SAM Talks: Australian Melting Pot

Australian Melting Pot (2018) examines the complexity of living between multiple cultures in Australia. Join artist Moorina Bonini and SAM Curator Belinda Briggs as they discuss the artwork and the multifaceted perspectives that contribute to the construction of Australian identity.

Moorina Bonini is a proud descendant of the Yorta Yorta Dhulunyagen family clan of Ulupna and the Yorta Yorta and Murundjeri-Woiwurrung Briggs/McCrae family. Moorina is an artist whose works are informed by her experiences as an Aboriginal and Italian woman. Her practice is driven by a self-reflexive methodology that enables the reexamination of lived experiences that have influenced the construction of her cultural identity. By unsettling the narrative placed upon Aboriginal people as a result of colonization of Aboriginal Australia, Bonini’s practice is based within Indigenous Knowledge systems and brings this to the fore.  

Top image: Moorina Bonini,  Australian Melting Pot (video still), 2018. Image courtesy of the artist © Moorina Bonini

SAM operates on the traditional lands of the Yorta Yorta people. The SAM Building, and art museum within it, is located on river country close to the Goulburn River, known as Kaiela to the Yorta Yorta.

SAM recognises the Yorta Yorta as the traditional owners and ongoing custodians of the lands and water of the Country upon which SAM is built, and that sovereignty of this land has never been ceded.