On a mild, mid-October evening in Adelaide, Brisbane artist Ryan Presley watched on as the Art Gallery of South Australia’s North Terrace forecourt filled with people.
The crowd — there for the opening night of this year’s Tarnanthi contemporary Aboriginal art festival — gathered under the historic building’s colonnaded portico to take part in a Kaurna Welcome to Country ritual.
Inside the gallery, Presley had just put the finishing touches on his Blood Money Currency Exchange Terminal, a roving installation that simulates a real-life currency booth.
With its own teller trading ‘bank notes’, a fluctuating exchange rate and fire-engine-red signage, the piece quickly caught the eye of the opening-night audience; a queue of curious punters was soon snaking around the gallery’s hallways.
Presley’s custom-designed currency takes its visual cues from Australia’s polymer banknotes, but features highly detailed portraits of formidable Aboriginal leaders and symbols. Each banknote is a limited-edition double-sided print.
Presley, a Marri Ngarr man who was born in Alice Springs and raised in Queensland, sees his alternative Australian currency as the perfect vehicle to tell stories that are unfamiliar and unpopular.
“There’s a lot to be said about how colonialism and dispossession function in our economy and the presence or absence of money,” he says.
The Blood Money Currency Exchange sold $10,000 worth of ‘blood money’ on that first night — a record for Presley, who has been performing the piece since 2016 at leading art institutions including Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and events such as Melbourne Art Week.
By the end of the opening weekend, that figure had more than tripled to $32,000.
All proceeds from the currency exchange booth were donated to Adelaide’s Kaurna Warra language centre and other local charities working with Aboriginal young people.
“[The booth] was more successful than I could have imagined — it raised $36,080 at the MCA in Sydney but that was over a whole week. So, Tarnanthi really took me by surprise,” Presley says.
He believes the piece especially resonated with the Tarnanthi audience due to the festival’s purpose: to provide one of the most comprehensive showcases of Australia’s thriving and diverse Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander contemporary art scene.
“It was wonderful to see so many engaged people attend this event who were there primarily for Indigenous art and who were engaged with Indigenous culture and politics,” the 32-year-old says.
‘Blood Money’: Can we pay it back?
The currency Presley invites participants to convert for Australian dollars forms part of his ongoing series of watercolour paintings, Blood Money.
The artist began this body of work a decade ago, and the paintings have evolved in size and detail since then; the Blood Money works on display at Tarnanthi this year are over a metre wide, and Presley says he undertakes months of research into iconography and completes meticulous drafts of each work.
Instead of the mostly white Australian settler figures, Presley’s currency features portraits of the heroes and warriors of Indigenous history — people such as Fanny Cochrane Smith, the last fluent speaker of the Indigenous Tasmanian language (Palawa) and Vincent Lingiari, the Gurindji activist and stockman who in 1966 went on strike for eight years to fight for the return of his land.
The latest ‘note’ in the series, commissioned by Tarnanthi, features the late Kaurna leader Stephen Gadlabarti Goldsmith, who was instrumental in reviving his people’s culture and language.
Through the physical exchange of money, Presley is able to engage a wider audience in a conversation about the version of history represented in Australia’s currency and about our current selection of figureheads (the only Indigenous Australian represented on our currency is polymath inventor and author David Unaipon).
Just like the floating exchange rate system, the Blood Money currency fluctuates — however it is always at least two to three times higher than legal tender, which Presley says provoked some audience members in the earlier days.
“When I first set up the exchange, there was some negative feedback. Some people were surprised and felt they’d ‘lost out’ on the exchange rate.”
Presley says this was precisely the point — to evoke the feelings that our First Nations people have endured through two centuries of dispossession.
“I’m also looking at the overlap of the art economy and the political economy. Blood Money is a gesture, not a real parallel currency. If you were looking at this more rationally you would see that you are getting a very affordable, limited edition print of one of my paintings, so it was interesting that many people were looking at this as a genuine exchange.”
Colloquially, the phrase ‘blood money’ is often used to describe the compensation an offender or their family pays to the family of a person who has been killed, but it can also imply money obtained at the cost of another’s life.
Presley’s work investigates both definitions, critiquing the exploitation of Indigenous people and also just how intrinsic the movement of money and capital was to Australia’s colonial project.
“The bulk of our economy functions off that dispossession that has happened over the past two centuries and is arguably still ongoing, so I was looking at profit through dispossession and violence and money gained from violence and killing,” Presley explains.
“How do we compensate for that, or is it even possible? There hasn’t ever really been a particularly meaningful compensation scheme for Indigenous people. For example, look at the stolen wages in the sheering industry in Queensland — all of that money rightfully earned by Indigenous people was flogged and kept by the state. My grandparents, too, had to work and live off rations.”
‘All indigenous work is political’
Presley, whose father’s family is Marri Ngarr and originate from the Northern Territory’s Moyle River region, spent his early childhood living in public housing in Alice Springs, but at the age of 12 moved with his mother and younger sister to Brisbane.
His family’s financial struggles at the time — and the acute contrast between the housing commissions of the outback and middle-class Brisbane suburbia — also played a major role in the artist’s preoccupation with currency.
“I didn’t grow up on easy street,” he says. “And when we got to Brisbane and saw all of these big, brick, two-storey ’70s houses, that was my first conscious sense of a middle class.
“I became very interested in the gap between the haves and the have-nots and how that has been enforced and encouraged. The colonial project’s monetary policy — introducing coinage into a culture that did not have it and then withholding that currency — has been very precise and considered. It’s fertile grounds for political work.”
Presley believes all contemporary Indigenous art is inherently political, from more obvious protest-style art — such as No Black Seas, a body of mixed-media work by 10 Arts Ceduna artists on show at Tarnanthi that looks into the impact of the oil drilling of the Great Australian Bite — to the more ambiguous.
“Even bark painting work is still political because it is still accessing resources and materials that people had a desire to steal, and celebrating a culture that was suppressed and extinguished.”
The Kaurna word Tarnanthi means to come forth or appear. “Like the first rays of light in a new day, or a seed sprouting,” says Presley.
“It’s an apt name for the nation’s largest survey of contemporary Aboriginal artists, says artistic director and curator Nici Cumpston.
“There are a lot of works of art and artists at Tarnanthi that are making political statements. Many of the artists are living in situations and at a time where it is necessary to speak up,” she told RN’s The Art Show.
“Having the opportunity to express those stories through works of visual art is sometimes the only platform for people’s voices to be heard.”
Tarnanthi runs at the Art Gallery of South Australia until January 27.
Topics: arts-and-entertainment, visual-art, contemporary-art, indigenous-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander, indigenous-culture, indigenous-policy, government-and-politics, performance-art, adelaide-5000, sa