globally.