One too many — 12 March to 30 April 2022

One too many
12 March to 30 April 2022

Artists from Iltja Ntjarra: Benita Clements, Selma Coulthard, Dellina Inkamala, Delray Inkamala, Dianne Inkamala, Vanessa Inkamala , Reinhold Inkamala, Mervyn Rubuntja, Betty Wheeler Namatjira, Marcus Wheeler with Chips Mackinolty.

Saturday 12 March, 3pm: Opening Conversation

Patricia Adjei, (Wuthathi/Mabuiag Island), Head of First Nations Arts & Culture, Sector Development and Strategic Partnerships, Australia Council i

Ken McGregor, author of A life and times of Albert Namatjira (2021)  and Iris Bendor, Itlja Ntjarra, manager.

Profits from the sale of this book go to Iltja Ntjarra Many Hands Art Centre.

Saturday 19 March, 2 pm: Michael Kempson of Cicada Press at UNSW, on prints made by the artists in 2016 and 2019.

Note: the artists and co-curators of One Too Many will attend the exhibition and the Biennale of Sydney installation, when the Covid crisis in Mparntwe (Alice Springs) stabilises.

Iltja Ntjarra in Rivus, Sydney Briennale: Watch  ‘Pmarra Nurna-kanha Ntarntarai / Care for our Country’: https://vimeo.com/680713927/79248ad8a3 and explore Rivus at https://www.biennaleofsydney.art/ 

One Too Many, Digital Catalogue > Download as pdf

About

‘The landscape is telling us that the situation was good and healthy before, but now there are diseases and suffering.’ — Vanessa Inkamala 1

One Too Many is one in a series of de-colonising exhibitions and projects presented by the powerhouse Iltja Ntjarra / Many Hands Art Centre located in Mparntwe (Alice Springs). Albert Namatjira’s watercolour heritage and Central Australia’s blindingly glorious landscapes are celebrated and carefully overlaid with images of modernity or juxtaposed with subtle whispering or agit-prop manifestos. Decades on, these artists are the third and now fourth generation of Namatjira’s family and kin.

The project’s chorus is, ‘Tjina Nurna-ka, Pmarra Nurn-kanha, Itla Itla Nurn-kanha / Our family, our country, our legacy, does not change.’ – Iltja Ntjarra Artists.
Iltja Ntjarra artists are back in Sydney with two powerful exhibitions. Pmarra nurna-kanha ntarntarai—Care for Our Country (Rivus, the 23rd Biennale of Sydney, 2022), is presented at The Cutaway in Barangaroo, and the sister installation, One Too Many, here at The Cross Art Projects. Both installations are comprised of paintings on re-purposed road signs or industrial refuge. They are beautiful and witty, but they are also heart breaking. José Roca, Artistic Director of the Sydney Biennale, is wise and alert to the fact that, ‘sustainability should be an action, not a theme’.

One Too Many opens a window onto the rivers of grog that blight lives and litter landscapes. If you’ve had one too many, you have drunk too much alcohol. As you enter The Cross Art Projects you are greeted by a tourist map, a road and an installation of flattened and painted beer cans: wreckage collected on the road to old Hermannsburg, a former Lutheran mission and museum, and new mission and surrounding outstations. Your scenic journey runs between National Parks: Tjoritja West MacDonnell Ranges and Finke Gorge.

You examine the series of red, blue and yellow crushed and re-burnished aluminium cans and on each is a vignette—a miniature painting that recalls country and western songs about roads that ‘take me home’. The road crosses land that is home to the Western Aranda people. The trip is marked by modified and re-purposed road signs warning us to ‘slow’, and the occasional minutely detailed drinkers’ camp. Vanessa Inkamala and Selma Coulthard, the exhibition’s artist/curatorial elders and other participants, have painted ‘distance to destination’ markers counting-down the journey.

At journey’s end is an old stone church where Selma Coulthard warns, ‘You will end up unless you stop drinking.’ Ntaria (Hermannsburg) is not far from Mparntwe (Alice Springs) and has a history of grog-running. But you could be singing your heart out as you travel on any Australian country road, blithely passing signs of an epidemic of alcohol abuse. In Mparntwe drinks are ordered by colours that identify cheap full-strength or heavy beer brands. In a pub, cans are often thrown at drinkers.

Logos from bottle shop chains feature in the exhibition, such as Selma Coulthard’s wry road sign with a Thirsty Camel (a marketing franchise). Artist Chips Mackinolty reworks Woolworths’ faux-urbane Dan Murphys bottle-shop brand: ‘guaranteeing* higher death price’. These logos expose an ugly reality: most Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory are dry by choice, so rivers of grog flow out of bottle shops and down to riverbeds and grog-runners on backroads. The money flows up stream.
For the 2012 exhibition, The Endurance of Bush Medicine and accompanying publication The Art of Healing 2, artist and Iltja Ntjarra chair, Mervyn Rubuntja wrote about his experience with alcohol: ‘One time, in 1999, I had problems in my liver. I admit that I had consumed too much alcohol at the time. The doctor told me that I had three or four days to live. My in-laws prepared the drink from young gum tree leaves; it was kept in a large drum. Every day for four days I drank a warm-temperature bottle full of it. I then healed, and the doctor couldn’t believe it! I haven’t drunk alcohol for years and I don’t drink any more. I am convinced that bush medicines are better than white man’s medicines.’ 3

Academic Marcia Langton has for many years identified and written on the colonial guarantee of ‘rum, seduction and death’. Australian governments are willing captives of the grog lobby and their ‘fun’ campaigns. The industry fights any attempt to constrain supply or restrict their operations. Aboriginal communities across the Territory defend their culture and have repeatedly resisted attempts by the alcohol industry to make inroads into their lives. Usually it is the Women’s Night Patrols that defend and try to shield families from domestic violence.

Chips Mackinolty has a long history working for Aboriginal run health organisations. In Darwin he opened the exhibition Groggy (NCCA, 2013) by reminding viewers, ‘Everyone assumes that grog is an exclusively Aboriginal problem. That is simply not true. Around 50% of Aboriginal people don’t drink at all.’ Health coalitions continue to battle alcohol corporations to ensure their engagement contributes to the empowerment, recognition and self-determination of First Nations peoples. Mackinolty’s installation in One Too Many is a line-up of miniature counter-propaganda posters. They assisted a five-year battle against a proposal to locate the Territory’s biggest bottle shop beside three dry Darwin communities located just down the road from the airport.

Alcohol companies rely on exploiting risky drinking, with 5% of the Australian population drinking over a third of all alcohol used—averaging approximately 8 standard drinks per day per person. This group of people is targeted when they might be feeling particularly vulnerable. 5 The Darwin campaign against Dan Murphys was successful, however under investor pressure, Woolworths who also own the BWS chain, simply changed the parent company name to Endeavour Drinks: to continue holding their hugely profitable alcohol and gambling revenue streams.

In mid-2016, Iltja Ntjarra artists invited leading Australian artist Tony Albert to hold collage workshops, confronting matters like homelessness and health—key issues the Federal Intervention into Northern Territory Indigenous communities has failed to address. 6 From these and other workshops, emerged inspired and collectively executed counter-intervention artworks. In NIRIN, the 2020 Sydney Biennale curated by Brook Andrew, the artists’ presented mobile ‘Homeless’ works painted on plastic ‘divorce bags’.
The sister exhibition, titled Particulate Matter: A Fossil Fuelled Future at The Cross Art Projects, presented works mapping the gas pipeline from Mereenie and Palm Valley Gas Fields (you pass them on your trip to Hermannsburg), to export ports in Darwin and Queensland and its political framing as ‘Develop the North’. As with grog, the real intervention is corporate: mining— specifically industrial fracking, the industry’s theft of the waters of artesian rivers and continued alienation and displacement of traditional owners.

Albert Namatjira and the generations that followed are resilient and tenacious. They do not fight alone. In 1995, Dr Charles Perkins called a public meeting in Mpartwe to stem the rivers of grog and the damage done. In the sublime One Too Many, the fight continues.

https://www.biennaleofsydney.art/ 

Footnotes

1. Vanessa Inkamala Namatjira, ‘Talking up strong for country’ in Living Tradition, Ilta Ntjarra Art Centre, 1019, p.19.

2. The Art of Healing: Australian Indigenous Bush Medicine, edited by Jacqueline Healy, Melbourne University Medical Museum, 2012.

3. Mervyn Rubuntja, The Art of Healing: Australian Indigenous Bush Medicine, edited by Jacqueline Healy, Melbourne University Medical Museum, 2012, p.46.

4. The alcohol industry is currently lobbying the Federal Government to remove the payment of excise tax. This will drop the unit price and enable ‘cheaper’ grog. See: FARE objection to the Treasurer from 80 health organisations.

5. FARE in collaboration with the Centre for Alcohol Policy Research. The research uses the 2019 NDSHS data. See the FARE website at https://fare.org.au/new-report-alcohol-companies-reliant-on-people-who-drink-at-heaviest-levels/ 

6. Prime Minister John Howard dramatically introduced The Intervention on the eve of the 2006 Federal election.

Vanessa Inkamala, Beware Falling Rocks, 2021 Acrylic on sheet aluminium Recycled road sign, 75 x 75 cm, (449-21) Photo—Belle Blau

Selma Nunay Coulthard, SLOW, 2021, Acrylic on sheet aluminium Recycled road sign, 60 x 60 cm (445-21) Photo—Belle Blau

Selma Nunay Coulthard, 181 KM, 2021, Acrylic on sheet aluminium, Recycled road sign, 45 x 45 cm (427-21) Photo—Belle Blau

Vanessa Inkamala, Don’t Drink Drive, 2021, Acrylic on sheet aluminium, Recycled road sign, 45 x 45 cm (481-21) Photo—Belle Blau 

(L) Delray Inkamala, Galah in the Bush, 2022 (4-22), (M) Dianne Inkamala, Old Windmill, 2021 (461-21) (R) Selma Nunay Coulthard, V8 Troopy, 2022 [32-22) Acrylic on found cans, Photo—Belle Blau