Produced by the Warburton Arts Project, Tu Di Shen Ti will again be presented in the context of an indigenous cultural space acknowledging Western Desert people and their world. Genealogies, narrative text, photographs taken by indigenous school children, a 20 channel digital immersive environmental soundscape, data projected and multiple screen installations are also important parts of the exhibition. The finest artworks from the Warburton Collection will be displayed in a powerful, communicative installation format to create significant inter-cultural occasions for Chinese and international visitors. Four art glass installations and eight large textiles will be added to the 2013 tour and is supported by a new, fully translated colour catalogue.

Curator Gary Proctor wrote: “Tu Di Shen Ti was seen by about a quarter of a million people across seven venues during the 2011 tour and the project brought out high standards of achievement in people working with it and created many new professional connections. The second 2013-2014 tour will travel to places in China with their own strong indigenous cultural traditions and which rarely receive major international exhibitions. That such a tour would further enhance knowledge and understanding of Chinese and Australian cultures in important and long-lasting ways is clear but, as significantly for us, it offers an opportunity to re-cast the perceptions Ngaanyatjarra people hold of themselves in highly positive ways. For younger generations of Ngaanyatjarra people the opportunities for roles in arts management and the care of their culture will significantly add to their potential options.

Perhaps projects such as Tu Di Shen Ti will also serve to extend the imagination of art workers and curators who wish to take shows to China: it seems to me that conceiving ways our nations can share our cultures as friends is not so much based on a triumph overcoming difficulties between the varying ways we do things as finding the common and abundant human ground between us. I am always impressed by the high regard in which Chinese people hold culture and the arts, and heartened as our partnerships helped overcome problems along the way.

The very well made and designed book with English and Chinese texts, opens with a Message from the (now former) Australian Prime Minister, Julia Gillard explaining 40 years of diplomatic relations between Australia and China and her message to foster the friendship by this exposition; a Message from the Premier of Western Australia, Colin Barnett and followed by the Foreword by Frances Adamson, Australian Ambassador to China praising how through education programs, school tours and bilingual materials the Warburton community shared their stories with the people in China. Then Xie Jun, curator Guan Cheng Art Museum explains the history of native art, and the process of organizing the exposition.

The essay by Jennifer L. Biddle, titled ‘Provocation from the Margins – The production and curation of the Warburton Arts Project’, sketches the ways the collection is important, how it came into being, and the role of Gary Proctor as project director since it began in 1989. It also explains the ways Ngaanyatjarra aesthetics require all senses for the interrelationships between voice, narrative, song, performance in the haptic, lived relationship between hand, object, person and place.
In ‘Under the road, the desert’ Gary Proctor notes the way marginal, non-Western groups move into ‘the modern world’ but at the same time remain tied to inherited structures that yield to ‘the new’ but cannot produce it and how everybody can be an artist in the Ngaanyatjarra cultural world because all indigenous people share their heritage equally.
‘Connected to Country’ is written by David Brooks about the landscape, the dessert and dreaming time, followed with more good photos on the works. The catalogue ends with a list of works and acknowledgements, including the names of students of the Wanarn Campus who made over 6,100 photographs for the installations in the 18 months leading up to the first show.
The book, the people and the work have conquered my heart and I will save it as a treasure to be always remembered what we seem to have lost.
Angela van der Burght