UNSW Galleries is delighted to announce Christian Thompson: Ritual Intimacy, the first survey exhibition of Bidjara artist Christian Thompson.

Curated by Charlotte Day and Hetti Perkins and presented in association with Monash University Museum of Art, the exhibition surveys Thompson’s diverse practice spanning across 15 years.

Showcasing photography, video, sculpture, performance and sound, he explores themes of identity, race and Australia’s colonial history, as well as his lived experience. Ritual Intimacy traces the unique perspective and breadth of Thompson’s practice, from the fashioning of identity through to his ongoing interest in Indigenous language as the expression of cultural survival.

Christian Thompson is best known for his photographic self-portraits exploring notions of identity, cultural hybridity and history, often referring to the relationships between these concepts and the environment. 

The first survey of this important artist’s work, the exhibition charts the evolution of Thompson’s practice, which includes an engagement with Indigenous artefacts in Oxford’s Pitt River Museum and his growing interest in language and gesture through performance, song and sound works. 

The exhibition includes Berceuse, a specially commissioned multichannel musical and video composition. Developing the sonic experimentation that is a signature of his work, Berceuse incorporates Bidjara language and invites viewers into an immersive space of wall-to-wall imagery and sound: “Bidjara is officially an endangered language but my work is motivated by the simple yet profound idea that if even one word of an endangered language is spoken it continues to be a living language,” Thompson says.